Design Thinking: An Empathic Approach.

Years ago, I had the opportunity to study Design Thinking for Business Innovation through the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.  It was an incredibly valuable course, as I’ve used the methodology to design meaningful marketing programs that benefit both customer and business.

For those who may not be familiar with Design Thinking, it’s a design methodology used to bring about more human-centered solutions.  It was developed by the Design School at Stanford University and was quickly adopted into other areas of business to drive creativity and innovation.  One of the leading practitioners of Design Thinking is IDEO.  While I could take a deep dive into the methodology, I think IDEO already does an amazing job educating those interested on the subject.  I highly recommend checking out their Design Thinking University for more information.

Simply put, Design Thinking for marketing can be outlined into four pillars, or questions:

1. What is?  Empathizing with the customer and defining their pain points and actual desired outcomes
2. What if?  Ideating potential solutions that address pain points in a way that turns them into gain points
3. What works?  Modeling and prototyping a solution to test with customers in a live setting
4. What wows?  Taking learnings from testing and then optimizing to apply the wow factor

Practical Application for Marketing.

I used this methodology to design the customer lifecycle program in one of the Financial Services companies I worked for.  We conducted customer surveys and focus groups to better understand how customers not only felt about online and mobile banking products, but ultimately what friction they encountered in managing their everyday banking needs.  Most of the answers we received didn’t revolve around the product itself but centered more around what customers desired most from banking services, which is to improve their individual financial journey.

Using this information, we then modeled – or mapped – the end-to-end customer journey, focusing heavily on first-year tenure.  We not only designed individual onboarding and product journeys to improve customer experience, we built specialized programs to support the customer’s personalized financial journey.  We then connected those experiences across the relationship in order to support the customer’s desire for improving their financial position.

Once tested, we then took the learnings and optimized our entire customer marketing program until we saw a consistent increase in engagement and customer satisfaction scores.  Through this empathetic, iterative process, we were not only able to improve retention by 7% and increase CSAT by 30%, we actually brought about  meaningful change in our customer’s lives.

Bottom line:  Design Thinking works – not only because it is a systematic approach to strategy, but more importantly, because it places the customer in the center of everything you do.