This is how you can innovate by design thinking and deliver best customer experience

Changing business landscape

The business landscape has changed considerably in the last few years. From being product-centric or services-centric, companies are now focusing on becoming customer centric. Companies are realising the need to follow an outward in approach rather than an inward-out approach to driving business profitability and achieving competitive edge. We can see this shift in mind-set across industry verticals.

Application of design thinking to addressing customer needs is gaining significance

Organisations with a customer-centric mindset are focused on being more relevant to the customers and finding new ways of addressing their needs better. In this context, the concept of design thinking has been gaining significance of late. A design mindset is a solution centric mindset aimed at finding desirable solutions for customers. It takes into account logic, imagination, intuition and systemic reasoning to create outcomes that benefit the customers. Empathising with the customer is a key principle of design thinking, which focuses on brainstorming with the customer to understand what they think, feel, about a particular product or service and then bring about innovations that are needed to deliver great experiences.

Typically as a process an empathy map is created, followed by an exercise with the customer to identify focus areas and need gaps, which can then be addressed. Winning companies, such as Apple, Virgin, Toyota and others, innovate continuously because of their culture of design thinking - integrating the needs of people, the possibilities of technology and the requirements for business success. More recently, IBM has announced investment of more than $100 million to turn their company into a design-centric company from an engineering focused company. The focus is on expanding their UX consultation practice, which serves clients in the realm of experience design and engagement.

Collaboration is key to design thinking

Collaborating with the customer to brainstorm on need areas is a key element of design thinking. However in today’s global environment where customers are spread across multiple locations and geographies, collaborating with traditional IT infrastructure doesn’t help in bringing alive the concept of design thinking. One needs a virtual war room kind of environment, which can bring together content, visual and data from across multiple locations and help the teams derive greater insights from it. In short from a normal collaborative environment one needs to move to a virtual workplace, which will not just be about collaboration but about collaborating to derive greater insights and deliver greater results.

Leading enterprises have long understood the importance of a customer experience center to provide customers with a visually impressive, immersive demonstration of their current and future offerings. However the role of these centres can evolve to a great extent to represent a new model of customer engagement, which is what design thinking is about.

Prysm’s visual workplace solution can help a great deal in customising customer’s experience by creating tailored, individualised, workspaces, where customers can share, join and collaborate from any location or device.

The era of internet and next gen technologies has opened up several possibilities for companies to develop easy exchange with customers that can in turn help them in improvising on their product or service or developing new ones. With technology enhancement, we will see more number of companies adopting the concept of design thinking to deliver better customer experience and co -innovate with customers. What will be needed is an open mind-set amongst IT decision makers to make investments in those technologies that will deliver benefits in the long run!

(Image Credits: Thinkstock)

(About the Author: This article has been contributed by Mr. Vardha Raju- “Vice President and Country Head, Prysm India”)