For the latest London Firestarters we took a theme that I've been talking about a lot over the past few years - the increasing focus on all things customer experience and what this means in terms of the changing dynamic between the big consultancies and agencies in serving a shifting set of client needs. The increasing cross-over between different types of agencies and consultancies was a notable theme coming out of the research and report that I did into The Future of Agencies at the back end of last year. Unfortunately we lost Cheyney Robinson (outgoing from IBM and incoming to Isobar) who was due to speak due to a last minute family emergency, but instead I drew from some of the key findings to come out of that work in order to set the scene, and we also had a couple of excellent talks from James Haycock, Founder of the brilliant AdaptiveLab, and Patricia McDonald, CSO at Isobar.
The growth in customer experience has been one of the most significant drivers of change in agency operating models. Back in 2012 I authored a report on the Future of Agencies in which we used a model taken from Gilmore and Pine's The Experience Economy (over a decade old now) to show how, in the face of commoditisation, agencies were moving from delivering services, to creating and crafting experiences on behalf of their clients, and ultimately towards guiding change within the client company itself.
At the time, a lot of agencies were talking a good game about transformation but very few were actually doing it. That has changed in the years since. Consultancies and systems integrators, coming from business, technology consultancy and organisational design are increasingly expanding their capability into customer experience, user experience, service design, product innovation and even more traditional areas of digital design (witness how many design-led firms have been acquired in the last few years). At the same time creative and comms agencies are expanding into customer experience from the other end of the spectrum, leading to some interesting clashes on pitch lists and significant cross-over in capability.
Whilst some agencies are becoming more specialised, working with clients who are adopting a confederated roster of specialist agencies, others (perhaps even at the holding company level) are going the other way and expanding into a whole suite of services that can deliver work at both front end, middle and back end – combining digital transformation and customer experience services with marketing, creative and design. This brings its own challenges in terms of acquiring an expanded footprint within clients (something that consultancies are already strong in), credibility in delivering new services, expanded revenue streams (and a more 'blended' approach to ratecards), and the necessity of new ways of working with clients.
James Haycock picked up on number of these themes in his talk, speaking about how these newer ways of working are brought to life and the 'full-stack' offering that AdaptiveLab present to clients. His company has adopted concurrent working with clients, using small multi-disciplinary teams that help them to move quicker than a traditional waterfall-like hand-off process between functions and teams and removing ambiguity between the participants in the process.
This reminded me a lot of the sprint process (adapting the five day Google Ventures design sprint methodology) that Dave King talked about at Firestarters in Melbourne, where the client and multiple agency functions are involved right from the start in helping to define the right problem to solve and then originate, test and validate ideas.
AdaptiveLab have adopted similar sprint-based working, developing a number of products that enable clients to see and buy into the people and a process in order to get an output.
James went on to talk about some of the lessons they've learned from working in this way such as not starting with an idea (and instead using the process to originate ideas which are then validated), working with the client rather than for the client (a subtle but important difference), embedding customer research and testing in the process, and the need to be open to multiple commercial models with clients. There was also a really interesting point that he made around how often a key output of a project might be actually helping the client to develop their own capabilities, which brings its own challenges in how you charge for the learning. It was a truly challenging and insightful take on the theme.
Next up, Pats McDonald spoke of how it is increasingly customer experience that is seen to be the key driver for commercial success for businesses and how many clients are facing a perfect storm (of opportunity) of rapidly rising customer expectations, more personalised and responsive experiences and a new era of technological possibilities including AI, mobile workforces and predictive analytics.
In the midst of this, Pats took an optimistic view on the future role of agencies and their continuing relevance, focusing around three key reasons:
- Customer journeys are increasingly complex, cross-device, multi-layered and dynamic, meaning that we are moving from continuous partial attention to continuous partial shopping. The dynamic optimisation of hundreds of possible user experiences necessitate user experience systems and a dynamic understanding of context.
- Stories are increasingly the glue that binds these experiences together, and the intersection of stories and action is the real opportunity ('everything is storytelling, everything is shopping'). So an understanding of the interplay between the stories that agencies create and the actions that brands and consumers take enables agencies to craft exceptional experiences for clients and generate real business benefit.
- Experiences are distributed. The future will be characterised by multiple lightweight interactions as interfaces become increasingly invisible (for example the integration of services into messaging apps, and all mobile apps becoming more like publishing engines as mobile navigation is increasingly dominated by search and AI)
Some good reasons there for us to be optimistic about why the burgeoning focus on customer experience is as much an opportunity for agencies as it is a challenge, and a fascinating talk.
You can see the Storify from the event here. As usual Scriberian have done there excellent visualisation of the talks which you can see below. My thanks to Google for hosting, to our excellent speakers, and to all those who came and joined in the debate.
