Design Thinking to create memorable experiences!

Why is a customer-centric approach important?

When you think about it, services are all around us: in our relationships with our colleagues, our internal or external partners, and with our customers. We are constantly providing or receiving service. Today's customer experience challenge is to adapt to new customer and employee needs.

More and more organizations are adopting a strategy that puts the customer at the heart of their culture. This allows for the reimagining and improvement of digital services or products, as well as the processes, activities and systems they require.

We are in an era where innovation is at the heart of competitiveness and loyalty issues: we must do things differently, faster and better than the competition.

In the past, people considered services to be one-time interactions (e.g., greeting a customer when they arrived at the store, or contacting customer service). Times have changed. Today, it's all of the customer's contact points that contribute to their experience. This can be before, during or after the purchase of the service. The customer journey includes human interactions, the emotions experienced, the use of digital channels, physical spaces and processes that support the experience.

Identify and emphasize moments of truth

More than ever, we need to be able to count on the commitment and curiosity of multidisciplinary teams to adapt services in a turbulent context. However, no company can review every moment of a service overnight. For this reason, an exercise to identify the moments of truth is imperative. By moments of truth we mean the critical moments of the journey or those that influence the customer's perception of your brand.

Design Thinking and Service Design are approaches that place people at the heart of services. They allow you to capture these moments through several activities: by talking to employees directly in contact with customers, by conducting field observations, by conducting ethnographic interviews with customers or by being on the lookout for inspiring ways of doing things in other companies. This data will help identify opportunities.

Developing the ability of teams to solve complex problems and co-create new services is an important step. This involves coaching to empower them to constantly listen to people and to first experiment on a small scale with new solutions that reflect your organization.

What is the impact promise of Design Thinking?

In 2021, the University of Georgia published the results of research[1] conducted on the promise of impact of Design Thinking. These results put forward five categories of significant impacts:

1. Increased adoption and implementation of solutions.
2. Individual benefits: feeling of psychological security, increased desire to experiment with new solutions.
3. Improvement in the quality of solutions.
4. Increased confidence.
5. The ability to create new talent networks.

To generate such impacts, it is necessary, among other things, to value the adoption of new mindsets such as empathy, multidisciplinary teamwork, diversity and creativity, to name a few. We also need to make this a daily habit. It is by adopting a new mindset towards everyday problems or opportunities that you will see changes in your teams' conversations. This will inevitably create changes in the results of those conversations.

Adopting the right mindset will help change the game for your organization.

How to make your team aware of the Design Thinking approach?

Innovation is known to be a team sport and a speed sport. It requires real training! There is no point in running, you have to start on time. How can you stimulate the desire to learn Design Thinking within your team?

Putting your team members in the position of participants in an immersive Design Thinking workshop will allow them to live it and grasp all its power.

How about starting with an issue that motivates your team members?

It's an excellent lever to develop future ambassadors of a customer-centric culture.

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