Customers matter, and every business knows this. Without them your business will not prosper. The most successful companies will need to reinvent themselves so that they can understand and serve the increasing customer base. This might be stressful for company’s ability to stay relevant and adapt to the situation. It is always important that we still need to have the customer in mind when developing new products and services, and using human centered design keeps your business more customer focused.
Role of Human-Centered Design
When it comes to customer service training, the word empathy is used a lot. One methodology of using empathy into the design process is a design called human-centered design. Empathy is important because it leads to understanding the needs, problems, and frustrations that a customer might have. This eliminates the internal first viewpoint that most organizations still uses. Human-centered design ensures that your service or product are more customer focused and that it works until the end.
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There are a lot of techniques to keep the design process more customer oriented. Some of the ones include:
Journey Mapping
Workshops that utilize this bring more customers and industry leaders together. The consumers map their journeys as customers in great detail as well as vital messaging and outlining important points.
Design Thinking
Popularized by a lot of industries such as the Stanford School and a lot more, design thinking is a very popular design technique that focuses on the customer experience. Some industries like to use design thinking on a regular basis so that they can gain a deeper understanding of empathy towards the needs of different customers. Brainstorming usually starts by segmenting different participants into different groups based on their interaction with a particular product or service, then encouraging the participants to play it out, brainstorm and create ideas.
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Jobs to be Done (JTBD)
Jobs to be done is a technique that is used to understand the wants of a customer to achieve a product. For example, a butcher with a knife. Though the knife is designed to cut through different ingredients such as meat and vegetables, the butcher is “hiring” the knife to make sure that the ingredients are cleanly cut. By understanding this type of concept, it has allowed a lot of industries to concoct new techniques like an automatic cutter rather than depending solely on a knife and manual work. By studying the different jobs that customers require, it will allow innovation and new product offerings so that they can achieve their needs other than depending solely on the regular functions of a product.
Experience Mapping
Workshops in experience mapping allows customers, service providers and other industry leaders to collaborate and map out the different customer experiences. This helps them compare their desired experience as well as pointing out the gaps that the customer might face when using these products.
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