Building a design-driven culture
It’s not enough to just sell a product or service—companies must
truly engage with their customers. Here’s how to embed experience design in
your organization.
At one point in the movie The Best Exotic Marigold
Hotel, Judi Dench, who plays a grieving widow, is connected with a
customer-service agent at a call center in India. Despite being told Dench is
in mourning, the call-center rep sticks to her script with a sadly predictable
result: hurt feelings and a lost customer. By the end of the movie, Dench’s
character has moved to India and reinvented herself as—wait for it—a
call-center trainer. In her initial session, she conducts a role-playing
exercise in which she demands operators go off script and respond to customers
as human beings first. The result? Instead of angry hang-ups, the call-center
reps make human connections and customers for life.
While the movie
is fictitious, of course, the broader lesson lies at the core of a real-world
business need: empathy. Using empathy to put customers, clients, and end users
at the center of the problem-solving equation is the foundation of design
thinking. With this focus, design becomes a tool for change, capable of
transforming the way companies do business, hire talent, compete, and build
their brand. To quote Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, the act of design “devises
courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
From product to experience
Think about a product you recently bought. Now think about
the experience you had buying and using that product.
Increasingly, it’s difficult to separate these two elements, and we’re actually
seeing many cases where customers prioritize the experience of buying and using
a product over the performance of the product itself. In fact, customer
experience is becoming a key source of competitive advantage as companies look
to transform how they do business.
This fixation
on customer experience isn’t just for the cool start-up world. Consider HP and
the mundane task of replacing printer ink. Through HP Instant Ink, the company
has executed a subtle shift away from pure transactions—customers simply buying
ink when they need it—and toward establishing an ongoing service relationship,
wherein HP knows when its printers will run out of ink and preemptively ships
more, saving customers time and effort. And making their lives easier not only
makes customers more productive but also makes them happy and generates
loyalty. Similarly, heavy-industry stalwart John Deere is transforming its
business by moving beyond pure equipment to provide farmers with digital
services such as crop advisories, weather alerts, planting prescriptions, and
seeding-population advice.
Few would dispute that these sorts of developments are good for
the customer and build loyalty. But there’s a larger question for businesses:
Are they worth it? While a hard metric on the return on investment of design is
notoriously elusive, the value is clearly borne out in other ways. According to
the Design Management Institute’s Design Value Index, for example,
design-driven companies have maintained a significant stock-market advantage,
outperforming the S&P 500 by an extraordinary 219 percent over the past ten
years.
At individual companies, you don’t have to look far to see the
value of design. When Walmart revamped its e-commerce experience, unique
visitors to its website increased by 200 percent. When Bank of America
undertook a user-centered redesign of its process for account registration,
online-banking traffic rose by 45 percent.2 And the business value of
design has only been underscored by the recent hiring of high-profile designers
by venture-capital firms; last year, for example, energy-focused Khosla
Ventures appointed the former head of Google’s user-experience team, Irene Au,
as an operating partner.
Many companies
are committing to improve the user experience. But making design a core
capability that drives growth and competitive advantage means companies need to
go further.
The four elements of design-driven culture
Really understanding
the customer
Pretty much all
companies insist they focus on the customer. Yet reality often belies that
assertion. Budgets and key performance indicators often are not aligned with
performance on customer metrics. Research may be superficial. Business
decisions made at the executive level often fail to consider the impact on
customers.
The difference with design-driven companies is that they seek to
go far beyond understanding what customers want to truly
uncovering why they want it. They recognize that while data
are important for understanding customer behavior, they’re woefully short on
empathy. Design-driven companies turn to ethnographers and cultural
anthropologists. These “empathy sleuths” conduct contextual one-on-one
interviews, shopper-shadowing exercises, and “follow me homes” to observe,
listen, and learn how people actually use and experience products. They plot
out customer decision journeys to understand exactly what motivates people,
what bothers them, and where there are opportunities for creating delightful
experiences.
Marketing
leaders at Sephora, for example, were watching millennials shopping on their
site and realized that before buying, these customers would often go to YouTube
to look for videos of people using the product. That prompted the cosmetics
retailer to create its own videos to serve this need. In another example, a
user-experience scientist at GE’s San Ramon innovation center conducted 119
interviews in the process of helping GE redesign its marine-shipping
positioning system. The result: an award-wining design that enables mariners to
focus on ship handling in dangerous and environmentally sensitive locations
instead of the distraction of managing technology.
When one large
North American bank tracked consumer behavior for 30 days—including what and
when bills were paid, how frequently consumers used ATMs, and how often they
got cash—it discovered, contrary to expectations, that consumers didn’t care
about the typical banking products that institutions usually try to push on
them. All its customers wanted was to sign up for an account. As a result, the
bank provided services as needed and, based on observed customer-usage patterns
and behaviors, it became much more judicious about recommending the right
products to meet their needs.
Bringing empathy to
the organization
One essential
to running a design-driven company is making sure the right people with the
right skill set are in the right place. To start, that means ensuring a chief
design lead has a seat at the table where strategic decisions are made. That
person could be a chief design officer, a chief digital officer, or a chief
marketing officer. All that matters is that whoever has the responsibility is
the primary customer advocate. He or she must bring the customer’s point of
view to business decisions, translate business goals into customer-friendly
initiatives, and build a culture in which employees think about how what they
do affects customers.
Pushing that
perspective through the company requires making a designer a core part of any
product or service development and building a design-driven process around
individual customer journeys. During these initiatives, design should take an
active role in bridging multiple functions—including finance, legal, IT,
marketing, and operations—so that these groups can not only be part of the process
but also start to directly understand the value that design can deliver.
Building these
bridges requires extending customer advocacy and customer-centric empathy to
more roles in the organization. In IT, for example, design should have a role
in devising the technical solutions that support customer experiences. In
product design, designers should contribute customer insights that influence
prototypes as well as the final product. And before a product is released
publicly, a senior designer should be responsible for consistency of experience
across all touchpoints, from product to packaging to social-media marketing,
web design, and e-commerce.
Raising the
design capabilities of a company requires moving customer empathy beyond the
skill set of a design team to permeate all areas of the business. Deutsche
Bank, for example, required all employees to use products that its customers
used as a way to understand what customers were experiencing.
Solidifying
this design approach requires, among other things, metrics that focus on the
customer. Customer satisfaction and retention are standard measures, but key
performance indicators should include, for example, customer lifetime value,
real-time customer satisfaction by segment, and “leaky bucket” ratios to highlight
where customer issues may be spiking. The goal is to track the depth of the
relationship between customer and brand over time.
Designing in real time
Developing any
customer journey requires input from many functions. We believe in a “braided” approach
that combines design, business strategy, and technology as the core working
group. These functions should work together to make decisions, ensure that the
designed journey aligns with the business strategy and is delivering value, and
keep customer experience a top-of-mind issue.
the same time,
we recognize that because developing a customer journey requires so many
different functions and skill sets, the process can quickly become bogged down
in endless email chains and meetings. Our preferred approach for mitigating
this is what we call a “four wall” approach: setting up a war room from day one
and bringing in people from design, engineering or IT, operations, and project
management who are committed to the process . Depending on the product or service
and the tactics demanded, we include people with backgrounds in research, user
experience, industrial design, interaction and visual design, service design,
and rapid prototyping.
Each group gets
its own wall, which functions as a working surface dedicated to customer
journeys, technology, business operations, and planning. Every day begins with
a team meeting in which members discuss what they will do, what they hope to
achieve, and what issues they may confront. Each wall becomes an ordered mosaic
of Post-it notes capturing tasks, actions, progress steps, people, and ideas,
visible for all to see. This approach supports on-the-fly decision making. Team
members can simply walk across the room, get their questions answered, come to
a decision, and move forward.
Acting quickly
Good design is fast. That means getting a product to market
quickly, which depends on rapid prototyping, frequent iteration, and
adjustments based on real customer feedback. In a design-driven culture,
companies are unafraid to release a product that is not totally perfect. That
means going to market with a minimally viable product, the better to learn from
customer feedback, incorporate it, and then build and release the next version.
Consider Instagram, which launched by rolling out a product, learning which
features were most popular (image sharing, commenting, and liking), and then
relaunching a stripped-down version. The result was 100,000 downloads in less
than a week and seven million registered users in the app’s first nine months.
To discover
what the dashboard of the future might look like, Chrysler paired its customers
with designers and product engineers to develop prototypes. The project started
with a bare-bones dashboard—just a steering wheel and a blank center console.
Customers were asked to build their ideal dashboard by choosing from a kit of
dozens of digital and mechanical screens, buttons, and levers. While the
results showed pronounced country-by-country differences, everyone agreed on
one element: a bigger physical dial on the dash to control the volume of their
stereo.
The bottom
line? Rapid prototyping is critical for getting live feedback and avoiding
costly mistakes down the road. In our experience, advanced companies can
prototype and launch a product or service in as few as 16 weeks.
Questions for the design journey
Transforming
your company into one that uses design as a driver of change takes time. Here
are some questions we’ve found helpful in successfully making that journey:
·
Do you have a senior design leader with real
authority?
Hire a chief design officer or vice president of design
strategy. Empower this person with a seat in the C-suite and the backing of the
CEO. Ensure that design factors such as customer implications are part of any
business strategy.
·
Are you continuously reviewing your metrics?
Make metrics a “contact sport.” That means going beyond
reviewing design metrics and key performance indicators regularly to reviewing
them continuously (often in real time), testing them, and changing your actions
in a constant test-and-learn cycle.
Are designers working with the right people in the organization?
Assign designers to critical functions so that design is
actively contributing to business decisions and experience development across
the entire customer journey. Identify and implement your first four-wall
experiment with design, engineering or IT, operations, and project management.
·
Do you really understand what motivates your
customers?
Create a map of the customer journey and use human-centered-design
research techniques to interact with customers and uncover pain points and
opportunities to delight.
·
How can you speed up your processes?
The nimble start-up mentality that defines Silicon Valley also
creates a new sense of cadence. Set challenging timelines, prioritize, and “do
the doable.” Speed is better than perfection.
Customers
increasingly expect products and services that are designed to meet their
needs, delight them with unexpectedly great experiences, and address a
heightened sense of aesthetics. Companies that meet those needs are rewarded
with fierce brand loyalty and higher spending, which translates into fatter
profit margins. But that kind of success only happens by design.
| byJennifer Kilian, Hugo Sarrazin, and Hyo Yeon
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/building_a_design_driven_culture?cid=digital-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1509
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