Understanding the end-user of your product or service, educating your project teams, and making sure employees are living the culture are paramount to achieving real customer-centricity.
Being customer-centric is more than building the right design strategy, it means embedding empathy.
The question on everyone’s lips is: “How do you create better experiences for your customers?” There’s much talk of digital transformation and designing customer experiences. However, when you put technology in the driver’s seat, the customer is left in the passenger seat, and technically you cannot “design” an experience. You can, however, “design” your organisation, so when an interaction with a customer happens—the experience will be a positive one.
So, how do you make your organisation more customer-centric? The key is a two-pronged approach. The first is having a human-centric development process.
Customer-centric organisations have evolved their product development process to systematically include the human aspect alongside technology and commerce at every step. It’s not just about having an established customer experience design budget and running some projects here and there. It’s about using customer experience design strategically, on every project, and having customer experience present at board level. But this topic is well discussed, I want to focus more on the second, building your corporate empathy.
Equipping your employees with the knowledge and methods of customer understanding can be a real eye-opener. Many employees see that technology and marketing alone don’t cut it in the service economy and embrace new methods enthusiastically. This complements the development process and makes happier employees.
Three Steps To Building Corporate Empathy
The first step is building empathy for the end-user of your product, service, or experience. This is about working face to face with your customers. Forget focus groups—go into their homes! And make sure you prototype and iterate, fast. Whether it’s prototyping digital products or life-size cardboard pharmacies, don’t be afraid to make and build.
One such case study is for Finavia, Finland’s airport operator. Helsinki Airport is a popular transit airport, with around five million transit passengers a year. Finavia wanted to support Helsinki Airport in becoming the leading transfer airport of Northern Europe. They launched the globally unique TravelLab project, which involved service concepts being tested during the transfer experience.
They tested 12 different kinds of new service prototypes chosen from 200 improvement ideas gathered from passengers. They included pop-up yoga classes “YogaGate” and midsummer (a popular Finnish holiday) celebrations, as well as technical services, such as digital boards on the gate buses providing information on what to do at the airport. All were live prototypes, quickly set up and quickly changed if they weren’t working. Nine hundred passengers took part across 75 days.
During the process, TravelLab invited passengers to take an active part in designing better transfer experiences. What was really happening was an agile, human-centric process of service design and prototyping, and a large corporation openly taking part in co-creation.
