What steps can you take to design a customer-centric product?

Customer centricity starts with how well you know or understand your customer and the efforts you are putting to resolve their issues, paint-points and make their experience delightful. This is an unusual approach than design thinking. You cannot make customer centric products. Its the company's whole processes, systems, approaches, strategies, goals and employees that need to be customer centric. Then, only you can build customer centric products. - Ensure every employee in your company knows your customer and thinks from the customer point-of-view (or being in their shoe) - Don't just make UX better, rather make it delightful - Don't release 10s of features. Release just 1 but ensure the customer is happy.

Understand Your Customer Empathize with the User Define the Problem Ideate Solutions Test with Users Design & Develop Launch & Monitor Iterate & Improve Foster a Customer-Centric Culture

Market Research: Start by conducting comprehensive market research. This involves studying your target market, including demographics, preferences, and trends. It's essential to identify the problems or unmet needs your customers are currently facing. Customer Segmentation: Segment your customers into different groups based on factors like age, location, income, and behavior. This helps tailor your product to specific customer segments. Customer Surveys and Feedback: Actively gather feedback from your existing and potential customers. Surveys, focus groups, and interviews are great ways to learn about their expectations and pain points.

yes, having customers at the heart of the organization and the design is a must. That also implies to be in their shoes when designing the product and the experience. Key considerations for that is to make the experience frictionless and effortless as much as possible. Reducing customer effort is a key design principle.

In my experience, you can start by conducting user research, gathering feedback, and prioritizing customer needs. Then, iterate and test your design based on their input.

Tie the product feature releases and description to common business goals that customers in certain industries would want to achieve, then explain the features and design throughly for the hands-on users.

Other ways to validate your assumptions is to create User Personas that accurately represent different customer segments. Offer suggestions on gathering data and insights to develop comprehensive personas that drive customer-centric design decisions. Empathy Mapping: Discuss the benefits of empathy mapping and how it helps in understanding customer emotions, behaviors, and motivations. Share practical tips on conducting empathy mapping exercises to gain deeper insights into customer experiences.

This is a big one. It matters even more when the use of product is heavily dependent on human support. Consistency how that support is offered matters a great deal because it educates users on steps that need to be taken in other similar scenarios should they arise. If the support is inconsistent or inconsistently delivered, users might decide the product or service is too difficult to utilize and churn.

Absolutely yes. Consistent and Personalized Experience. But in order to achieve this, it is very important to reduce or eliminate the need for "manual" steps in any of the touchpoints and channels. Intelligent Automation will allows us to deliver that experience without bottle-necks, without errors and consistently. No manual steps or human support needed if possible.

Customers feedback is key but even when they don't provide feedback, by analyzing usage and consumption behaviors we can identify if there is any problem with the product. Incentivizing effortless customer feedback is really important, either active or passive one.

Having a solid feedback loop with CS/Sales ( any customer facing position) championing feedback during client cadences. Internally this should be linked directly to product / engineering teams to prioritise based on frequency/importance and include in roadmaps. This process should also be communicated to the client re-enforcing the need for open feedback. Of course expectations should be managed but having a clear internal flow to action critical feedback is vital to empowering clients to provide insightful feedback.

I think NPS does this job well. We always act in the score and feedback around where the product isn’t handy and what are the major problems of client. Till the time your product and business strategy is based on client feedback you’ll never go wrong.

Always keep in mind the thumb rule while designing customer centric product/services: ?? Low tech, high touch: this means the product or service which we design should be easy to use/adopt/propogate and high touch refers to the outcome, it should exceed user expectations/purpose.

By prioritizing product features based on customer input, and this can be done through surveys, UT. If you understand your customer, this will help you to identify and prioritize the features that are most important to him.

I've gained valuable insights into creating a customer-centric product through my experience in customer service and management. Leveraging AI and data analytics, I would understand customer preferences. My LinkedIn network would provide up-to-date AI trends. By mapping the customer journey, I could identify opportunities for AI integration. Personalization strategies, based on expertise in Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Dynamics 365, would enhance the customer experience. Establishing robust feedback mechanisms, conducting A/B testing, and providing customer education, drawing from a background in leadership and management, would ensure a customer-centric product that fosters trust and loyalty

You can use Design Thinking and Working Backwards frameworks to design a customer-centric product. Design Thinking is a customer-centric framework that creates desirable, profitable, and sustainable products. It emphasizes the problem to be solved, the context for solving it, and the long-term growth of the product. Amazon's Working Backwards method guides the definition of every customer-centric product it develops by identifying the customer needs, business context, and target vision - and by answering key questions from customers/stakeholders. Key artifacts include customer insights, problem statements, personas, empathy maps, customer journey maps, solution text, benefits matrix, workflows, wireframes, prototypes, and PR/FAQ.