The Situation

To gain market share, Dimension Data (now NTT) needed to radically differentiate itself from global competitors by transforming itself into a customer-centric service provider. A new customer management platform was required to completely reimagine its core support services to gain and retain clients and to streamline underlying operations and processes.

The Task

Dimension Data was servicing their customer needs through 8 disparate systems, which created a challenging environment to effectively assess and manage the health of the client’s end-to-end IT business. To support the strategic objective to transform itself from a technology-centric to a client-centric service provider, a unified and seamless portal needed to deliver support and premium services in the data centre and be flexible enough to expand into premium, managed, and enterprise service offerings.

The Action / Approach

As a traditional IT-centric company, this was Dimension Data’s first attempt to follow a best practice User Experience design methodology and apply a more agile approach.

  • Innovation process enabled to rapidly identify, agree and prioritise new ideas and opportunities to generate business value
  • User research and validation supported the effective demonstration of concepts, decisions, outcomes and business cases
  • Enhanced global cross-business silo collaboration, communication and buy-in
  • Improved internal satisfaction, loyalty and customer value through co-creation process
  • MVP & long term feasible roadmap to phase change

The Result

The success of the portal has generated a cultural shift within Dimension Data. It resulted in customer-centric business transformation, a global digital design system and a complete evolution of product development processes.

Value was delivered by;
• 307% growth in data centre service clients: competitive differentiation and increased market share
• 515% growth in data center services revenue: effective delivery against financial targets
• 579% increase in client online engagement, advocacy, and lifetime value
• 3 months vs 9 to market: Improved business agility / ability to rapidly respond to change
• Fostering a human-centric and agile culture: adoption of Design Thinking processes
• Repositioned value proposition from technology expert to business partner
• Increased user adoption and a dramatic drop in user queries / incidents
• DBA Award for Design Effectiveness

Pains relieved included;
• Disconnected customer experience across 8 systems
• Lack of ROI on existing investment
• Inefficient or misaligned operating model to support customer-centric vision
• A disconnect between culture and future vision based on historic product development processes
• Lack of customer insight to drive transformational change

Focus In On: Responsible for Innovation

New Areas of Value:

Enabling competitive differentiation and increasing market share

Fostering a human centric, transparent, trustworthy and agile culture

Increase customer acquisition, advocacy and lifetime value

Improved business agility and ability to rapidly respond to change and opportunity

Enabling positive behavioural change

Gain access to additional budget through success

More satisfied and engaged employees with increased retention and productivity

Increased credibility, confidence and influence across the business

Effective delivery against financial targets

Viable, scalable and actionable roadmap to deliver innovation and change

More consistent and sustainable profitability and business growth

Direct positive impact on internal and external customer satisfaction

Successful, timely delivery of evidence based transformative change

Improvements around:

Inefficient or misaligned operating model and lack of business agility

Disconnect between culture and future vision

Lack of clarity around the internal business ecosystem

Lack of customer insight

Lack of exec sponsorship and track record

Relevant Business Perspectives

Practice