Are you a Design Thinking fan ? (maybe stronger than a fan you are a Design Thinking evangelist) We are also and have taken Design Thinking processes and concepts and applied them to Customer Experience Strategy & Design, or was it we took Customer Experience Strategy and Design and applied it to Design Thinking.
Anyhow ! the result is CustomerThinking .. here’s how to do it yourself (or contact us for help at service@customerresults.com).
Starting with the Design Thinking process as defined by Stanford University’s D School. We apply it to marketing, sales and service challenges and opportunities as follows (using Stanford’s definitions as a starting point)
The underlined components are our additions, the strikethroughs are Stanford words we have removed or replaced.
1. The Design Customer Thinking process first defines the problem from the perspective of a targeted Customer Segment and then implements the solutions, always with the needs of the user Customer Demographic (or Partner or Employee Segment) at the core of concept development. This process focuses on need finding, understanding, creating, thinking, and doing. At the core of this process is a bias towards action and creation: by creating and testing something, you can continue to learn and improve upon your initial ideas. This is based on four steps:
· EMPATHIZE: Work to fully understand the experience, needs and persona that defines the digital first but not digital only “who” (customer, partner or employee) of theuser for whom you are designing. Do this through observation, interaction, and immersing yourself in their experiences.
· DEFINE: Process and synthesize the findings from your empathy work in order to form a user customer point of view that you will address with your design. Specifically focus on the journey of the particular customer segment, the moments of delight, the pain points and the process, organizational and technology “how’s” that enable the customer experience.
· IDEATE: Explore a wide variety of possible solutions through generating a large quantity of diverse possible solutions, allowing you to step beyond the obvious and explore a range of ideas.
· PROTOTYPE: Transform your ideas into a physical form so that you can experience and interact with them and, in the process, learn and develop more empathy. Focus on “paper prototypes and mock-ups” that allow concepts to be evaluated. Coded proof of concepts can be useful and high powered digital experience platforms that enable A/B Testing models and incremental analytics can be very powerful.
· TEST: Try out high-resolution products and use observations and feedback (including form customer centric digital analytics) to refine prototypes, learn more about the user, and refine your original point of view.
· Action – The one thing we always felt was missing from Stanford’s process was Action. Without a clear target of action (or at least Action Plans) Design Thinking and Customer Thinking can become an ivory tower exercise disconnected from real world outcomes.
Come join the Customer Thinking revolution. Make your next Customer Experience Strategy session or your next Design Thinking session a CustomerThinking sessions
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