Applying design thinking to customer strategy development

Customer Experience is having its moment. Over 80% of businesses expect to compete predominantly on CX in 2019. However, businesses are having to catch up. Over the last 10 years organisations like Amazon, Nike and Apple have taken and maintained the lead, combining their business and customer strategy to truly live customer centricity in not only the products they create but the experiences they deliver. These businesses are design led in everything they do, from product development to customer experience design and customer strategy development and delivery. By applying design thinking principles, processes and tools beyond product innovation and into customer strategy development, businesses can shape and deliver strategies that meet the new customer’s needs and demands.

What is customer strategy? And what is it not?

Customer strategy fundamentally addresses the needs of a customer.

• It shapes the future experiences a business aspires to deliver to its customers
• It learns exactly who the audience is; their needs, known and unknown, and their behaviours
• It uncovers insights into how a business can deliver against these, identifying the touch points and interactions that make a difference to a customer’s perception of that brand

It differs from business strategy in this sense, by shifting the focus from business value, capability and technology, providing a complementary customer engagement aspect to any holistic strategy. In order to overcome challenges faced in customer engagement today, businesses need to approach customer strategy development with an innovative and customer-oriented mindset, utilising tools and frameworks that lend themselves to innovation.

What are the challenges being faced by CXOs and CMOs today?

A shift in the impact technology has on everyday life has led to complex challenges for businesses, especially in identifying how to engage with their customers. The need for a clear customer focused strategy has grown; customers demand personalised, relevant and convenient experiences, not only in the products and services they use, but in their interactions with brands and businesses across every customer lifecycle touchpoint. Businesses need to know how to deliver against these expectations, reaching their customers when, where and how they choose.

Businesses that don’t listen to their customers, create feedback channels and use customer data effectively, lose relevance amongst their audience, create frustration and ultimately deliver poor customer experience. It would seem obvious to dedicate attention to solving this issue, however, only 12% of companies across the globe identify as being ‘mature’ when it comes to their customer experience capability, identifying as having a clear customer strategy, embedding customer insights into everything they do. Further, 80% of executives believe they understand consumers’ emotions, but only 15% of consumers agree.

Alongside the need for innovation in products and services, customer centric strategies are an essential piece of any transformation. Customer experience development impacts cross divisional business areas and customer strategies need to be developed to account for this. Businesses must become customer obsessed, ensuring the end customer is the focus point across each business division. Design thinking is a framework that enables this, designing products, services and experience with and for real users. By applying this mindset into customer strategy development and the tools that deliver the strategy, businesses can understand and therefore respond better to the customer demands of today.

“It’s not ‘us versus them’ or even ‘us on behalf of them.’ For a design thinker it has to be ‘us with them’” – Tim Brown, Founder of IDEO

It’s not a new mindset, framework or process, but it certainly isn’t an old or dying one. Fundamentally, it puts people’s needs at the core. It can be applied to multidisciplinary aspects of businesses, from product innovation teams to CMOs and CXOs through to CFOs. It is a customer-oriented approach that can be applied across transformation strategies, including but not exclusively to customer strategy.

50% of design-led companies report an uplift in loyalty amongst customers as an impact of developing design practices whilst 46% of companies that do not prioritise design in digital customer strategy development reported on par or weaker DCX than competitors.

By applying design thinking as a strategic tool to customer strategy, we can help shape leading customer strategies that continually evolve around the user’s needs, behaviours and desires and continually help our clients win.

At Capgemini Invent we have a set of tools and frameworks that can help our clients win in this space. The tools lend themselves to design thinking led application, helping shape truly customer centric experiences.

Segmentation

Our clients know the importance of building a picture of who their customers are and engaging with them through effective segmentation. Businesses can apply design thinking tools when adopting segmentation frameworks through understanding, defining and prototyping, testing and learning. Through empathising with real users, colleagues and multi-disciplinary business areas, segmentation strategies and models can be built encompassing insights and inputs from a more horizontal landscape than before. By prototyping and testing throughout the development process and beyond, customer insights and data can be fed into the development and delivery of the segmentation strategy. This ensures the desired experience is delivered and received by customers, enabling businesses to iterate and continually innovate their approach to segmentation.

Customer journey mapping

Journey mapping is the accelerator to understanding and unlocking great customer experiences. It is essential to understand how businesses can reach their audiences in ways that will succeed.
The development and design of customer journey maps lean on design thinking tools throughout the Design and Define phase; empathising, listening and ideating. Customer journey mapping impacts cross divisional sectors; by building and shaping them through interactions across the spectrum of those involved and bridging the gap between customers and the business, experiences that work can be created and delivered.

So, what does this mean for customer strategy?

We are continuing to develop frameworks and tools that help our businesses shape leading customer strategies. By applying them to businesses with design thinking techniques, processes and mindsets, we can help our businesses become truly customer-centric and win within their sectors.

Author

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Emily Roberts

Emily joined Capgemini in October 2018 from a design thinking and product and service design background. She has a passion for disruptive technology and innovation and a natural interest in human behaviours, having studied Psychology. She is currently working at a leading bank.