Celia knocked on Kim’s door. “I’d like to use the ‘customer pain point’ approach for our operational improvement efforts,” she said. As the VP of operations, Celia had to sort through competing opportunities with no clear data that would help her prioritize. More often than not, this meant funding the squeakiest wheel. She thought customer data might be the key to help her prioritize her team’s efforts.
“But once we identify the pain points,” Celia continued, “how do we turn them into solutions … the right solutions?” She found that even when they had identified a pain point, their solutions would miss the mark. For example, one of the pain points identified last year was the need for faster customer service. The team worked hard to create an online do-it-yourself approach that allowed customers to get help 24×7. But this website proved only faster for those who knew how to navigate it. Since their customers needed the service only sporadically, they did not develop the expertise needed to really use it. The result – frustrated customers and even more calls to the call center. It seemed they only exasperated the situation.
Kim was the innovation catalyst in the organization, leading their strategic investment portfolio for scaling their business. “I have been reading about Design Thinking,” she said, “It is a method for designing solutions based on customer empathy. It starts with observations of our customers in their own environment and explores how they are feeling at each step in their journey. Excitement? Dread? Those highs and lows can tune us into how we can contribute to their success.”
“Yikes – feelings?” Celia replied. “My team will find this too touchy-feely. Can’t we just hire someone to do this for us?”
The key to making Design Thinking work is to collectively develop empathy for our customers.
“We need to walk a mile in their shoes,” said Kim. Even though the team was made up of analytical thinkers, she knew from past experience that they were more comfortable talking about anecdotal evidence than listening to actual customers. The stories they told led to opinion-based rather than fact-based decisions about what solutions to develop.
As Celia left her office, Kim thought more about how to develop a culture of innovation, where employees were designing solutions to her customer’s hardest problems. She knew they would need the diverse perspectives of everyone on the team … and the team needed to be cross functional. Effective design relied on collaboration and customer empathy. Celia’s do-it-yourself service approach had failed partly because the team didn’t recognize that their customers would be stressed and rushed when they reached out for help. A more diagnostic tool might have worked better but the customer service department by themselves would not have designed this solution; product managers and engineers would have brought the needed perspective.
Kim felt this was only the tip of the iceberg. What else was needed to bring design thinking and a culture of customer problem solving into their organization?
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