Garrett Smith Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Illinois, Us

- Leading cross-functional, end-to-end CX strategy initiatives for digitally focused clients.- Driving client discovery to align business goals with customer needs. - Designing and conducting qualitative research to uncover actionable insights. - Facilitating client-facing co-creation workshops to identify future-state opportunities. - Delivering journey maps, personas, future-state CX storyboards, and roadmaps that identify short-term improvements while guiding long-term CX investments.

HARQ is a customer-focused research & strategy partner that’s here to help cross-functional teams find focus, craft inspiring customer stories, and envision seamless customer experiences.

Chicago, Il, Us

- Successfully implemented a design sprint process that enables BCBS companies to rapidly co-design, prototype, iterate and test digital & physical solutions with customers over the course of a 7 day “Design Sprint Relay.”- Evangelized the design program to a breadth of audiences including c-suite leadership, operations and customer service management through in-person & online presentations.- Translated the design program prototypes and insights for application to the entire BCBS network, which resulted in validating and refocusing ongoing product development efforts across the system.- Acted as a CX & design subject matter expert through ongoing consultation sessions to aid in developing customer-centric capabilities, defining CX personnel requirements and coaching to refine storytelling skills.- Facilitated scoping workshops for internal partners that resulted in focused project goals, team alignment and clear next steps.- Rewarded the BCBSA Presidents Award as recognition for excellent performance.

Chicago, Il, Us

- Successfully co-developed and launched the Blue Cross Blue Shield Signature Experience; a system wide customer experience vision that aligned the CX strategies of 36 BCBS companies, which impacts the customer experience of over 100 million people.- Designed and launched a toolkit that BCBS companies have used to translate CX strategy into digital, communication and service solutions.- Designed a CX project pitch template for the BCBS CX community that has enabled project teams to create proposals that connect customer problems to business needs.- Collaborated with research partners to plan and execute in-home & online customer research interviews, which led to designing customer journey frameworks used to identify opportunities for improvement within the BCBS customer experience.- Led 5 multi-day workshops to immerse over 200 BCBS stakeholders in customer healthcare journeys to identify, prioritize and align on key problems to solve.- Delivered conference presentations across the BCBS network about implementing customer experience strategy and rapid product development.- Facilitated and designed multiple BCBS CX community scoping sessions to identify opportunities for community enrichment and consulting offerings.

Racine, Wi, Us

- Led a cross-disciplinary product development team for the Ziploc brand to identify customer insights and product development opportunities, which led to a global Ziploc printing program.- Partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and SC Johnson’s Base of the Pyramid team to design a mosquito repellent product in the ongoing effort to eradicate malaria from the world, which resulted in providing a breadth of product concepts that were used to evaluate market fit and business feasibility.- Led an initiative to refresh the Ziploc visual brand language and restructure the brand architecture based upon global quantitative research, which resulted in marketing assets that communicated expanding the possibilities of how to use the Ziploc product portfolio beyond food. - Collaborated with research and ad agency partners to identify insights about customers bringing food on-the-go, which resulted in designing a customer experience journey that was used to create interactive web based tools that helped customers clearly see the benefits of “being a lunch bringer.”- Collaborated with Ziploc marketers and ad agency partners to redefine the Ziploc brand purpose, resulting in long-term strategies for how to represent Ziploc in media and marketing assets.- Partnered with Ziploc marketing to define a Space Bags claims strategy based upon quantitative usage research, which drove redesigning packaging to reflect prioritized claims on shelf.- Led a large scale Ziploc design innovation project to, which led to relaunching a previously defunct product that was re-communicated using the identified insights.

Lincolnshire, Il, Us

- Designed, developed and launched over 30 products in 3.5 years across multiple brands as well as working directly with retailers such as: Williams Sonoma, Crate & Barrel and Sur La Table.- Collaborated directly with Chinese manufacturing partners to gauge product feasibility, co-create product specifications and oversee tooling & production development.- Implemented customer-centric research methods under extremely tight budget constraints, resulting in designing 3 product platforms based upon creating solutions that worked together across the customer cooking/baking experience.- Created an internal blog to share customer research and housewares trends across the design, marketing and engineering departments.- Led weekly brainstorming sessions that incorporated marketing, engineering, sales, operations and customer service, which helped to develop cross-disciplinary “buy-in” across the organization for new product development.

Bfa, Industrial Design

Studio Arts

Studio Arts