Opinnäytetyö

Useful  material (opinnäytetyö) :

Aktian palveluiden kehittäminen nuorille asiakkaille - Theseus

/Bella

Hello everyone,

I’m Team Fresh’s new member due to various factors. Here is a short introduction of me :) 

I am a senior marketing and organization and management major at School of Business and Economics at Åbo Akademi University, In the winter of 2013/2014. In the winter of 2013/2014 I will, hopefully , graduate with a master’s degree in business.

I look forward working with my new team and combine our creative minds and start working in Kunstenniemi.

Best regards,

//Alexandra 

A short compilation video of what we have done so far

So Max, Johannes and me took maters in to our own hands and decided to make a short video of what we have done so far just to sum it up a bit... I don't know if the video made it better or worse but I hope you got a picture of what we have done.

Inno58h Team Fresh Video

My reflection on studying Marketing research

Hola Amigos!

This weeks assignment for me to  the inno58 project was to research and gather data around marketing research so that we will have so much information ready when we hit camp Kuusteeniemi next Monday.

Because i haven’t got any marketing background i decided to start by picking up couple of elementary books from the library to study marketing research from. The first title i chose was The Market Research Toolbox (2006) by Edward F. McQuarrie and Marketing Research (1999) by Alvin c. Burns and Ronald F .Bush to get a grip of the fundamentals of market research.

From these books i have widened my my view on what marketing research basically is and no doubt these will be good books to bring to the 58h project. To get a wider angle on marketing research i also viewed some videos discussing marketing research. A nice video by an unknown author states that marketing researchers have to be as innovative as the marketing campaign designers to get a good results

I also studied some other interesting articles focusing on marketing research and innovation:

Searching for further inspirational texts about marketing research i found an interesting blog post discussing the relationship between marketing research and innovation by the pseudonym sgassee. In this blog post the writer makes a discussion around innovation and doing marketreaserches in

http://blog.hbs.edu/hbsinov8/?p=698

http://www.brainjuicer.com/xtra/BrainJuicer_Kearon_Innovation.pdf

In this blog post brainjuicer.com founder and self proclaimed marketing “guru” John Kearon writes about innovation, marketing research and startupps.

Hope this will give some enlightenment of what i have done so far,

Have a Blessed Friday & a Victorious Weekend!

Max

Learning Portfolio - Isabella Seege

My portfolio can be found on: http://inno58hportfolio.blogspot.fi/

It includes all the material I have produced during the course on my own. Other material, e.g. material produced with the group has been posted on this blog or on Twitter.

See you in Kunstenniemi! :)


/Bella

Lisävahvistusta - New group member

Team Fresh welcomes Alexandra Koskiranta from Åbo Akademi to join our fabulous team.

Welcome! 

I will give Alexandra the instructions on what we have been doing and since she has been working on another assignment before, we thought it is just best that she reads everything we have posted on the blog and prepares around the topic "service design for future retail banking".

Alexandra can maybe shortly tell a little something about herself on the blog :) I will invite Alexandra to our Facebook group, give her the instructions, passwords she will need and so on...
I'll soon post my portfolio on the blog too.

Have a great weekend everybody and see you on Monday! :)


/Bella

Four steps for designing services

Marc Stickdorn (2011) outlines a four step approach for designing services:

1. Exploration 

The process seldom starts from the customer, even though the customer is often in the centre when it comes to service design. We need to understand the goals and the culture of the company that provides a service and aks some questions, whether the company knows what service design is and if the are ready for such a process. Due to the reason that co-creativity is a part of service design it is important to agree on the extent to which the service designer has freedom in the creative process. First, we identify a problem that the designer will work on. We need to understand the view on the problem from the company's point of view.  Second, we shall NOT look for a solution, rather identify what the real problem is, i.e. understanding the situation from current and potential customers' point of view. We shall ascertain the real motivations for the reason why customers behave the way they do, meaning getting some insight instead of only gathering some empirical data. The third thing to do is visualise the findings and the underlying structure of the previous intangible services which helps in simplifying complex and intangible processes.  

2. Creation

We shall test and retest ideas an concept and not focus on avoiding mistakes but rather on exploring as many as possible. This should be done as early as possible and learn as much as we can from these mistakes. Service designers tend to have an obsession with sticky notes that help them illustrate associations and relationships, visualise processes etc. during co-creative ideation processes. Since service design is iterative as well during the four stages as within one of them, they work as a visual support to keep track on this quick and repetitive approach to development.   In this stage we gather and develop solutions to the insights we got in the first stage. All stakeholders should be included; we should work  with interdisciplinary teams including customers, employees, management, designers and so on to be able to come up with a holistic and sustainable solution. 

3. Reflection

Based on the developed concepts from previous stage it is now time to build some prototypes and test these with a few customers or experts to get some feedback and  to be able to make some improvements to match the expectations of the customer. There are though great challenges at this stage because we cannot just put the prototype on the table and aks their opinion; the customer also needs a mental picture on the future service. This is where the emotional aspects of the service needs to be considered. By using storyboards  videos, photos etc. we can help to generate the emotional engagement necessary but we will still be missing the user interaction that is considered important. Therefore we shall prototype the service concept i reality or close to it, e.g. through role play. With this cost-efficient method we engage users emotionally and and elicit fun. Creating these kind of prototype situations is not always possible so sometimes we try to create is as a kind of scenery. 

4.Implementation 

Last but not least, it is time to implement new service design concepts will demand a process of change. There are some principles of change management that have to be considered.  The sequence of planning , implementing, and reviewing change are great guidelines. We should make sure that the employees understand these changes so they get a real vision on the service moment, which can be illustrated with the help of blueprints. When implementing these changes there should be support for the employees and problems need to be solved quickly and creatively. The more we invest in these earlier stages, the more likely it is for the transition to run smoothly. Last but not least, it is time to review the changes, i.e. control the success which again will take us to the iterative service design thinking.




/Bella

Comparison to Jyske Bank

People, Service, and Profit at Jyske Bank

This case study is about a bank which was in the same position as the Aktia Bank now and I think we can learn from them a lot how to create own and innovative services. The Jyske Bank is a Danish bank which had the same objective like Aktia bank already a few years ago, "to be the bank in their country with the best service to offer", like an executive said they want to be “the most customer-oriented bank in Denmark”. To reach this ambitious goal they used different tools and strategic changes in their company which will presented here. And the main thought behind it was and is to make the company remarkable and differentiated.

Tangible Differences:

Account Teams: In the beginning the Jyske Bank tried to connect every customer with an responsible employee, but quite often this led to unrest because he was not available, so the system was changed to teams which are responsible

Branch Design: The branch design was not too much, just small changes like coffee for every customer, warm colors, the same comfortable chairs for everybody to give a feeling of equality and toys for children to give a feeling of home.

Details: Even the pictures on the employees card where changed to the style of an old family picture because the thought was that “details change everything”

Intangible Differences:

Empowering the branches: They gave for example the responsibility for the approval to the employees as long it was no big loan. This system shortened the time to approval a much, so the customer satisfaction was increased a lot.

Empowerment throughout the bank: The main sentence the management gave to the employees was “does it make sense to ask for help or permission?”. With giving every single employee more power the management tried to get more commitment and interest of them into the bank and therefor interest in the profitability of the company.

Human Resources:

Jyske bank kind of “outsourced” their human research to professionals which were located in the field but for whose advice the branch managers had to pay if they used it. They also changed their selection and are not strictly focusing anymore on banking skills but also on social abilities in their choice. Furthermore every employee got an annual bonus when the bank performed better than the other top 10 Danish banks. They also had the chance to buy 13200 DKK of company stock with a 20% discount. With these programs the management tried to get even greater commitment to the company.

The Jyske Bank Value Chain:

 

Johannes 

Some links which could be of use in Kunstenniemi:

This is about the Global Service Jam 2013, which was conducted in over 100 countries in many different locations; one of them was Boost Turku

http://planet.globalservicejam.org/home

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY49OE9PScU

Interesting services and projects evolved out of this 48h and now in Inno we have even 58h so we should be able to achieve even more, but there are some funny videos as well which maybe will trigger our creativity ;)

And here is a link to the book we used there, unfortunately I couldn’t get it to take it with me to Kunstenniemi but the website shows a good summary of it, also with some short videos.

http://thisisservicedesignthinking.com/#

And here is a short presentation which gives easy insights in service design:

http://issuu.com/paulthurston/docs/uxbrighton_edit.ppt

Finally a website which could provide us with some tools which should be used to design a good service:

http://www.servicedesigntools.org/

Johannes

Learning portfolio - Rasmus Kuhlberg

Here are some thoughts about what I've learned so far from this course and all the blog posts that I've contributed with for this course so far:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M4IqvXc313eK5cbwcf61HzcRRm8wQrweJLKUbnzsC5I/edit?usp=sharing

Some questions mailed to Aktia's management.

Togeather with Mikael Lundqvist from the other Aktia- group we contacted Marc Hinnenberg to get some answers on some questions that we've been pondering over. Unfortunately Marc is on paternity leave so we contacted another member of Aktia's management. Hopefully we'll get some constructive answers before 15.4. 

""Hej! 
Vi är två grupper från innovationskursen INNO58h (Åbo Akademi, Turun Yliopisto, Folkhögskolan Novia och Turun AMK) som har fått i uppgift
att göra ett arbete till Aktia som främst tangerar er framtida utveckling samt strategier. Om ni möjligen kunde svara på följande frågor skulle
det vara till ovärderlig hjälp för vårt arbete.

- Vi har hört att Akitas mål är att år 2015 vara Finlands bästa bank på service; hurdana åtgärder och hurdan strategi har ni för att genomföra målet?

- Har Aktia planerat att göra eller håller Aktia på att göra en "bank-app" till smarttelefoner? Hur kommer den att verkställas och vilka tjänster kommer
den att innehålla?

- Vilken är er viktigaste målgrupp/kundsegment inom private-banking?

- Vad upplever Aktia själv att är dess starka sidor och vilka kunde utvecklas?

- Hurdan skolning har Aktia för arbetstagarna och hur ofta håller Aktia skolningar?

- Finns det någon möjlighet för oss att få tag på "test-bankkoder" för att se hur ert Internet-kontor fungerar?

Stort tack på förhand!

Med vänlig hälsning, Mikael Lundqvist och Rasmus Kuhlberg (ÅA-studerande)"


// Rasmus

Advertisement...

Hi again!

I did some research on how Aktia advertises its services, and the thing is they actually only advertise on the internet and in some brochures which one dose not see much of. They do advertise a lot in smaller communities with big sings and sponsorship's, but if you don't really know anything about them from before you wont get much out of their logo, so that is why I think they need a little face lift.
On the other hand there advertisement of services on the internet are really good in my opinion, since the webpage is really easy to use and has a simple layout even though there design is nice and pleasing to look at.
http://www.aktia.fi/sv/

As someone mentioned earlier in this blog many people think that Aktia is a totally Swedish bank, and yes there are a lot of "Swedish speaking Finns" that use this bank but this is a point which needs to be removed if Aktia wants to grow, and I would love to help given the chance next week. I also have a lot of service advertisement's on my mind right now just waiting to put them on paper at Kunstenniemi.

1. Fast and Easy to change language
2. Easy and stylish to browse through, find what you are looking for fast
3. Check their interest rates fast while browsing
4. Use their fast and easy shortcuts
5. Give them a call with any given problem, you will find their number fast and easy

More to come so stay tuned...

Cheers

Fred

Visit of Aktia/Turku

Last Friday Max and I visited together with two members of Team Royal Mess the local Aktia Branch in Turku to get some deeper insights and help with our task.

First the regional branch Manager, Christian Holmqvist, gave us a tour through the different departments, starting with the Real Estate department, to the Investment and Company part and ending in the private customer area. During the tour he described us how they are working in the different departments.

Afterwards he invited us to ask him any questions which he answered as good as possible, to summarize it:

One strength of the Aktia bank is that they are small, what enables them to have a much closer customer relation which is also based on a long time partnership, due to this the bank has a better knowledge about their customers than the main competitors. One thing which shows this is that Aktia is not using a call center, but the customers always call the local branches. Furthermore it is common practice to call the customers annually to be informed about their needs and there are also customer events for the same reason. Another tool used to have this close connection is that every customer is assigned to a team of employees.

The main competitors are Nordea, Dansk. One of the weaknesses, compared to these competitors, is the size, because innovations are quite often too expensive for such a small company and they do not have as many offices as the other banks, an example would be an app for banking which is already offered by many competitors but not Aktia. Still the bank tries to have the “best service in Finland” in 2015. The strengths, regarding the departments, are located in the very good asset management but the real estate department is performing quite poorly. 

About the strong connection to Swedish customers: many people think that Aktia is a Swedish bank which is not true and it even tries to get rid of this wrong stereotype. Still in the Turku branch 60 % of the employees are bilingual and approximately 50 % of the customers are Swedish speaking.

In my opinion the visit was very good and important, I by myself feel now much more connected with the project because I can see how “real” it is and that there is interest in the bank for innovations.

Johannes