The first week of October is a special week for all of us at Lindström. During this week, we celebrate our co-operation with our customers by making it more visible. Before explaining more what Customer Experience (CX) Week is all about, I would like to wish happy CX Week to all our customers and partners! We are excited to collaborate and succeed together with you.
We have been organizing CX Weeks on a yearly basis since 2018. The purpose of the CX Week is to develop and strengthen the customer experience culture at Lindström and to celebrate our customers, of course. In 2019, the CX Week was especially exciting, because we got a chance to welcome our customers and the guest speaker Thomas Kolster to join us in exploring the topic of how a sustainable brand can offer excellent customer experience.
CX Week 2020 is held on 5th to 9th October and this year’s topic is True Partnership, which is especially close to our strategic goal of being the desired partner and succeeding together with our customers. To me personally, True Partnership means that you are genuinely interested in the partner, always helping them in whatever is needed, without your own agenda. A true partner is there to support, even if it doesn’t necessarily play well for them.
Understanding the future together
The year has been challenging. COVID-19 has brought many changes to the way our customers, partners and we at Lindström operate. However, the pandemic has shown how important true, strong and trustworthy partner relations are. Listening to the customers, understanding them, showing empathy and offering a helping hand in these difficult times have been the key fundamentals in Customer Experience lately.
Our customers and their businesses are also influenced by megatrends: digitalization, climate change, ageing population – these are just a few examples. As we want to succeed together with our customers, we need to support them in accelerating the continuous development and renewing processes to stay current. This is exactly what Lindström Lounge community is dedicated to. Through this community, we want to support our customers to be or become the best experts in their field by offering them unique insights into the future. By immersing ourselves in the challenges of various industries, we also get the information we need to better serve our customers. The Lindström Lounge customer workshops utilize both community-based insights as well as data from future researchers, and the results are unique perspectives on future challenges and opportunities.
Recently, together with other Lindströmers, I participated to one of these workshops with some of our key customers from the travel industry. Together, we discussed and envisioned the future of the customer’s company, how the different scenarios of how megatrends could alter it. Here are some of my findings:
- Although traveling has been affected severely, the will to travel the unforeseen world (in a sustainable manner) is still there – people are just hesitant to make the journey due to the uncertainty of the pandemic.
- Workflows and digital processes are needed, to keep the information going from one outlet to another to succeed in providing the ultimate customer experience, for instance in when it comes to travelling. The reservation systems need to be connected with planning the supply of, say, linens to ensure the most ecological and economical solutions.
These both are topics that we are willing to offer our support with – we want to help our customers overcome challenges and succeed, even when the times are tough.
For us, true partnership is genuinely wanting the best to the customers. I wish you all – our customers, partners and Lindströmers – a happy CX Week 2020 and thank you for co-operation!