Role
Lead Designer
Client
NS Dutch Railways
Team
CX Team & NS Research
Type
Interactive Game
When we play we learn. We tested a prototype of this board game and there was excitement in the room. We knew we were on to something special.
We refined the game through a series of co-design sessions with the internal CX team. It was important for them to feel ownership over this game as they would be the ones to facilitate sessions with their co-workers. We handmade and distributed 6 board games. The game combines elements of a classic game play with ideation. We used themes from NS’s door to door customer journey, underserved customer personas and known common pitfalls customer’s experience such as struggling with heavy luggage, delays, uncomfortable weather on the platform, and crowded train cars. Employee teams compete to brainstorm new solutions to improve the customer experience. It’s a lot of fun and leaves the employees with a common set CX success metrics and ideation skills.
The biggest success of the project was the Chaos Dice. We turned problem solving for the little annoyances NS customers face every day into a fun experience.
During game play when teams are focused ideating ideal customer journeys for their personas, suddenly the opposite team throws the chaos dice and deals them a new challenge.
You can get anything from your customer suddenly has to use the toilet to losing their mobile phone and teams must scramble to fix their customer journey to still be a satisfactory experience.
Practicing a customer satisfaction mindset and thinking in terms of the wholistic customer journey.
At the end of the game teams are scored on real customer satisfaction metrics for each stage of the customer journey, from door to door. Teams who think outside the box tend to score the highest, by exceeding customer expectations.
The shift from what works for most people to what helps overlooked people was pivotal for the CX team.
NS had a lot of research on their majority customers, typically Dutch natives. Since the aim of sharing out research insights was to improve the NS customer experience, we made the call to focus on a set of underserved personas instead.
By focusing on underserved personas many new challenges came to light for the team from designing for non-Dutch speakers (like tourists and students studying abroad), non-English speakers (sometimes immigrants), low-tech literacy users (like the elderly), user’s without Dutch bank cards or phone numbers (like refugees). By solving problems for these minority users, the majority experience improves as well. All the personas were based on real people who already take the train in Holland.
