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Case: Signify

A personal signature for a better customer experience

Signify is the new name for the former Philips Lighting. This market leader in lighting is rapidly transforming from a supplier of lamps and fixtures to a specialist in lighting systems and services for the professional market. Willem de Groot, Manager of Lighting Application Services for the Benelux, got his team of designers to take the customer experience for complex lighting designs to the next level.

LED lamps and LED luminaires for consumers and professional customers. Whether its components for Original Equipment Manufacturers or lighting systems for installation companies and professional market parties such as Hudson's Bay, when it comes to light, Signify is at home in every conceivable market.
The employees of the Lighting Application Services department translate functional requirements, such as a specific lighting experience in a shop or office, into technical requirements, and from there into an implementation design specifically for professional market parties. If the customer agrees with this lighting plan and the corresponding quotation, the lighting plan will be technically implemented and delivered on site. 

"In all these phases we carefully measure customer satisfaction, a primary theme in our organization," says manager Willem de Groot. “We carry out a relational NPS measurement with our customers twice a year. In addition, we have been carrying out a transactional NPS measurement per project to establish how the customer has experienced our service in all phases, so we can further improve our own performance.”

De Groot and his team wondered whether there were possibilities to create a richer and more positive customer experience during the first phase of projects, the design and presentation of the lighting design resulting from the customer debriefing. "We have a team of 25 talented lighting designers here, and I firmly believe that they add unique value to our projects,” says De Groot. “But I would also like to see that reflected in the NPS measurements, and I don't think that came through well enough".


Not anonymous

After contacting Altuïtion in the summer of 2017, De Groot decided to introduce his team to the theory behind customer engagement. "I introduced them to the Kano model, the difference between functional and emotional experience. In short, it was an introduction to the basics. Because everyone knows that if you don't do what the customer asks, you won't get 7 or 8 as a rating anyway. But what exactly triggers a client to give a 9 or 10 is a bit more complex – certainly in B2B" says De Groot.

He and his team also juxtaposed a large number of lighting designs to analyze them. "We found that there were quite a few differences between the various lighting designs, depending on the person who had made them and the customer request. On one occasion it was just a correct calculation, without a good introduction and without a conclusion. The other time it was just a CAD drawing, with no explanation. Each of these, in their own way, met the definition of a lighting design, but the degree of quality depended strongly on the perspective of the assessor. In other words, an engineer looks at a lighting design differently than a planning engineer or an architect."

Together with Altuïtion, a core team from the department decided to redefine the ideal lighting design as well as the coordination process with the customer, with the aim to create a better experience for the customer. "We started to no longer make the lighting design anonymous, but instead allowed the designer to create a personal document,” explains De Groot. So, first we write an introduction in which we describe the background of the designer, the signature of the design, why the designer found it interesting to work on it, what design considerations they made, and why they finally chose this design. By naming these facets much more explicitly, the customer can clearly see that the design has really been thought through and that it is tailor-made."


Touchpoints

The core team also looked at the process. "To start with, we're making more work of the debriefing," says De Groot. "We want to better reflect how we received and interpreted the customer's question, and what actions we linked to it. This prevents us from thinking that we understand the customer's question, only to come up with output that doesn't 100% match with what the customer wanted at the start. This makes it incredibly difficult to get rated as a 9 or a 10.”

The coordination process with the customer and stakeholders was also scrutinized and adjusted on certain points, says De Groot. "For some large projects, there must be constant contact with the architect, the construction firm, and the customer during the course of the project. These are all touchpoints that offer opportunities not only for scoring a good score on the functional experience, but also to create something emotional. That means communicating in a different way and always sharing the right information."

After rolling out this new approach to the entire team in December 2017, De Groot's team has now been working according to this new 9+ Way of Working for more than six months. “We apply this new 9+WoW to projects above a certain value. Although the effect is clearly visible as we score up to 20 NPS points higher than before, making a lighting design 2.0 is more labor-intensive than a traditional lighting design. So, we still make traditional lighting designs for smaller projects in order to keep it manageable."

A new dimension

De Groot expects that the whole exercise will eventually lead to an even stronger position for Signify in the market for professional projects. "This approach fits in seamlessly with our strategy," he says. "We focus as much as possible on creating added value for the end user, whether inside a building or in the built environment. A stronger focus on systems and service contracts at a 9+ level fits in with this.”

When asked whether Signify is not afraid that competitors will copy this way of working, De Groot replies: "What we do is about maximizing added value, but of course it's not unique. But it's more than just filling in a template. You really have to think about it, write down the right things – preferably in terms that the customer understands. That's a totally new dimension to work with that can sometimes be quite tricky. And this applies to everyone who wants to copy it as well.”

De Groot and his team are already thinking about the next step. "I can imagine that we will offer visualizations in 3D instead of 2D in the future," he says. "We're living in an increasingly digital world, so there are more emerging possibilities in this field. Once you think from the point of view of an emotional customer experience, you automatically see new opportunities.”  


 

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