San Francisco Seminar 2008
Day 3

Hosts and Academic Partners: Adobe Scene7, Forrester Research, 24/7 Customer, Seagate Technology

Minimalist illustration of a globe used as a symbol of international collaboration, globalization, knowledge sharing, and worldwide digital development. The icon represents how technology, trade, innovation, and communication connect people, businesses, and societies across national borders. Its timeless design makes the illustration well suited for professional topics related to the global economy, digitalization, and global markets.

Introduction and Context

This day marked a clear shift in the seminar—from a focus on products and technology to user experience and customer value.

Through presentations from Adobe Scene7, Forrester Research, and 24/7 Customer, participants saw how digital experiences, data-driven analytics, and global service processes could be connected into a single, integrated value chain.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) emerged as a key concept. While Adobe demonstrated how visual experiences create engagement, Forrester and 24/7 Customer showed how companies can build long-term relationships through effective organization, quality, and insight into the customer journey.

The seminar day also revealed an emerging realization:

Innovation does not happen only in products, but also in how companies organize themselves around the customer.

Program Overview

Day 3 – April 2, 2008
- Adobe Scene7 – Rich Media and E-Commerce in a Web 2.0 World
- comScore / EMC² – The Multichannel Consumer
- Forrester Research – Best Practices in BPO (Business Process Outsourcing)
- 24/7 Customer – Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM)
- Case presentations:
- Financial services (Citibank, MBNA)
- Technology (NCR, Seagate)
- Healthcare, logistics, insurance, and retail

Key Academic Themes

Web 2.0 and the New Customer Experience

Mary Meeker’s analysis (Morgan Stanley, Web 2.0 – The State of the Internet) described a new era in which content, sharing, and personalization were changing how people used the web.

Adobe Scene7 brought this down to a practical level, demonstrating how interactive visual solutions—360° product images, zoom, video, and configuration tools—increased both conversion rates and average order value.

A key message was:

“Rich media isn’t just decoration—it’s communication.”

Multichannel and Customer Behavior

comScore and EMC² demonstrated how the customer journey moves seamlessly between online and physical stores. 70% of those who shop in physical stores had first conducted research online. This gave rise to the concept of click-to-brick—the impact of digital channels on in-store sales.

Outsourcing and the Global Value Chain

Forrester Research (John McCarthy and Scott Rousseau) noted that BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) had evolved from a means of reducing costs into a driver of value creation.

The most successful companies are those that delegate routine processes while retaining ownership of the customer experience.

Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM)

24/7 Customer presented its approach to end-to-end management of the customer journey—from sales and onboarding to support, loyalty, and repeat purchases.

This was supported by a series of case studies showing how outsourcing actually increased customer satisfaction while reducing costs at the same time.

Watercolor illustration from Mara’s Italian Pastry in San Francisco, featuring fresh croissants, Italian pastries, and cappuccino by the window overlooking the city life outside. The scene captures the quiet mornings during the seminar visits—when reflection, professional conversations, and inspiration often began over coffee and brief pauses in the city’s vibrant café culture.

Case Studies

Citibank and MBNA (Telesales and Financial Services)

24/7 Customer handled both credit card and insurance processes for major global banks.

By combining “soft skills” training with open sales conversations, the sales conversion rate increased by more than 20%, while the cost per customer was reduced by 30%.

NCR (Technology and Support)

24/7 took over technical customer support for the global technology provider NCR, achieving the following results:

40% reduction in costs
Increase in customer satisfaction (CSAT) from 86% to 90%
Reduction in average response time from 55 to 35 seconds

This was highlighted as an example of “smart outsourcing,” where quality improves alongside greater efficiency.

European Automotive Dealership Group (UK)

By moving customer interactions and follow-up to 24/7’s platforms, the dealership group achieved 35% cost savings and 50% faster response times.

Seagate Technology

Alan W. Clark, Senior Director at Seagate, presented how the company outsourced its global warranty system to 24/7 Customer.

After three months, the results were:

Abandonment rate below 5%
60,000 calls handled
40% reduction in costs
Complaints reduced from hundreds to just two per month

Clark summarized the experience this way:

“The challenge is not outsourcing—it’s learning how to manage success across continents.”

Reflections and Discussion:

The discussions that day focused on the balance between proximity and efficiency. Several participants noted that outsourcing can create distance between the customer and the company—but it can also free up time for innovation and strategic work. It became clear that the customer experience is a chain of touchpoints, not the responsibility of a single department.

Digital technology enables personalization, but the real value lies in the interaction between people and systems.

International Perspectives

Indian companies such as 24/7 Customer and Infosys illustrated how knowledge-intensive services had become a new export industry. While many Western companies viewed outsourcing primarily as a cost-cutting initiative, Indian providers demonstrated that the real value lies in learning, processes, and quality.

Forrester described India as “the world’s innovation lab for process improvement.”

This also marked the beginning of a new economic era—one in which customer data and digital flows became as important as the production of physical goods.

Watercolor illustration of a decorated heart from Union Square in San Francisco, surrounded by palm trees and warm evening light. The scene combines sailboats, Coit Tower, and the Transamerica Pyramid in a poetic cityscape symbolizing community, creativity, and a love for San Francisco—the city that inspired so many of the reflections, seminars, and ideas behind The Invisible Capital.

Watercolor illustration from Nob Hill in San Francisco, with Grace Cathedral bathed in warm evening light. In the foreground, an open notebook and pen rest on a round wooden table—a symbol of reflection, idea development, and the many thoughts that emerged during the seminar visits to the city. The scene connects San Francisco’s history, architecture, and creative energy with learning, writing, and personal development.

What Did We Take Home?

A deeper understanding of the customer journey as a value chain—from communication throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Insight into how Web 2.0 and outsourcing can work together to strengthen both the customer experience and profitability.
Evidence that customer-centric innovation can be organized on a global scale.
Inspiration from companies such as Adobe and Seagate that combine technology, insight, and leadership.

Relevance Today

Much of what was presented in 2008 points directly to today’s reality:

Adobe Scene7 is now integrated into Adobe Experience Cloud.
24/7 Customer later became part of [24]7.ai, which uses artificial intelligence for predictive customer service.
The interactivity of Web 2.0 was a precursor to today’s social media and AI-driven personalization.
In this sense, the seminar day can be seen as a precursor to the digital customer revolution we now see across both the private and public sectors.

Peder Inge Furseth

Peder Inge Furseth was a key academic driving force behind the San Francisco seminars and played an important role in making the encounter with Silicon Valley relevant to Norwegian and European organizations. Through his role as a professor at BI Norwegian Business School and as academic director of the program, he helped participants place the presentations within a broader context—one in which technology, innovation, business development, and people had to be understood together.

In San Francisco, participants met entrepreneurs, researchers, technology leaders, and investors from some of the world’s most innovative environments. Furseth’s strength was his ability to connect these experiences with practical challenges and opportunities facing Norwegian organizations. He helped translate Silicon Valley’s ideas and ways of working into a

Nordic context where collaboration, trust, and long-term value creation play a central role.

Throughout the seminar series, he served as an important bridge between research, business, and technology. For many participants, he therefore became more than an academic leader—he was also a mentor who inspired them to think differently about innovation, digitalization, and commercialization.

Learn more about Peder Inge Furseth here

From Studies and Seminars to Today’s Knowledge Hub

The studies, seminars, and academic trips documented on this page form part of the knowledge base behind The Invisible Capital. Topics such as customers, technology, innovation, digitalization, and value creation have been part of this journey for several decades — while these fields have continued to evolve.

At The Invisible Capital, we continue exploring these questions through dedicated knowledge series. Here, earlier theory, research, and experience are connected with newer knowledge, emerging technologies, and today’s challenges facing people and organizations.

Innovation

Innovation is not just about new ideas. Value is created when knowledge, technology, and ideas are developed into products, services, processes, organizational forms, and business models that are actually put into use. The series on innovation traces the field from Schumpeter to modern innovation research and explores incremental, radical, disruptive, open, and user-driven innovation.

→ Explore the Innovation series

The Customer

The customer is not simply the recipient of what an organization produces. In a competitive market, the customer is a decisive factor in whether an organization actually succeeds in creating value. The series on the customer explores customer orientation, customer insight, customer experience, satisfaction, loyalty, trust, and the human interactions that shape the customer relationship.

→ Explore the Customer series

Value Creation

What does it really mean to create value — and who creates it? The Value Creation series moves from economic theory and influential thinkers to a broader understanding of how people, knowledge and skills, institutions, organizations, and the public sector contribute to value creation.

→ Explore the Value Creation series

Digitalization

Digitalization has evolved from individual technologies into a fundamental part of how organizations operate and create value. The Digitalization from A to Z series traces this evolution through the internet, the web, e-commerce, search, UX, social media, mobile, omnichannel, cloud, data, platforms, and digital transformation — leading up to today’s AI-first era.

→ Explore the Digitalization from A to Z series

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence represents the next chapter in the digital evolution. In our dedicated AI knowledge hub, we explore how artificial intelligence works, how AI finds and uses information, how it evaluates sources and websites, and what this development could mean for people, organizations, and value creation.

→ Explore the articles on Artificial Intelligence

Outside In

Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research explain how companies can create a competitive advantage through customer experience and customer centricity. The book shows how organizations must be built around customers’ needs, expectations, and experiences to succeed in a digital and increasingly competitive economy.