Change, by design

The world is changing faster than ever before, and the pace of change will never be this slow again.

In this environment, it is easy for companies to feel out of control, in a position where change happens to them, rather than being determined by them.

At Veriteer, we have encountered this super tricky challenge in many of the large and small brands that we work with. As a result, we have had to learn how to help our partner brands deal with it. And in addition to (hopefully) making us more useful to our customers, these learnings have helped shape our own next evolution.

Tackling customer centricity and customer experience has been the sole focus of our business for the last 7 years, but we have increasingly (and depressingly) found that it isn’t enough. Our partner brands are dealing with broader issues and we have had to evolve to deal with these. As ever, in line with our philosophy of design as intentional experience, we have launched a new strategy that makes sure that our evolution is determined by us.

Veriteer as a change agency.

Veriteer is growing up from a customer experience consultancy into a change agency. We will help today’s most iconic brands change into tomorrow’s most successful brands.

And although we will keep customer centricity as a core focus, we will now support changes across all elements of our customers' business and allow them to address their most fundamental challenges and opportunities.

And so that we might do this important work responsibly, our new strategy has had to address two key challenges:

1. Extending our own capabilities beyond customer experience, by:

   • Acquisition and integration of our sister agencies MadeFor (learning and capability development) and Engineered (digital product consultancy and delivery);

   • Organic development of new disciplines within our core business (e.g. change programme management, behavioural change, marketing, physical space design); and

   • Repurposing our existing Customer Experience Leadership Programme to create new talent across a broader set of disciplines.

2. Formalising our learnings into a clear playbook that our partner brands can use to become ‘good organisations’, by:

   1. Defining the key changes required to become a good organisation (see below);

   2. Capturing best practice and innovative ways of working from the world’s leading brands; and

   3. Thoroughly documenting a range of ‘solutions’ that address common customer challenges.

Building good organisations.

We believe that in order for businesses to establish control over their future and be successful in this new landscape, they need to make some essential changes:

• Adopt a customer-led growth strategy to gain control over go-to-market and sales;

• Fully digitalise the business to gain control over your effectiveness and efficiency;

• Build a healthy business ecosystem to gain control over your capabilities and culture; and

• Adopt sustainable business practices to gain control over long-term business viability. 

We refer to organisations that have successfully implemented these changes as ‘good organisations’. The terms originates from our thoughts on good outcomes and represents a benchmark above which organisations will have increased potential to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving market.

It goes without saying that we believe that organisations that fall below this benchmark are likely to be the opposite of good .

Oh - and by the way, we reserve the right to add to this list of essential changes over time. The world is changing after all…but we still stand by our original thinking, and our own ways of working.