Customercentric, Customer First!
Enterprise Solutions Rolls Out Customer
First! E-Briefings to Employees as They Move
from Customer Understanding to Customer
Centricity
L istening to the customer is the number one business
strategy for New York-headquartered Enterprise Solutions
(ES), Nokia’s business group that aims to offer mobile
solutions to the enterprise using any device over any
network, with any application.
And while the focus on customer understanding is not a
new angle to Nokia’s core competencies, the increasingly
difficult task of supporting an all-encompassing mission—
while responding with agility to customer needs—has
inspired ES to adopt a renewed customer in the center
vision for business.
According to Billie Hartless, VP of Human Resources (HR),
the customer-centric approach is driven by a marketplace
dynamic that poses itself as a great challenge in rapidly
answering the customer’s changing needs: coopetition,
also known as cooperative competition.
“It’s complicated to be able to immediately calibrate and
adjust to customer needs in a synchronized effort with
companies that are both competitors and partners,” says
Billie. “We can either rally around each other or create
tension in the system, but ultimately, it’s about finding the
best solution for the customer—the customer is in the
center of all.”
And while ES hopes to promote Nokia products and
solutions as the customer choice, the trend toward
aggregated technologies means sometimes pleasing the
customer by promoting the competitor’s product as part of
the portfolio. “Although we hope to, we aren’t always
arriving at the Nokia-organic solution,” says Billie. “For
example, we recently worked with Blackberry to offer RIM
software connectivity to a customer on our 9300
communicator.”
Bottom line, says Billie, the customer’s perspective should
drive processes. “The idea is to examine how our
customers experience our products and services and use
this as a catalyst to build the process from inside out,” she
says.
1
Employees Ask for More in the Listening to
You Survey
In 2004, just a year after ES was formed, employees of this
entrepreneurial-spirited organization, structured as a self-
contained business group, called out in the Listening to You
survey for more understanding of customers. Given the
complexity of the business model, they wanted to know,
"Exactly who are our customers, and how are our products
sold?"
With a target market of both end users and the enterprise,
employees needed to know more about the key decision
makers driving development of the mobile solutions offered
by ES. For example, end users within the enterprise typically
dictate features for ES’s mobile applications, yet decision-
making authority to adopt these technologies falls to IT
managers and business owners. Employees felt they needed
to understand these, and other, nuances to ES business to
fully support the customer-centric vision.
Sari Forsman, HR Manager for ES based in Salo,
understood that answering the queries of ES’s population of
2200 employees, representing 47 nationalities in 30 sites,
would involve a nontraditional solution to employee learning.
“Being a highly diverse organization located in many
geographical locations, we were used to working in virtual
teams,” says Sari. “It made sense that we would investigate
an e-learning solution—we just needed to find the right
partner to help implement the program.”
As it turned out, mammoth HR outsourcing firm Convergys
proved to be that right partner. With experience in
implementing learning solutions for large multinational clients
such as Deutsch Bank, Citibank, Mazda and General
Motors, Convergys offered precisely what was needed: a
comprehensive, competency-driven e-learning program that
could be deployed to any ES site and used at employees’
convenience. Not only did this solution remove traditional
barriers to learning, it could also be produced rapidly and at
a low cost per employee.
The decision to partner with Convergys was an obvious one.
Next came the process of developing the first of the
e-briefings, appropriately named Customer First! to
emphasize ES’s new vision.
Customer First! Emerges

For a period of several months, a dedicated team from Convergys’ New York satellite office met with Nokia content
matter experts and HR and Communication team members to begin an arduous, thorough process of groupthink.

Convergys project manager Kyle Thomes described the process as creative and collaborative, fueled by strong leadership
on the Nokia team. “We kicked off the project by gathering the stakeholders in a room to facilitate a full-day solution
design session with the goal of defining the learning objectives, overall theme, and high-level design elements,” says Kyle.
“The Nokia group was dynamic, prepared, and fun. . .this, and the thought leadership shown by the team naturally made
for stronger content in the end.”

Employee response to the e-briefings, rolled out one year ago, acknowledges the high quality of the 30-minute animated
sessions that run in Flash and feature members of the ES leadership team sharing key strategies and objectives. By
design, each of the four modules offers open-ended employee feedback that will be used to improve subsequent
modules.

So far, employees are clamoring for even more specific training as it relates to their own area of expertise. Each year, two
to four new modules are scheduled to launch. Convergys plans to continue expanding the current four titles, driven by
employee feedback and need:

• Enterprise Mobility and Our Customer

• Introduction to Intellisync and Mobile Suite
• Nokia for Business Solutions
• Create a Great User Experience

It’s easy to see that ES’s mission to provide mobile solutions to customers anywhere, anytime, is not so different from the
unlimited flexibility and ease of use that the business group seeks to offer employees through its Customer First!
e-briefings. The reasons are clear—in a recent U.S. industry survey, 49 percent of businesses polled indicated a
correlation between e-learning initiatives and business results.

Kyle reiterates why e-learning is critical for impacting the bottom line, noting, “Global companies like Nokia need a tool to
quickly and effectively calibrate team members to new directions for the company. E-briefings offer a simple, richly
engaging medium to convey messages for new strategies and products, and they also offer busy employees the
opportunity to stay connected to important, rapid changes—at their own pace.”

“Customer understanding has

historically been an area of strategic
competence for Nokia,” says Sari
Forsman, HR Manager for Enterprise
Solutions. “Now we’re moving from
customer understanding to customer
centricity.”