To begin, Thrive contacted me about designing one of their customer success stories into something that can be shared with clients and across social media.

To understand this, we must first ask, what is a customer success story?

<aside> ❓ A strong customer success story is a rocket booster for your sales team. It’s powerful for two reasons. First, a customer story allows prospects to see and hear in words other than your own just why your product or service is so valuable. Second, the structure of a story itself works magic in the human brain. Stories have served humans in their quest for survival since the earliest of times — our species has used storytelling to warn of dangers in the world around us and to create meaning out of the chaos of life.

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Here's a summary of what the client (Thrive) asked from me:

<aside> 💬 Please use the attached Air France KLM Customer Success Story to design a case study and export it as a PDF to be used as part of our sales and marketing collateral.

In addition to this, we are interested to see how you would promote this case study across our social media channels (Twitter, Linked In, and Facebook). Please provide example material via a zip folder for this purpose.

Note: We are looking out for attention to detail, new ideas, and creativity. We have provided our brand guidelines as guidance.

We need this back as soon as possible and will work from there once the design is done.

Thanks! Thrive

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To clarify, they had attached a word.doc with pre-written content to me via email, which they wanted to be designed into a PDF and into various social media images. So at this stage, I had all the information I needed to begin.

Beginnings

Designing a customer success story or similar means developing a storyline and narrative using design elements and thinking. This particular customer success story was about AirFrance KLM, specifically how Thrive (the client) developed an app called ‘My Wem’ which in their own words:

✓ Increased employee engagement ✓ Streamlined communication ✓ Increased knowledge sharing and collaboration ✓ Breaking down of silos ✓ Improved employee experience and morale ✓ Increased productivity ✓ A formal recognition and rewards channel ✓ New social interactions with colleagues ✓ Happiness and engagement ✓ A way to measure the number of employees consuming key messages and content

To add context, here's a brief explanation as to who AirFrance KLM and Thrive are:

<aside> ❓ Thrive is a startup that has designed a mobile CMS platform used by companies to share news and content with their employees. It's a sort of 'SharePoint for mobile. That actually works (unlike SharePoint). They've partnered with AirFrance in this instance to create an app called 'My Wem' which was developed using the CMS platform they have available.

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<aside> ❓ Air France–KLM, also known as Air France–KLM Group, is a Franco-Dutch airline holding company incorporated under French law with its headquarters at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Tremblay-en-France, near Paris.

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The challenge

Here's the hard part, I had accepted this project before circumstances beyond my control meant that I only had a single day (around 6 hours at that time) to design and produce this project. They originally gave me three days to design it. This was disheartening because I always love to put as much time and effort into my work as possible.

However, I still felt that I could meet the challenge and design something that the client was happy with.