Prototypes – Tales of creation to consumption
What if we had the opportunity to be celebrated in front of the entire organization for the work we do? Booth Camps were introduced just so.
The Experience Hacks team conceptualized “Booth Camps” so that employees could showcase their work, take pride in it and create a cross learning platform for the entire organization. Organizing such an event would require teams to come together to exhibit and explain their work to a large audience. The Experience Hacks team conducted the Prototype Booth Camp on the 15th of November – the 2nd large scale event under the Experience Hack umbrella.
Go crazy in designing your booth camp
Teams create booths to exhibit their work. From narrating the journey of the engagement, to the ups and downs, the milestones crossed, best case practices and the client’s ‘aha’ moments, you can have anything worth talking about. The teams typically use videos, decks, charts and more to aid their narration. The booths are set up with creativity and care to interest and engage the crowd, containing not just account and project specific information but games, quizzes, skits and fun activities as well.
Since our prototype has ended and is converted, a lot of interesting questions were asked to understand client consumption and next steps, which were answered by the team. It was a great learning experience and a stage to showcase our prototype journey – Manjeri Sai Sandeep
All about the Prototype Booth Camp
Prototypes are the blue-eyed projects of Mu Sigma. They are coveted projects, which everyone would definitely want to be a part of at least once in their Mu Sigma journey.
There were 6 teams who came forward to share the journey of their prototypes.
Here are some highlights from the Prototype Booth Camp
A major financial services corporation
Their problems were threefold:
- Identify customers for retention and reactivation regarding usage of credit cards issued by a particular bank.
- Identify the sentiments of customers via social media about the co-branded cards issued by one of the world’s leading banks and UK’s top retailers
- Understanding debit spending behavior using customer segmentation and commercial card analysis for one of Romania’s top banks
When the clients themselves were unsure of the approaches to take for customer segmentation, the team created various designs for them. Although initially accepted, they were mutually modified to suit their clients’ requirements.
Clients just expected the analysis and never asked for reports. When they were showed the team’s dash boarding capabilities and infographics, they were highly impressed and even showed it to their own clients.
A Japanese technology giant
The team had to understand affinity in terms of product purchase across its multiple product lines and leverage bundling as part of its sales strategy.
The team implemented a dynamic one touch execution module, where with one click, the client can load, clean and translate the data, find out the best product bundles from the transactions, apply all business rules and rank them according to client’s metrics, simultaneously populating all the dashboards.
Client expected only the top product bundles that they could promote, but the team created a dynamic R-Shiny dashboard to wow the client, which helped in easier consumption of results.
They excited people by getting them to write their names in Japanese, also showcasing that translating a muPDNA in Japanese was a smart way of approaching the clients.
A leading sports broadcaster
How can advertisements be hyper-contextualized based on viewers’ consumption? Can a viewer’s emotional state be used for targeted advertising? Identify events in a game that generate an emotion and display advertisements corresponding to the viewer’s emotional state!
The team conducted interviews with the Columbus Batch to better understand the emotions resonated by different moments in various sports, since understanding the problem space involved a deeper understanding of sports viewership in the US. They also leveraged AoPS to exhaustively identify all possible opportune moments (muPDNAs for each sport) for advertisers to target customers.
The customer was invited to visit the India office to showcase Mu Sigma’s capabilities and align on a common vision. The team provided the analytical backbone to the contextualized targeting engine, thus helping display the right ad to the right consumer at the right moment.
A leading US food services distributor
The team had to develop a weekly forecasting process incorporating trend, cyclicality, seasonality, marketing promotions and holidays.
A lot of interactions were carried out with other teams that had done forecasting, before the prototype had kicked off.
The team introduced the client to forecasting in R and using Tableau for visualizations. Also, an additional dashboard was created to help the client keep track of the forecasts’ accuracy by providing an exception management dashboard.
A major US health care partner
The team had to determine effectiveness and contribution of various sales and marketing channels in driving enrollments.
The team received annualized marketing spends from the client, which had to be dis-aggregated to a weekly level for the purpose of creating a marketing mix model.
A Decision Aid Tool was created to help clients answer all marketing related questions and optimally allocate their marketing budget.
A retailer of energy and energy services
The problem was to generate impact for a company which says: “Buy less of what we sell” and identify the drivers of subscription renewal and their impact.
Brainstorming sessions were conducted with different stakeholders. This not only helped the team understand the problem from different perspectives but also with stakeholder buy-ins.
The muPDNA created helped them to come up with innovative hypotheses that the clients were wowed with and are taking action upon.
This is what Sairam S, one of the organizers of the booth had to say
“Overall the experience was enriching, though the entire process was quite exhausting. Felt proud when displaying the work the team did, to other Mu Sigmans. Planning even minute details of the event was necessary. Articulation, presentation and administration skills were highly tested. Not many people know about Direct Energy, or what we are doing. The Booth camp, we feel, will let a lot of people know, understand what/how we do our work. Were able to stress on the importance of AoPS in all engagements. One important experience I learnt is, making a video is not as easy as it is made out to be. Booth Camp is going to be a major stepping stone towards enabling cross industry learning.”
What can you take away from it?
Prototypes in Mu Sigma are the perfect platform for learning – not just across the length and breadth of a particular industry but at an exponential rate as well.
The problem statements and solving approach showcased by the six account teams were aimed at giving the attendees an interdisciplinary perspective on solving specific and connected problems, which they could then take back and apply to their respective solution spaces. In the process, different learning aspects of working in a prototype engagement were also indirectly highlighted.
All in all, the prototype booth camp intended to drive home several key messages, the crux of which was that prototypes are a source of rich, hyper-accelerated learning for all stakeholders involved, resulting not only in efforts being consumed fast and whole, but providing an interdisciplinary perspective to connected problems and their solution space as well.
The prime beauty of prototypes is to see how something that you have created with your own hands and nurtured with your thoughts take shape and get consumed by the clients. Should you want such an experience created for your team, get in touch with the Experience Hacks team!
But why should you want to be a part of a prototype engagement? Watch below
