By Janus Boye
“Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for”
Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author Peter Drucker is one of the most widely-known and influential thinkers on management and his opening quote is really an eloquent way of saying that the customer's experience and perception of the service or product is what ultimately defines its quality.
Peter Drucker also coined the term “knowledge worker” and that’s really what Gudrun Möller, Service Designer at Zürcher Kantonalbank (ZKB) in Zurich, Switzerland is. Her focus is along the same lines as Drucker on using research data to focus on delivering value to customers and testing, testing, testing.
Prior to joining ZKB 2021, Gudrun has worked on both customer side and with a consulting firm in various roles including Senior Digital Media Manager at Swiss Re, Head of Digital Product Management at Neue Zürcher Zeitung and also as Senior Consultant at Stimmt, a boutique Swiss business consulting firm focusing on customer experience.
Gudrun is also our expert of the month.
An insect-lover turned service designer
Prior to making it, so to speak, Gudrun’s initial real job was a scientist at ETH Zürich at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, where she stayed for six years. Her academic background helped her land the job and her impressive learning journey includes studying biology at Universität Osnabrück, a master’s degree in zoology at University of Zurich and later a PhD in neuroscience at ETH Zürich.
When I talked to Gudrun, she called herself an insect-lover and customer experience professional, now with the job title as "service designer". While her work is often behind a desk and in workshops, she still loves nature, enjoys finding nature’s patterns and interpreting them. Ecological sustainability and biodiversity is high on her list and she in particular loves insects and the whole ecosystem around them.
Fast forward to today and she’s almost been 2 years at ZKB as a service designer, where she focuses on the customer experience to design the journey from the beginning to the end. This includes improving touchpoints from digital channels, IT systems to the consulting situation in the bank branches and a deep understanding of who needs to deliver what and where, always considering delivering value: “Value for the customer and value for employees delivering our services”.
She’s busy collecting, digesting and sharing more customer knowledge, customer journeys and prototypes than ever before. Similarly to her academic roots, she enjoys covering more than just the digital platforms and actually the entire ecosystem across channels to fully improve the services delivered to customers.
Working with an internal coach for personal development
In previous jobs, Gudrun often had to cover many areas and navigate many topics on her own, sometimes stretching the expertise thinly.
In her current role at ZKB she finds herself most of the time coupled with a subject-matter expert colleague, e.g. a colleague from financing or asset management. This close collaboration with subject-matter experts, enables her to further focus on the user, context, jobs, pains and gains and together improves the understanding of the customer and business context as well as delivering thorough business cases & solutions, ready for testing and implementation.
In the department where Gudrun is located, they’ve organised it using the scaled agile framework, also known as SAFe, which means that they have chapters and guilds that span across more traditional and hierarchical organisational structures.
Interestingly, Gudrun has an internal coach for personal development, whom she meets in general with every 2 weeks for 30 minutes. The conversation focuses on what makes Gudrun happy and productive and how to assist Gudrun in performing best. The internal coaches do this for 20% of their time and then still have their usual day job.
Building sustainable change
Similarly to Peter Drucker who taught that management is a liberal art and about much more than productivity. Drucker famously emphasised that to be an effective manager you must understand things like psychology, science, religion, and the other things that go into that subject. This resonates well with Gudrun, who is also focused on digital sustainability and creating solutions that make a positive impact.
As an early adopter of sustainable digital leadership, Gudrun has already integrated digital sustainability as a product owner, aiming at reducing the carbon footprint of digital channels. Doing this made her fully realise the importance of weaving the ecological aspect into an economical benefit.
Economical sustainability is paramount for companies, however, society and governments are now starting to push the importance of ecological and societal sustainability.
Gudrun loves that she can now connect digital sustainability with her work by supporting clients becoming more sustainable. In other words, she’s focused on bringing her user research back in to understand clients better and as she said, this also means caring about economic sustainability.
To quote Gudrun:
“Internal clients have long moved on from the old inside-out approach of developing products, to a more open and iterative approach, where challenges are welcomed and concepts are only created on relevant ideas”
Citing an inspiration for her recent work, Gudrun brings up Irish expert Gerry McGovern and his work on earth experience design. It’s clear that Gudrun believes that individuals can bring positive change and have an impact - as she said in closing:
“When the business benefits are clear, e.g. faster, more accessible and better website, then they will prioritise creating sustainability from the beginning”
Learn more about Gudrun Möller
Back in 2019, while Gudrun was at Swiss Re, she made it to the Boye Aarhus 19 conference and gave a highly-rated talk on “Delivering a new usable, simple and fast corporate website”
You can also connect with Gudrun on LinkedIn.