In today’s fast-changing markets companies need innovative and differentiating solutions to remain competitive by improving their value proposition beeing more customer centric for existing and new customers. Using co-design, we help our business partners face that challenge.
Together, we define partners’ priorities, from differentiating their offer or becoming more data-driven, to supporting customer retention or creating new touchpoints, and ultimately revenues. We then facilitate co-creation workshops to help them gain insights, imagine new business concepts, and design tailor-made service offers. We leverage our startup ecosystem of over 100 innovative companies to help us enrich the value we deliver to end customers.
Strategic Partnership : an innovative value proposition
Co-design focuses on finding creative solutions to business challenges through collaboration. It helps companies better understand their customers' needs and develop new products. Using innovation and data to go beyond core business models, co-design can improve customer retention and business monetization.
Our answer to meet B-Partners needs
according to Olivier Wyman, in “The new Era of B2B2C insurance”
A 3 step method
By deep diving into the problems companies are trying to solve, we use a 3 step method to gather the insights and knowledge they need to evolve and pursue successful customer centric strategies.
In the first phase, we help them understand a problem by speaking to the people who are most affected by it and analyzing the data. In the second, design phase, we turn the problem into a challenge and ideate on how we might address it. In the final step, and after having found a concept that has been tested and approved by users, we are ready for the release phase, meaning the launch of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) or Pilot.
It is an enriching experience, during which the participants are inspired by their co-designers - from colleagues to outside experts - to come up with wide-ranging, creative ideas.
The tool: co-creation workshops
We our method revolves around co-creation workshops that are adapted to companies’ needs and constraints. They take them through different steps of customer and market analysis to gain new insights on their problems and to find potential solutions. According to the needs and time to allocate to the approach, we have packaged three formats to fit our partner’s objectives and constraints.
In the Discovery workshop, which takes 1-2 weeks, we learn about companies’ goals and strategy, interview stakeholders and end-users to gain insights, and identify areas of improvement. These insights are then evaluated in the context of the challenges. The output maps all potential opportunities we can identify based on the end-user customer journey, which can then be used to prioritize the main areas to deep dive.
The New Business Concept format is composed of two workshops. After a light user research, where we design the existing customer journey and use data to perform a gap analysis and an ideation workshop to find new ways to address customer pain points or identify new selling points. This is followed by the Concept workshop where we build a Business Model Canvas. The output is a prioritized roadmap of differentiating offers. These can be evaluated two months later as part of a deep dive to find the most powerful concepts and offers, leading to the development of a minimum viable product with a pilot program 3-6 months later.
The Tailor Made Offer workshop, which lasts 6-12 weeks, is the full co-design journey. Thorough user research is performed including dozens of interviews, social listening, mystery shopping, as well as market insights to get a clear view of end customers’ needs and behaviors and market opportunities. Then, during the ideation phase, we find new ways to address customer pain points and prioritize new selling points, to then come up with a unique solution and a potential new business model. This is usually digital and is prototyped and tested with end-users. The output is a differentiating offer, its business case and feasibility can be reassessed two months later. After 6-9 months, a minimum viable product with a pilot program is developed.
The uptake of the workshops has been growing steadily, with over +30 workshops every year performed worldwide. Sectors have included energy, health, banking, insurance, travel, and telecommunications, with topics such as connected health, elderly care, smart home, new mobility, green business, and travel 2.0.
A case study: Accor hotels
Following a “Tailor Made Offer” co-design journey, Accor and AXA launched a strategic partnership to provide medical support to guests across the 5,000 Accor hotels worldwide. From July 2020, Accor guests have benefitted from AXA’s most recent advances in telemedicine through free access to medical teleconsultations. Guests also get access to AXA’s extensive medical networks with tens of thousands of vetted medical professionals. This allows hotels to make the most relevant referrals (e.g. relevant language, specialty, etc..) to their guests in the 110 destinations where Accor is present.