In the second season of the Vincit Talks vodcast, we’ll be discussing the fundamentals of digital business – online stores, web services, customer data, customer experience, and more.
In our most recent episode, we talked with Kesko's Design Competence Lead, Annukka Alasko, who currently leads digital design across the entire K-Group. We asked her about how one of Finland's most well-known companies collects and uses customer data – and how this data is translated into business and growth insights.
Decentralized design
We began by discussing design. Annukka feels that design belongs to everyone, and everyone is welcome to do design at Kesko. This helps create a more customer-centric approach. Kesko of course also has teams dedicated to design for all three sectors that the company operates in: grocery, automotive, and hardware.
Kesko aims for a unified customer experience across the entire K-Group. At Kesko no one owns the customer experience itself. In order to make this kind of decentralized approach work, Kesko needs to make sure that there are very clear common goals for all employees to work towards.
The central role of data
Data is the key enabler for making sure that decentralized design and customer experience work. This is because data makes it easier to define the common goals everyone in the company is striving for.
Kesko wants to use data to build a better customer experience. That’s why data also belongs to everyone in the company, just like with design. While there are dedicated insight teams, all people at Kesko can use data to make their own work better and to improve the customer experience.
The company takes this approach because of the sheer amount of data Kesko collects – having a few dedicated experts is not enough to fully leverage the insights from 4.5 million weekly visits in their digital channels and 800,000 customer feedback instances. Individuals know best how to incorporate data into their existing work more effectively.
A focus on experimentation
When developing new services, Kesko relies on traditional analytics, their insight team, and user testing. When the company has data from existing services, they, of course, continuously optimize the customer experience based on that data.
To create completely new services, understanding the needs of their customers is critical. Data is again a key enabler for this as it helps to define customer pain points and needs. Developing something new also requires an attitude that experimentation is OK – there is a chance for failure just as much as success.
As part of this experimental approach, Kesko has been working with AI. This is not a recent development at the company, as Kesko has had their K-AI team for some time now. The goal of the team is to take advantage of their data to develop and incorporate artificial intelligence into their digital services to improve the customer experience even more.
