Design Thinking For Your Business
“You can’t see the picture if your in the frame”
Les Brown
Most Global leading brands like IBM, Google, Apple and GE have adopted design thinking as a means to understand users, existing and prospective customers. Leading Universities like Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Pace University are teaching in their course work.
Design thinking is an innovative complex problem-solving approach that prioritizes empathy while considering the human element in the equation. The value and benefits a solution offers your audience should be outlined effectively. This iterative multidimensional process removes assumptions and places an emphasis on perception and experiences. When done effectively it influences outcomes and reduces inefficiencies in your business.
6 Phases of Design Thinking:
Ask questions, gather data, and observe. Identify and connect with the needs of your audience and rapidly adapt to changes in consumer sentiment. Encourage loyalty. Create a customer empathy map outlining obstacles, frustrations, concerns, and what the customer wants their outcome to be.
How stakeholders currently view your business. Put yourself in their position and think about their needs, wants, wishes and goals if they become a customer.
Brainstorm and “think outside the box.” Prioritize the importance and how easily your message can be delivered and conveyed. Criticize and challenge the status quo. Create a patient experience map. Test, analyze, and gather patient feedback while refining through trial and error. Reestablish why your services are needed and what makes you different. Challenge your existing methods and processes.
Rapidly create and deploy conceptual solutions and where necessary consult your legal team. Refine and market to your audience.
Confirm your assumptions to ensure that the hypotheses are validated or proven. There are many ways in which we can validate our assumptions including various forms of testing and measuring our key performance indicators. Turn insights into action.
Decide, validate, and review that your strategy is working. Notice if your assumptions are correct or if you should pivot. Evaluate changes and notice trends while evaluating data collected. Continuously monitor and refine quarterly. In this phase, you must be agile and quick to adapt.
Corunit Managing Director, Ray Correa is a Board Member of both Pace University Lubin School of Business, and Bellevue College Tombolo Institute Design Thinking programs. We have been successfully helping our clients employ these methodologies.
Knowing your ideal customer is important
Define the type of customers or if you are a physician patients you are solving a problem for. Put yourself in your customer's position for some perspective. Did you consider their needs, challenges, and behaviors? Don't make that mistake. Your more successful competitors will capitalize on it. You business depends on it to have a pulse!
Define your customer's needs and what a successful transaction looks like. Make sure they are all addressed. Every Transaction should be mutually beneficial.
How To Market To Your Customer demographics
Take into account the customer's mindset, decision-making process, and how you think your business resonates in their minds. Ask questions, use surveys, and other customer feedback initiatives to get answers and solve common challenges to win more business.
Empower customers and employees to help you overcome obstacles all while forming emotional anchors from previous customer experiences searching for their most common characteristics and perceptions.
How to Build Customer Personas- What type of customers do you want to attract?
Consider various age demographics and sub-characterization whether they be male or female, active or military veterans, athletes, cash or insurance payers (if you are a doctor), or level of interest in your product or service to name a few.
Walk through the customer journey of each persona created and develop new paths while addressing additional or new needs and challenges. Try walking in their shoes for a minute to discover "pain points." Afterward, address them diligently.
Marketing to Create A Great Customer Experience Map before, during, and after a prospective customer becomes a paid customer.
How are you communicating with your audience and what are they saying as a result?
Start with the first interaction or impression between you and the customer. Detail step-by-step actions taken between both your company and the customer outlining the first interaction to payments received, thanking them, and offering additional opportunities when possible. Don't forget to ask for feedback. Go through their journey as if you are them. Create the itinerary for the destination they are headed to.
How To Create Brand Perception and the Drivers to Consider?
Use Anchors that drive interest and adoption. They may be either behavioral, emotional, sensorial, or intellectual. Hitting the “right buttons” can dictate prospective customers to take action. Make sure to consider how you address the customer’s needs, wants, wishes and goals.
Properly defining objectives will improve the quality of customer care and financial results.
Create emotional anchors to generate stimulus that influences the behaviors and decisions of your targeted audience. Start analyzing various perspectives of your audience and consider the most common reasons why you think people choose to do business with you. Build on them.
It’s looking at the situation through the eyes of another person or group.
Viewing through the eyes of the alchemist.
Its the perspective of feelings, interpersonal functioning, and emotional interactions with others.
