Reinventing from Within Don’t talk about cultural change, do it This story is about the transformational journey of Telekom Deutschland GmbH (Deutsche Telekom) as it moves towards having a more customer-centric DNA. As the market leader and incumbent of the German telecommunication sector, Deutsche Maik Medzich has studied business informatics and has been part of the Deutsche Telekom group for more than 15 years. Since 2014 he is responsible for implementing a Customer Experience culture within Telekom Deutschland. He is also one of two initiators of the CX Navigator community. Pia Drechsel is graduated with a design degree and is an unconventional researcher. She helps businesses to create user-centric products and services through the means of Design Research and Design Thinking. In 2010 she co-founded the Design Research Company in Cologne, Germany. Since 2014 she has supported the CX Navigators as an external expert.
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Telekom faces a continuous need for change due to a rapidly changing market environment. Here, we would like to introduce you to a bottom-up approach, which was invented from within the company by just a few people. This group of voluntary ambassadors are the so-called Customer Experience (CX) Navigators, who act as coaches and spend part of their regular work time supporting other projects. The approach is easy yet compelling: “Don’t talk about cultural change – do it, and use the chances you get.” In the following story, you will be introduced to some protagonists who tell the story of the transformational journey from their perspective. The birth “I have often been asked where the idea was born to start the CX community. This is difficult to answer, because it was born out of an iterative process of trying, failing, and then trying it again in a different way,” says Maik, one of the founders of the community. “However, yet another strategy pro gramme was the trigger to start something different. Not because the idea was born in this programme, but because nobody took accountability for the good ideas in that programme. It felt like designing a car and leaving out the engine,” he explained.
“One idea was a diamond in the rough: ‘We need people in our company who constantly challenge the status quo in terms of customer experience!’. At this time there was no budget allocated for this topic. But somehow we (a colleague and myself) were confident that we could make a change if we just started to do something. We tried to convince managers that it would be a great idea to establish CX ambassadors in each department. Not only to spread the word but also to use them as neutral coaches for a customer-centric approach, by spending 30% of their time on projects outside of their own area of work.”
