The red chair, customer centricity in Singapore

Customer centricity is alive and well in AIA offices across the globe. One initiative that’s proving to be quite successful at AIA Singapore has been the introduction of the ‘red chair’.

Inspired by the practices of Jeff Bezos and the Amazon team, AIA Singapore have placed one empty, red chair in each of their 28 meeting rooms. Its purpose? To represent AIA customers.

The chair is intentionally left unfilled to represent the presence and importance of the customer in all scenarios. By keeping the customer front of mind in meeting rooms, they stay top of mind as you make business decisions, solve problems, and plan for the future.

This practice isn’t new. Amazon have been doing this for a number of years. Practices like the empty chair continue to help the organisation solidify its position in the market and continue to be one of the most customer-centric businesses on earth. And despite being in an entirely different industry, it’s an exercise we can all learn from and implement easily into our day-to-day.

In February 2018 our Singapore team put this into practice. The goal was to:

Generate awareness of our customers during meetings so everyone is conscious about how decisions impact our customers.
Continue having focused discussions with customer-centric outcomes.

Here’s a few things AIA Singapore staff had to say about the red chair:

“The red chair reminds me of the customer and how I should at every juncture put customers at the forefront of what I do.”

“The red chair tells me that customers are important to my everyday work.”

“The red chair sets a reminder that I should always think of the customer first.”

Mr How Chee Koon, Head of Consumer Marketing at AIA Singapore says the red chair is “a meaningful initiative which highlights the ‘presence’ of AIA customers who are critical to our everyday business.”

“It reinforces how every single discussion, measure or decision we make, has an impact on the customer.”

“Having the red chair in every meeting room reminds us to start our discussions from the view of the customer, and constantly ask ourselves ‘what does this mean for customers’ and how we can value add to meet their needs. The more we put customers at the heart of everything we do, the clearer the objectives become and the easier it is for us to determine the right thing we should do which helps to provide a clear direction when we face tough business situations,” he says.

Stephanie Phillips, Chief Group Insurance Officer said "This is a great way to remind us about what's important every day. Here in Australia we are looking to adapt this for our environment, whether that's a red chair or something else, which will ensure that we keep the customer at the centre of everything we do.

In Australia we keep our customers front of mind with Human Centred Design (HCD) at the forefront of the design and development of our product, services, and processes. Read more about out HCD approach here.

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The red chair: customer centricity in Singapore

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The red chair: customer centricity in Singapore