Challenge
Push a traditional B2B industry to discover the value of being customer-driven.
Outcome
Business, brand, and cultural transformation—all from a clear vision focused on customer needs.
Overview
EQ takes a modern approach to work-life experience, balancing how work gets done with where it happens.
As businesses prioritize employee experience and consider what it means to have a distributed workforce, the real estate industry watches outsiders, such as WeWork and Convene, create new value and markets. With the future of work in mind, EQ (formerly Equity Office Properties) is proactively reimagining how businesses experience space as a service.
To do this, we collaborated with newly appointed CEO, Lisa Picard, to invent an original approach to transformation. A partnership unlike any other, our teams continually pushed each other, made decisions that carried equal responsibility, and created a considered cadence for change that empowers employees to lead it.
Vision & Platform
A vision that taps into the extraordinary ability of humans to transform.
To create experiences that support new ways of working, EQ needed a shift in mindset – a vision that would activate their transition from a transactional business to a relational one. We crafted a point of view on the future that prioritizes experiences where people thrive, focusing on what it would take to create collective prosperity and deliver on the brand promise.
The EQ vision is people focused. It gives voice to the unique people and culture that makes up the company and its customers. It inspires active participation in change and celebrates collaboration as the primary path forward.
Cultural Practices
Defining practices that anchor how employees think, act, and relate to each other.
Taking a deep dive into company culture to identify what makes the organization unique, we established cultural practices that reflect their strengths. Practices are similar to company values but have a stronger outcome because they’re actionable. They work toward the vision by putting a spotlight on successful behaviors and creating a shared language around change.
Customer Experience
Mapping customer pain-points to inspire experiences that speak directly to customer needs.
We spoke to a diverse range of customers from Snap to United Airlines, CEOs to Office Managers, in pursuit of a holistic perspective on the full customer experience of leasing and working in an EQ office space. The result was a customer journey, highlighting pain points and opportunities to reimagine their offering. The journey became a storytelling tool used internally to discuss their roadmap for the future.
Going beyond the world of real estate, we hosted off-sites with the leadership team to explore the fundamentals of experience design. They learned first-hand what great (and terrible) customer experiences feel like, using this perspective to think differently about their own industry.
Writing the book on Customer Experience and training 250 employees in new processes.
Customer experience is as much process as it is an outcome. To inspire creativity within the organization, we designed a toolkit of techniques for co-creating new products and services with customers. We called this toolkit the EQ Method.
I learned that creative approaches are socially acceptable in the traditional real estate world."
Employee training in the EQ Method took place live, in sessions coast to coast. From security guards to portfolio directors, building managers to VPs of leasing, each was motivated to work together toward change, discovering a renewed sense of purpose in meeting customer needs.
Brand Building
Carving a path that breaks with tradition.
With the vision and practices in place, we helped transform Equity Office Properties to EQ, developing a new visual and verbal identity that’s rooted in emotional intelligence.
The brand system is informed by context and audience. Every element speaks as clearly to customers as it does to partners.
The photographic direction highlights customer experiences and lifestyle, replacing suits shaking hands and tall glass buildings, to signal change in a traditional industry.
Progressive and modern
EQOffice.com was designed for usability as much as storytelling.
Pulling on best practices from modern web design, the site ties together EQ Office’s new identity and brand with a digital presence that speaks to their vision of what the real estate industry can and should aspire to. Fully responsive, the site’s design and functionality are tailored to all no matter the device. Cultural references like Monopoly cards serve as an easy analog for how to display locations, playfully giving users a reference point for viewing available properties. The human-centered filter tool allows users to narrow the properties down according to their needs. Each location acts as an independent microsite for marketing purposes, covering the types of features you’d find on a stand alone property site. Fast, nimble, and elegant, the site reflects organization it’s built for.
Built on a completely modern web stack, EQOffice.com’s frontend is powered by Zeit.co’s fantastic Next.js React framework while content is being served over the cloud via Contentful CMS. This gives EQ Office the flexibility to use their content on any potential platform, while decoupling website functionality from content hosting, making maintenance and extensibility an easy task.
Our Role
- Business Strategy & Offering Definition
- Customer Experience Blueprint
- Value Proposition & Brand Platform
- Employee Engagement Strategy
- Journey Mapping / Touchpoint Priority
- Product Architecture
- Cultural Transformation
- Content Strategy & Production
- Responsive Website Design & Dev
- Event Design & Activation
- Naming
- Internal Process Design & Training
Creating a human-interface for Artificial Intelligence.
