IBM Universal Experiences
Love is a universal experience.
“The Universal Experiences are the only way we can build products―not a way to build products. This will change the nature of IBM.”
—Rob Thomas,
Senior Vice President,
IBM Cloud & Data Platform
Summary
The IBM Universal Experiences represent the mindset that clients have throughout their relationship with IBM. A client’s relationship with IBM is more than just the product or service. It's all the moments before and beyond the product or service experience—including how they discover and learn about the product, how they purchase it, how they get support, and even how they discontinue or end their product use. It's the digital and analog interactions they might have—all the conversations, people, platforms, products, events, web sites, and more. This innovative and unifying customer lifecycle model rooted in service design research is also a foundation for broader change management in terms of IBM’s CX and UX and excellence in orchestrating experiences across everything IBM does.
User need
The first version of the Universal Experiences originated early on in IBM’s reinvented design program (2014) and debuted with six experiences. Today, the Universal Experiences has expanded to nine experiences and has evolved with many iterations, pilot projects, and years of research. There are several notable organization-wide needs and pain points which lead to the renewed investment in the Universal Experiences:
Cross-functional offering teams proliferated a number of duplicative customer lifecycle models and client-focused excellence efforts in silos.
Cross-functional offering teams lacked a common shared language. This language would help teams achieve alignment on:
Client needs and IBM’s business goals
Cross-functional collaboration
Systems of measuring success
Cross-functional offering teams lacked examples of excellence they could apply to the touchpoints they work on (specific points of client interaction), which impeded the orchestration of high-quality experiences.
Our goal
This work is the culmination of partnerships across all of IBM, informed by industry best practices and has been validated through research with our internal teams across every BU and our clients. We curated this research and collaboratively designed this site to align teams around people’s needs and IBM’s goals and drive a shared focus on outcomes―excellent products and services that people love. And like any business, our desired outcomes are to increase revenue and client loyalty.
Our hill statement:
Cross-functional teams can understand how experiences relate to each other, people's needs, and our business goals using a single shared language.
The team
Our dream team delivered the new internal version of the Universal Experiences site working remotely in under five months. Our research and UX was lead by a SME in the Universal Experiences and previous Journey System work. They were supported by a Design Principal with a focus on Visual Design and Art Direction, and me, the lead Content Designer. We also worked with two developers to build the completed experience. They collaborated with our Design Principal to showcase unique and innovative interaction design elements on the site.
Our experience was sponsored and supported by Distinguished Designer Sarah Brooks, an expert in the field of Design Research and Service Design. The project was jointly co-designed and co-announced with 50+ executive sponsors across the business including the CMO.
The Universal Experiences Home
Love is Universal blog written on behalf of Sarah Brooks by Allison Biesboer
Universal Experiences promotional content on IBMer News Quick Takes
“We all must be obsessed with continually delighting our clients. At every interaction, we must strive to offer them the best experience and value.”
—Arvind Krishna on his
first day as IBM CEO
Project contribution
Research
While the Universal Experiences is based on years of research, I contributed to research for our December 2020 site release and briefly in 2018. This involved multiple rounds of interviews with sponsor users including leaders and operational team members across offering management, development, design, marketing, and more. We brought our prototype feedback to our senior leadership team, and gathered input from 50+ executives from across all IBM business units.
Content Design
I lead the content design, starting from early project research to our coded interactive experience. The challenge of the Universal Experiences was to unify IBM on a single shared lingua franca—the language of the business, and to align offering teams to think about experiences from the perspective of the client while collaborating across silos to deliver excellence. The greatest content design challenge at hand was to redact dense service design concepts into easy-to-understand, approachable content that not only informs IBMers but flips their mental model 180°. From a feature- and technology-lead world to a human-lead universe, we need continually strive for excellence from the vantage point of our clients.
Engagement
With a background in content marketing, I lead the engagement workstream for my larger program team, which included the communications and gaining stakeholder buy-in for this effort and other components of our program. General Manager of IBM Design, Phil Gilbert referred to the Universal Experiences launch as “the best first iteration launch that [IBM Design] has ever pushed out.” Our team worked with 50+ executives and leaders from across the business to help co-announce and co-design with us with. I was able to bring the Universal Experiences to the greater business through IBM-wide channels like w3 IBMer news, and other quality and transformation programs.
Executive video content
Each page of the Universal Experiences features an executive with expertise from different disciplines and business units across IBM. I worked with our leadership and a video production expert to engage our CMO, Senior Vice Presidents like Rob Thomas, General Managers, and more. I was instrumental in leading this portion of project, drafted the scripts, and provided the first cuts during video production. This content creation and engagement effort aligned with our launch date and added to the production quality and credibility of the Universal Experiences.
Evergreen content
To fortify our launch, I designed evergreen content including a blog we launched with internally called “Love is universal,” which I ghostwrote to help get more IBMers to discover and learn about our lifecycle model. I also worked with IBMer News colleagues to publish evergreen content broadly on w3 IBMer News and IBMer News TV. We also featured the Universal Experiences in presentations within relevant communities that share the same goals, and enablement programs, and more.
Impact
The Universal Experiences is an ongoing transformation effort. While it’s too soon to measure the lasting impact on IBM’s revenue and client loyalty, our launch of the Universal Experiences to thousands of IBMers is a giant leap towards excellent experiences that clients love.