Hackathon Delivers Innovation for Outstanding Client Experience

As you probably know, innovation is a subject very close to my heart and so I’m loving the creativity and the amazing work that has been coming out of our team. Recently we turned our attention to the question of how to give our clients the ultimate BVT customer experience. Having had some great results with our last Hackathon , I was excited to see what would come out of a client experience session. Chris Matthews is our R&D guru and he runs the hackathon in a structured way. Three teams are presented with a challenge (in this case client experience), followed by some serious brainstorming, some idea sharing and some very competitive work, culminating in a presentation by each team to the group at the end. It might be an internal competition, but damn it is fierce! I love seeing everyone bringing their A-game and their ambition to create something extraordinary. I wasn’t there for the hackathon itself but I did log in for the presentations at the end and they were bloody amazing! I know our team are pretty darn smart, but wow they blow my socks off some days! The winning concept from the hackathon is a one-stop-shop for clients, available anytime.The first group got up and did their presentation, it was a lovely slide deck of their thinking and ideas. I’m sitting there and I said to the group “This is awesome, it’s been on my wish list for ever!” Then the second team comes on, and one of our young guys stands up and says “We didn’t have time to do a fancy presentation, so we just built a website instead”. They had turned it around in two and a half hours. I’m not kidding - it was sensational. I did have to laugh at their swagger and sense of humour.

Customer Portal Concepts

What I also found really interesting was how the teams approached the same question from different angles. Two of the teams came from an engineering/ mathematical perspective and the work they’ve done will sit behind this interface. But the other team had thought about it from the client’s perspective and their work will provide a complimentary aspect to the final product.  Seeing the different lenses people brought to the competition just reminded me how valuable diversity of thinking is in a team. Watching them present their ideas I thought to myself, there is such goodness out there!