What is design thinking?
Design thinking is a management and innovation method developed in the 1980s at Stanford University in the United States by researcher Rolf Faste. This method acts wonderfully as the "glue and cement" between the expertise of the organization insofar as it advocates the involvement of the right players in the company in order to co-create solutions and experiences that work for the customer and, even better, contribute to their experience.
Innovating and creating value for the customer will not happen if everyone is working in silos or accumulating data in a disparate way. One of the current trends proposes that the customer experience will be driven less and less by the marketing department, but more by all departments of a company. It is this synergy that will create the strategic value of a new product or service.
"Collaborating on CX efforts improves the quality of CX experiences by encouraging better cross-functional CX execution" - Gartner Customer Experience Management Survey
The strength of design thinking: empathy
The general idea behind design thinking is to create innovation solutions centered on the needs of the customer. We use the term customer in a broad sense: it can be the one who pays, the one who distributes, the user and the employee. To innovate, we must also seek to collect qualitative data focused on customer behavior, attitudes and pitfalls.
It has become vital to combine qualitative data with quantitative data: we need access to customers to better understand what they want to achieve from a functional point of view, but also from an emotional point of view (how they seek to feel). We are in a true era of experience. Researcher Kann Turlani was the first to put forward this proposition: in order to create the best solutions, it is imperative to develop one's level of empathy and understanding of the customer, beyond the simple product one wishes to offer. The goal is to try to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and understand what he or she is going through with more clarity. The organization must absolutely stop assuming that it knows its customer. This is an important paradigm to make in order to imagine as accurately as possible how our products or services will improve the quality of life of the customer.
Customer expectations continue to evolve
As mentioned earlier, the company is now competing with the best in customer experience. In addition, a study by Accenture (in the U.S.) found that the use of technology by customers has increased by 80% since the beginning of the pandemic. According to the study, this increase will not diminish over the next few years. As a result, customers continue to have rising expectations and less and less patience for what an organization "should" know or offer: greeting you by name when you enter a store, automatically remembering your membership number when you check out, offering you the ability to easily pay for a product online, etc. These days, the customer knows that there is certainly technology that would enhance their experience and keep an eye out for the enablers that are available to them. The good news is that the same Accenture study mentions that 77% of business leaders surveyed in the U.S. want to fundamentally rethink the way their brand interacts with the customer. In this movement, the objective of design thinking remains the same: to develop empathetic solutions, inspired by new technologies, and to have the humility not to pretend to know what the customer wants, without having first started a research process.
Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen developed the "Jobs to be done" theory (in his book "Competing Against Luck"). In a few words, this theory states that it is not the product or service itself that interests the customer, but rather what it can help him or her accomplish. This is in addition to the keys to design thinking: understanding the "why" of consumers before offering them any product or service. Of course, you can't always try to transform people's lives, but at the very least, you may be able to improve their experience as much as possible.
Design thinking is a process that should involve as much expertise as possible within an organization. That said, keep in mind a few important elements: the power of empathy in creating value, the collaboration of multidisciplinary teams to avoid losing good ideas due to siloed work, the importance of iteration since implementing good processes can take a lot of time and effort and, finally, the willingness to learn and exceed customer expectations. All of this should be part of the core values of a successful transformation process. On that note, dear readers, I wish you the taste of daring to experiment with design thinking... you might be surprised at the results!
To go further :
Design Thinking : Implementing practices to be customer oriented
