Customer Insights and Innovation Training for Design Thinking and Innovation Culture

Need your employees to be a bit more in touch with who your customers are? Need to embed “design thinking” or an “innovation culture” into your organization? Our Customer Insights and Innovation Training Modules can help.

We’re skilled at facilitating training sessions in a multitude of ways. We’ve conducted lectures or hands-on workshops that have lasted a few hours to a few days. We’ve also facilitated on-the-job training on real projects that span a few weeks to a couple of months. Training modules are customized for each client to respond to their specific goals and interests. Some may want to inspire their teams to put customers at the forefront of their product development process, while others may want to integrate user research and innovation planning skills into their organization’s DNA. We’ve helped companies do both, and would be happy to help you too.

Case Study

Client:      ABN AMRO/LaSalle Bank

Assignment
Identify opportunities for extending existing products and developing new ones to better serve the accounts payable and cash management needs of the bank’s middle-market clients. Instill a competency in innovation, and a commitment to customer research amongst members of ABN AMRO’s Transactional Banking Group.

Approach
On-the-job training was deemed most appropriate for this initiative, as we had an internal team at ABN AMRO staffed to the project. Training was delivered at each step in the project to prepare the team for the next phase’s activities.

Together, Sylver and ABN AMRO explored the accounts payable and cash management needs of middle-market organizations in the manufacturing, distribution and retail sectors. We conducted ethnographic research with middle-market organizations, each of which was focused on understanding the spoken and unspoken needs of ABN AMRO’s clients as it related to the daily processing of invoices and cash forecasting activities. In addition, we conducted a focus group of 15 additional middle-market companies to further validate and test emerging hypotheses. Then we held a series of Translating Insights into Opportunities Workshops to translate customer insight gained from the research into new product development/service opportunities for the bank. Finally, we launched a quantitative online survey to a larger representation of the bank’s clientele, providing a statistically-based understanding of which opportunities emerging from the research offered the most value to middle-market organizations.

Outcomes
Research insights led to a number of new offerings and educational efforts pursued by ABN AMRO. One of these new products was CashPro Accelerate®, which assists organizations in downloading cash reports from various accounts into a single Excel-based cash position worksheet, saving them a significant amount of time on a daily basis.

"Sylver Consulting went well beyond providing expert guidance on Ethnographic Research, strategically translating the research into results for the Bank and its customers. Sylver Consulting brings creativity, excellent facilitation skills and a strong ability to tailor their work to the unique needs of the client, which are key ingredients to ensure a successful outcome. On-time, on-budget completion of complex projects are achieved through the energy and dedication that Sylver Consulting brings to the table."

- C.M., Executive Vice President, ABN AMRO/LaSalle Bank