The Digital Customer Experience And The Design Paradigm

Customer Experience (CX) has been a hot topic in marketing discourse for many years and, more importantly, a key enabler for transforming customer paths and the company's internal processes. Mainly because customer service is everything, and if the customer experience isn't a part of your marketing strategy, you're doing it wrong.

That's harsh but true.

Adapting customer experience in your marketing strategy is crucial advice, even corroborated in PwC's 2018 report on building a solid and loyal customer base. Companies that focus on this aspect get as much attention as possible. An excellent digital customer experience makes global companies thrive beyond expectations and create history.

Among all customers, 73% point to experience playing a crucial role in their purchasing decisions, right after the price and product quality. Now the question is how to build a winning CX.

You don’t. You design it. When someone designs a customer experience, they discover a solution to create an ideal CX rather than engineering a solution. By design, these experiences augment personalised content consumption and experiences at every touchpoint.

It leads us to the design thinking approach. To develop an excellent digital customer experience, focusing on context and a design thinking mindset is essential. According to a study by Adobe, 78% of companies prioritising design have an explicit strategy for conceiving new digital CX ideas.

However, the design-oriented design CX is only successful if done right.

That’s where Growth Jockey makes waves. At Growth Jockey, we help businesses understand their audience from level zero. Hence, build a robust strategy for customer-focused growth using a design paradigm.

Read ahead to learn about the design thinking approach and how it can benefit your business in unprecedented ways.

What is Design Thinking?

“Design thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” - Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

Businesses often confuse design thinking with design. However, design thinking is more than just integrating awe-inspiring graphics into a product and making it look appealing. But it’s more than that. You can identify it as both an ideology and a process of solving tricky problems in a user-centric way to guarantee excellent customer experience and better results.

In short, it’s about using both the left brain (logic) and the right brain (creativity) to find connections to identify, ideate, and find innovative solutions to a problem.

Notably, almost half of companies that don’t ingrain design in their design CX strategy reported that CX is on par or weaker than competitors. It makes a clear case of this approach, doesn’t it?

Now, let’s look at the five fundamental stages of design thinking.

The Five Essential Stages of Design Thinking

Design thinking is a repetitive and non-linear process that includes five crucial phases to create the best customer experience. Using this process with the right mindset can set you up for exceptional product development from a consumer problem-solving outlook.

Wondering what these phases are? Let’s find out.

1. Empathising—Research Your Customer’s Requirements the Right Way

For most businesses, the innovation part always stems from a technological standpoint. However, keeping the consumer’s perspective at the front is imperative with the design thinking approach.

Understanding and resolving core pain points will lead to a consumer-oriented product that amplifies their experience. When you look at customers’ needs, you should gain an empathetic perspective of the problem you desire to solve, typically through researching customers.

In terms of design thinking, empathy is crucial to a human-centred design process. Why? Because it allows businesses to set aside their hypotheses and beliefs and tap into real insight into customers and their needs. You can use empathy mapping to gain deeper customer insights. Hubspot research]shows that laying out customer journey maps improves marketing ROIs by about 24% and shortens sales cycles by 16%.

2. Defining—Announce Your Customer’s Needs and Pain Points

Now that you have researched the customer’s requirements, it’s time to gather the critical information amassed during the “Empathising Phase.”

Analyse your observations and synthesise them to define the core pain points of the customer that you need to solve with your solution. Consider these definitions as your problem statements for the later phases. You can create personas for these problems to help keep your efforts human-oriented.

As a result, it makes it easy to decide where to direct your focus and effort, setting clear objectives for incredible design CX.

3. Ideate—Challenge Deductions and Identify Unique Solutions

You have identified and defined the pain points to reach this phase, and now your team is ready to generate ideas. The solid knowledge acquired from earlier phases allows you to think outside the box and develop different perspectives to examine the problem. Further, 69% of design-led firms found that the innovation process is more efficient with design thinking.

Consequently, you can identify creative solutions to the problem statement.

Coming up with as many ideas to solve the problem should be the end goal of this phase. Contrary to popular belief, you must actively focus on the quantity rather than the quality of ideas. Brainstorming and other creative methods are helpful here to record ideas for future consideration at the subsequent stages.

4. Prototype—Start Developing Exemplary Solutions

As the name suggests, it is an experimental phase that aims to identify the best possible solution for each problem detected in the past phases. Only finding problems and generating ideas doesn’t serve the real issues.

Secondly, it’s not wise to develop full-blown solutions after generating ideas.

Businesses must adopt an Agile approach to save time and resources. Hence, intelligent businesses create prototypes that allow them to test, experiment and improve frequently and faster. You can develop inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product or features that can improve your product.

The founder of Growth Jockey, Mr. Ashutosh Kumar, gained years of expertise working as CXO for OYO India, Reliance Jio and Airtel. He has helped businesses generate creative solutions and develop practical prototypes, keeping customer experience at the core.

Most companies don’t understand the intricacies of the design paradigm and fail in the process. Partnering with us is a sure-fire way to success.

5. Test—Give Your Solutions a Go

End users rigorously test the prototypes at this stage.

Make the polished prototypes accessible to a broader user group. You can then collect their feedback and fetch vital information required to reconsider earlier stages in the process. Here, they don’t experience the product in controlled and predictable conditions. Therefore, testing is one of the essential steps of the design thinking process.

Although this is the last phase, design thinking is repetitious, as we already mentioned.

Businesses often utilise the outcomes from this stage to redefine the problems further and develop better solutions. They can return to previous stages to make changes, alterations and improvements. Once satisfied with the final products, they can further launch the developed solution.

The Road Ahead

Customer expectations have changed drastically in the current digital world scenario, and how enterprises approach CX design must follow suit. With this design paradigm shift, business leaders must adopt an aggressive strategy to create a holistic plan and align CX at its centre. They should focus on CX outcomes that impact the brand, not just the end goal.

The design thinking framework helps businesses orient their customers’ genuine requirements. Essentially, it can help them launch their solutions to the market twice as quickly, enable more efficient teamwork, and improve return on investment.

Growth Jockey is precisely known for its design thinking approach. Here, we understand your business and help them flourish across all industry verticals. Whether small or big, any company requiring assistance to improve its digital customer experience and streamline its marketing strategy and product can connect with the team.

At Growth Jockey, we are committed to delivering tailored solutions that effectively address the critical challenges faced by our clients across various industries, ultimately enhancing the user experience. Regardless of your company's size, whether it's a small-scale enterprise or a large corporation, you can now leverage advanced technologies to optimize your user experience. Take a proactive step towards unlocking the next level of growth for your brand by reaching out to us today!