Phase 5
Technology-Forward Thinking for an Omnichannel Customer Experience

Phase 5, one of the first research and consulting firms to advise clients on online markets, empowers enterprises to manage customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) in the complex multi-channel digital environment. The team’s deep expertise in UX design, CX, innovation, and advanced analytics helps companies realize value by centering around and evolving with customers.

With Phase 5, businesses receive clear insights and guidance on where to start their CX improvements and how to manage their ecosystems accordingly. Focusing on the convergence of CX and UX across multiple channels, the team draws upon its technology-forward thinking and leverages its experience to mine insights and help clients on their journey to customer-centricity.

One of the very first agencies with a usability lab-for-hire, today, Phase 5 brings comprehensive experience design and market insight toolkits to solve complex issues faced by clients.

“It’s rare to have an experience design practice within a broader market research company. We understand market trends, we are good at mining insights, and we have to have a deep methodological toolkit to support that,” says Andreas Noe, founding partner of Phase 5.

Working with large businesses like some of the biggest banks in North America, the London Stock Exchange, global charities, leading manufacturing companies and major retail brands, Phase 5 brings to their clients best practices on how to achieve CX and UX goals across various industry sectors.

To achieve this, Phase 5 experts start a project by gathering broad market insights on competitors, new technologies, and shifts in customer attitudes and behaviors. Depending on the goals of each project, the team then conducts quantitative and/or qualitative research (often large-scale) and works collaboratively with clients in order to optimize costs and streamline efforts.

Based on the accumulated intelligence, the experience design team comes up with refined design strategies inspired by the client’s users. The experience can be designed around a particular product or service, irrespective of the channel. Phase 5 offers both strategic recommendations and practical guidance, providing the client with prototypes that later serve as blueprints for their own engineers and developers.

When seeking to deliver an omnichannel experience, it addresses how to mitigate the limitations due to deep-seated siloes within most large organizations.

At the same time, practicing holistic experience management, whether employee, client, or user experience, requires a team to operate in diverse business cultures. Phase 5 is capable of bringing various disciplines together, bridging cultural gaps with people who work together to achieve a common purpose.

The team also applies the latest technology to increase efficiency and save costs and time. In one of its engagements, Phase 5 deployed Oculus Rift immersive glasses to develop a 3D environment for a bank to test a new branch environment efficiently and in the shortest time possible without going through the arduous process of constructing an actual branch layout.

It’s rare to have an experience design practice within a broader market research company. We understand market trends, we excel at mining insights, and we have a deep methodological toolkit to support that.

Leveraging AI technology and ML for predictive analytics, they also help clients manage customer churn and reduce the onboarding period.

In another instance, Phase 5 worked with a global client from the retail industry that experienced cancellation rates too high to be sustainable. They struggled to recover their customer acquisition costs. Phase 5 collaborated with the client to get comprehensive data about their customers, channels of acquisitions, and customer behavior related to specific products.

The team used predictive models and ML algorithms to discover key drivers for cancellation and identify touchpoints to improve on. As a result, the client obtained prescriptive guidance for changes in their onboarding, messaging, and marketing down to specific channels. After rigorous A/B testing, they found that the guidance was very helpful, implemented the suggested changes, and now continue to employ Phase 5’s recommendations full-time on a global scale.

Living by the notion of ‘Smarter Together,’ Phase 5 leverages its expertise as well as the client’s knowledge of their business to optimize efforts and maximize benefits.