PMI commenced their customer centricity journey with a series of projects seeking to assess where it currently stood, whilst also identifying critical processes needed to keep their customers at the forefront of all engagements. Working with the World Bank’s Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), PMI engaged with Quicksand, a human-centered design and innovation consultancy, and CoCoon, an organizational design and change management consultancy, to translate the learnings from these previous engagements into a clearly articulated change management strategy. In order to complete their journey towards customer centricity, the team would need to collectively develop frameworks that develop and foster specific behaviors and activities.

Kevin and the project team engaged with PMI's headquarter and field staff, as well as customers, to better understand the perceptions, challenges, and opportunities that would, or could, impact the development of customer-centric behaviors; this was accomplished through interviews, workshops, and observations. This primary research was done over the course of several in-country engagements in the Philippines, including having Kevin embed himself with the company during their multi-day annual team-building retreat. The ideal customer-centric behaviors which emerged from these engagements were: Collaboration, Empathy, Problem Solving, Business Acumen, Communication, and Leadership.

The field research interactions proved instrumental in directing the subsequent design efforts for developing the change management toolkit (i.e., onboarding and training programs, a performance management system, and a remuneration and rewards strategy), particularly with respect to identifying the customer-centric behaviors that staff needed to develop, be trained on, and evaluated against. The tools developed to assist PMI’s journey towards customer centricity were created in an effort to keep these six distinct behaviors at the forefront. These were designed to act as the lenses in which performance is measured and rewarded, are the foundation for the onboarding program, and were personified as superhero characters that serve as the training program’s overall narrative. The gamified training system was a direct response to the interests in performance, video games, and superheroes that was exhibited by PMI staff throughout the fielding engagements.

The resultant frameworks were co-created with PMI staff, and with guidance from the CGAP team. These were tested through workshop engagements in context and refined based on emergent insights. These engagements facilitated the design of interconnected modules that independently address specific needs and collectively provide the necessary road map for ensuring alignment throughout the organization on its customer centricity objectives. Kevin designed the training program to provide a fun and engaging format that reinforces key customer centric behaviors through role play, team-work and a gamified activity. The program was built as three-week problem solving challenges, that took the participants through the typical design thinking process. Customer centric behaviors were embodied in superhero characters (called Defenders of Customer Centricity), that guided players to achieve pre-determined tasks - both individually and collectively - while learning certain foundational principles of human centered design. Activities related to the training program were beta tested with PMI staff to ensure resonance and applicability.

The experience of developing the frameworks for building a customer-centric organization was an affirmation of the design thinking process. At a macro level, these frameworks were designed by capitalizing on the same skills and approaches that they seek to train PMI staff in, specifically working in multidisciplinary teams, engaging with people in their context, ideating and prototyping, and keeping the individual or individuals being designed for at the center of all activities. The frameworks designed to facilitate this will were piloted to identify and address any pain-points and adjust accordingly.