A change in perspective can help businesses to implement new ideas and successfully complete ongoing processes. Design thinking is a customer-centric approach that can help in this endeavor.
By adopting an approach to digital innovation that is used by the world’s most successful consumer-facing companies, CMOs can turn customer satisfaction into a profit center.
Designers solve problems for people. So what is design thinking? It is a methodology and a framework that helps people to use creativity to solve other people's problems regardless as to whether the problems are small or large.
Service design includes all the intangible aspects of how an organization seeks to build a relationship over time with its customers. And one goal of prototyping these service design experiences is to bring tangibility to these intangible experiences. Prototyping is such a powerful tool because you're organizing your service around the needs of the end consumer.
How do you encourage new customers to open bank accounts? In 2004, Bank of America used the Design Thinking methodology to look at the problem from a human centered perspective when they assigned design agency IDEO to boost their enrollment numbers: a problem that at the time, lacked any user perspective on why it was so hard for customers to save.
As CEO, Nooyi visits a market every week to see what PepsiCo looks like on the shelves. She always ask herself—not as a CEO but as a mom—“What products really speak to me?” The shelves just seem more and more cluttered, so she thought they had to rethink their innovation process and design experiences for PepsiCo's consumers—from conception to what’s on the shelf.
This case concerns one of the earliest attempts by design thinkers at designing a large, complex system. It shows that design approaches in the public sector can look back at a long history. And it reveals how design thinking within the organization must include members of the whole organization in the design process.
What is sold as Design Thinking often has little to do with the actual methodologies. Here’s what to look out for, to do it right.