Sébastien Bertrand – strategic projects Director - Orange Innovation division - Orange shares his experience with Sofrecom.
The Orange group is developing its IOT strategy in order to offer new services to its customers. To support their growth in Europe, the « Technology and Global innovation » department called on Sofrecom to identify new added-value services and build customer loyalty.
« For many years, Orange has made the IoT a key area of anticipation and one of the value creation levers for the group. The « Technology and Global Innovation » department supports the Orange subsidiaries in identifying partners and in creating new services for their customers. The rapid expansion, these past few years, of the connected objects market of any kind (wearables, items for the home, for health, etc.) has generated an obvious need to make available for users a single interface for inventory management and the operation of all their connected objects.
We wanted to go further and design new innovative services around connected objects. In order to do this, we called on Sofrecom’s experts to carry out a study aiming at identifying these additional services.
The Sofrecom consultants have created a comprehensive « user-centric » approach combining methodology with the ability to listen to internal teams and to customers.
In a first step, they collected the expectations and difficulties of this target market via a questionnaire conducted through an online panel.
In a second step, I wished to mobilize the Orange group’s collective intelligence to imagine new services meeting these needs. Relying on the Agile and Design Thinking methods, Sofrecom’s consultants facilitated a workshop with the Orange group’s specialists of various complementary domains (Marketing, techniques, etc.). The service ideas collected were then formalized with UX experts, and then tested during 4 focus groups in France and in Spain. On the basis of the insights collected, and following new transverse workshops with the actors of Orange’s IoT community, four service proposals were selected for the study.
Throughout this mission, Sofrecom’s consultants have shown a great knowledge of the IoT market, of its usages and of its technologies. The methodology deployed, as well as their objective views on the project, enabled us to challenge our ideas and create new ones. This has been very valuable.
They were able to rely on the collective intelligence of the internal teams, to efficiently prepare workshops and participants, and ensure that the deliverables are operationally usable.
Thanks to this work, we have a precise list, validated by the market and collectively approved, of value-added services which will soon enrich the IoT value propositions of the Orange group. »
