Speaker Acquisition
Workshop Development and Facilitation
Event Moderation and Production
Task: How to Create Customer Obsessed Teams with Zappos Cultural Maestro
Client: Deutsche Telekom
Situation
Deutsche Telekom’s T-Global Division reached out to MCL Digital to create an interactive and exciting virtual keynote and workshop to kick-off their day-long Leadership Forum event. The T-Global Division within Deutsche Telekom is a relatively new part of the organization, made up of Global Carrier, which runs the global wholesale business, Global Business, which is responsible for international B2B customers and Network Infrastructure, which is responsible for building and operating the international network. These once separate entities would now be working together closely and would require a unifying approach in their leadership.
The first order of business to the leaders of T-Global included inviting the entire management of around 100 leaders to come together at the Leadership Forum to get to know one another better, collaborate on pressing topics and rally around the new mantra of the organization: leading high performing customer obsessed teams.
Our objective was to develop a unifying framework for the session, inspire the group with a rousing and insightful keynote and foster a collaborative spirit through an interactive workshop.
Solution
Customer first mindset
Our first task was to create a framework which would provide the leaders with the ability to learn, collaborate and discuss and to create a shared experience around the topic of ‘customer obsession’. We broke the session into three distinct portions:
Inspiration and insights
Conceptual group work
Share out and discussion
Each portion would ladder up to the next utilizing insights from the first portion in the conceptual group work stage, and discussing with the larger group, challenges faced during the group work stage.
Ryo Zsun speaking to Zappos' very unique, but effective hiring process, focused on finding talent which not only has the right skill fit, but also the right culture fit.
Ryo Zsun wrapping up his Keynote and speaking to the most important aspect of cultural shepherding - everyone’s responsible.
Learn from others
We then assessed potential keynote speakers from our network based on T-Global’s mantra and a host of other factors, such as the speaker's ability to provide real-time feedback on the conceptual group work. After a rigorous search and many discussions with potential speakers, we selected Ryo Zsun, the Cultural Maestro at Zappos as our keynote speaker. Since Zappos wrote the book and pioneered the modern-day idea of customer centricity, it was a perfect match with T-Global’s mantra and future goals. We worked intimately with Ryo and the team from Zappos to support them in developing a keynote presentation that touched on the most vital aspects of their customer obsession (creating WOW moments for customers) using a multitude of real-world examples from their daily business.
The keynote included:
Introduction to Zappos and how humanizing company culture in a digital age has been instrumental to their success.
Showcasing Zappos 10 core values, citing specific examples of how they live each and every one in the organization and how that translates into record high retention rates across the company
Discussion on how these principles extend to hiring - hiring by “two thumbs up” (skills fit and culture fit) without compromise
Discussion on how their values and customer obsession has led to some of the most unique customer experiences in the business world
Apply learnings
We then developed the interactive portion of the workshop creating three scenarios around process, people and technology - the most important factors for T-Global’s business success. During the workshop, the leaders were divided into 10 teams of 10 (breakout groups). Each group was assigned to one of these three scenarios and was charged with creating a story of how the scenario could be elevated into a WOW moment (referencing Zappos examples). For ‘process’ for instance we asked the leaders to focus on the first touchpoint with a new customer and to make the first customer interaction more memorable and meaningful unlike anything their competitors could offer.
Our team handled the full moderation with 2 facilitators and a technical producer to ensure the user experience was seamless.
Starting the share out process with T-Global Leadership.
“This was really awesome. It was a really great session with great engagement. I loved the discussion and interaction. Thank you!”
— Rolf Nafziger, SVP T-Global
Result
We received overwhelming positive feedback from the entire leadership team at T-Global, along with the news that concepts generated during the workshop were being prioritized internally to be assigned to working teams to action. Furthermore, the keynote, workshop and discussion allowed the leaders to work together for the first time in a productive and fun environment, setting the tone for their future shared interactions.