Customer Centric, Customer First_september_newsletter

Customercentric, Customer First! Employees Ask for More in the Listening to You Survey

Enterprise Solutions Rolls Out Customer First! E-Briefings to Employees as They Move from Customer Understanding to Customer Centricity

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n 2004, just a year after ES was formed, employees of this entrepreneurial-spirited organization, structured as a selfcontained business group, called out in the Listening to You survey for more understanding of customers. Given the complexity of the business model, they wanted to know, "Exactly who are our customers, and how are our products sold?"

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istening to the customer is the number one business strategy for New York-headquartered Enterprise Solutions (ES), Nokia’s business group that aims to offer mobile solutions to the enterprise using any device over any network, with any application.

With a target market of both end users and the enterprise, employees needed to know more about the key decision makers driving development of the mobile solutions offered by ES. For example, end users within the enterprise typically dictate features for ES’s mobile applications, yet decisionmaking authority to adopt these technologies falls to IT managers and business owners. Employees felt they needed to understand these, and other, nuances to ES business to fully support the customer-centric vision.

And while the focus on customer understanding is not a new angle to Nokia’s core competencies, the increasingly difficult task of supporting an all-encompassing mission— while responding with agility to customer needs—has inspired ES to adopt a renewed customer in the center vision for business. According to Billie Hartless, VP of Human Resources (HR), the customer-centric approach is driven by a marketplace dynamic that poses itself as a great challenge in rapidly answering the customer’s changing needs: coopetition, also known as cooperative competition.

Sari Forsman, HR Manager for ES based in Salo, understood that answering the queries of ES’s population of 2200 employees, representing 47 nationalities in 30 sites, would involve a nontraditional solution to employee learning. “Being a highly diverse organization located in many geographical locations, we were used to working in virtual teams,” says Sari. “It made sense that we would investigate an e-learning solution—we just needed to find the right partner to help implement the program.”

“It’s complicated to be able to immediately calibrate and adjust to customer needs in a synchronized effort with companies that are both competitors and partners,” says Billie. “We can either rally around each other or create tension in the system, but ultimately, it’s about finding the best solution for the customer—the customer is in the center of all.”

As it turned out, mammoth HR outsourcing firm Convergys proved to be that right partner. With experience in implementing learning solutions for large multinational clients such as Deutsch Bank, Citibank, Mazda and General Motors, Convergys offered precisely what was needed: a comprehensive, competency-driven e-learning program that could be deployed to any ES site and used at employees’ convenience. Not only did this solution remove traditional barriers to learning, it could also be produced rapidly and at a low cost per employee.

And while ES hopes to promote Nokia products and solutions as the customer choice, the trend toward aggregated technologies means sometimes pleasing the customer by promoting the competitor’s product as part of the portfolio. “Although we hope to, we aren’t always arriving at the Nokia-organic solution,” says Billie. “For example, we recently worked with Blackberry to offer RIM software connectivity to a customer on our 9300 communicator.”

The decision to partner with Convergys was an obvious one. Next came the process of developing the first of the e-briefings, appropriately named Customer First! to emphasize ES’s new vision.

Bottom line, says Billie, the customer’s perspective should drive processes. “The idea is to examine how our customers experience our products and services and use this as a catalyst to build the process from inside out,” she says.

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Customer First! Emerges

For a period of several months, a dedicated team from Convergys’ New York satellite office met with Nokia content matter experts and HR and Communication team members to begin an arduous, thorough process of groupthink. Convergys project manager Kyle Thomes described the process as creative and collaborative, fueled by strong leadership on the Nokia team. “We kicked off the project by gathering the stakeholders in a room to facilitate a full-day solution design session with the goal of defining the learning objectives, overall theme, and high-level design elements,” says Kyle. “The Nokia group was dynamic, prepared, and fun. . .this, and the thought leadership shown by the team naturally made for stronger content in the end.” Employee response to the e-briefings, rolled out one year ago, acknowledges the high quality of the 30-minute animated sessions that run in Flash and feature members of the ES leadership team sharing key strategies and objectives. By design, each of the four modules offers open-ended employee feedback that will be used to improve subsequent modules. So far, employees are clamoring for even more specific training as it relates to their own area of expertise. Each year, two to four new modules are scheduled to launch. Convergys plans to continue expanding the current four titles, driven by employee feedback and need: • • • •

Enterprise Mobility and Our Customer Introduction to Intellisync and Mobile Suite Nokia for Business Solutions Create a Great User Experience

It’s easy to see that ES’s mission to provide mobile solutions to customers anywhere, anytime, is not so different from the unlimited flexibility and ease of use that the business group seeks to offer employees through its Customer First! e-briefings. The reasons are clear—in a recent U.S. industry survey, 49 percent of businesses polled indicated a correlation between e-learning initiatives and business results. Kyle reiterates why e-learning is critical for impacting the bottom line, noting, “Global companies like Nokia need a tool to quickly and effectively calibrate team members to new directions for the company. E-briefings offer a simple, richly engaging medium to convey messages for new strategies and products, and they also offer busy employees the opportunity to stay connected to important, rapid changes—at their own pace.”

“Customer understanding has historically been an area of strategic competence for Nokia,” says Sari Forsman, HR Manager for Enterprise Solutions. “Now we’re moving from customer understanding to customer centricity.”

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