Creating Customer Value by Reinventing Businesses with “Strategic Experience Design & Management"

The new face of Business:

“Business” exists in the form of an occupation, commerce, organization and as a system. Eventually businesses are for people and run by people for the betterment of those involved or associated with it. Businesses are not just to make profits but for “People” and to live up to their “Purposes”.

As this gets clearer by the day, many businesses struggle and suffer from a crisis of distinguished product and service innovation. In a Phygitally (Physical + Digital) upsetting world, it is increasingly difficult to differentiate brands, products and services. Prospective growth depends on proactive, rapid and well managed modernization and always responding to trans-formative consumer ecosphere. To achieve this sustenance, businesses must place people at the heart of everything they do. They must assimilate and harness the influence of “Design” (which is a systematic practice of evolving decisive and state-of-the-art solution that symbolizes functional, serviceable and appealing demands based on the necessities of the intended stakeholders. It has definite economical, ecological, social, functional and technical outcomes).

In some cases, the business operations become “Business as Usual” (BAU), nothing innovative arises, and the business as a whole stops learning and adopting emerging strategies. A reason for this could be the business leader’s lethargic attitude that infects the division, percolates across business service lines and eventually, the entire business loses the focus to work towards the strategies for transformation and creative thinking.

Thankfully with innovative companies, the business accommodates (customer) experience strategy as a part of their business strategy. This has been their primary basis for competitive advantage in rapidly changing business scenarios. Many design centric businesses have succeeded and outperformed by infusing human centered, agile design and development practices with participatory design principles. Ola, Uber, Paytm, BookMyShow are popular examples for the same.

Many businesses have also realized the role and the value of Experience Design and Design Thinking so as to envision and create positive impact to frequently changing ecosystems. “Experience” is an outcome and “Design” is the way to plan IT, “Experience Design” is thus all about clarifying, simplifying and amplifying human lives. Human lives are a collection of moments in life that can be classified into various satisfaction levels such as Mental, Physical, Rational, Emotional and Motivational.

A Winning approach, Strategic need for Designing Outcomes:

‘In the long run, standards of human living can be enhanced only by Design led innovation with human centered design approaches. (Human would imply people/ customers/ users/ citizens). However it strongly requires surroundings that are encouraging to include Strategic Experience Design activities to be integrated with everything in what we call as Business Design Thinking. When you consider anything as “Strategic” it must have a specific “Rationale” and thus it is called Strategic Experience Design and Management. It is risky for businesses to innovate without considering the people/stakeholders/customers/shareholders; those have direct association with it. Businesses need to develop new narratives and strategies to advance people (targeted customer) centricity for ease of doing business on daily basis. This would certainly place people and their living standards at the heart of business policy by pursuing “Strategic Experience Design” inclusion more explicitly into business strategies. Businesses will have to map people (customer) behaviors with the intended financial goals and objectives. And eventually businesses will have to specifically consider design led innovation in the context of new products and services development so as to heavily contribute both to economic development in evolving markets and to economic re-possession and advancement in the developed ecosystems. Social media, digital retail, payments, e-commerce and overall digital industrial revolutions are full proof examples for such notions.

Applying innovative-critical-creative thinking, context and the whole systems around people and businesses, one can transform how they can empathetically engage with the right people, through the best Phygital (Physical + Digital) channels, mediums and at the right time. Chasing human behaviors and demographics with human centered design approaches is the key to success in the rapidly changing human (customer) behaviors and demographics era. It requires employment of effective deep diving techniques such as People (Customer) Analysis and Insights (Data) Analytics. One can penetrate the products and services to the local levels by adopting such people centric development approaches.

Design Thinking (an innovative way of solving business problems by conducting creative thinking critically) business approaches and Experience Design led developments can play a fundamental role in re-imagining forthcoming businesses, and thus to create better and certain ecosystems for the future generations and  society. Most of design led business innovations that have proved to be good for society have also set examples for emerging businesses. Products like Airbnb, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram etc. fall under the design focused and outcome based business category, as their primary focus is People-Customer and their positive experience with the products and services. “Design” has extensive capability to innovate, create and build a better ecosystem and can enhance quality of human lives if conducted strategically. The strong belief is that creating positive customer experience should be the ultimate purpose of every business and the businesses should work for people’s betterment. Considering “Experience Design” as business strategy can strongly bring positive changes within emerging economies.

 In other views, Design Thinking focuses more on solving the business problems with creative thinking, empathetic approaches and with exploratory design techniques. It is intended towards simplifying complex business problems and creating positive experiences as value for the targeted users. However does it really assure the business outcomes, profitability and more so brand credibility? The answer is ‘Yes’ if Design Thinking is applied with the combination of “Strategic Experience Design and Management approaches. “Strategic (Customer) Experience Design and Management” is about creating tangible value not just by designing good looking products and services, but by delivering solutions that directly produce business results and credibility”. Outcome of Experience Design has to be strategic, which means it should have a direct impact on increasing the top line growth and reducing the cost (dollars invested in the digital-physical channels), thus having a measurable impact on business profitability.

For example, in case of an e-commerce channel, a Conversion Centered Design approach would increase the number of visitors interacting with the ‘Call to Action’ thus leading to increase in channel conversions. However, business profitability per customer would be defined only if the Lifetime Value of the acquired customer (based on repeat purchase frequency, average value of order) is greater than the investment that was made by business on acquiring the same customer. Thus, it does not become enough just to design a particular channel, if it is not driven by its strategic intents.

In the above example, a means of reducing the customer acquisition cost is also by closing the loop of the Service Experience journey with the advocacy phase that eventually reduces the marketing cost to acquire new customers. Thus, mapping the end-customer’s journey definitely leads to significant business impact.

Strategic Experience Design and Management principles specifically focus on transforming organizations, from persuading and reimagining business models to identifying new growth opportunities for businesses. It helps businesses to outline result oriented (cost, revenue and experience) value propositions for products and services. It imposes creating and setting up Customer Centered Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, Experience Design Strategy Canvas, and mapping with performance metrics for new business opportunities and innovations. Thus, it helps businesses in creating the big picture i.e., Product or Service Blueprints and targeted customer’s best possible journey across the touch points. The whole process is aimed to utilize “The Design” strategically with rationale. Each design output is mapped with business outcomes and value (for customer). The combination - Design Thinking and Strategic Experience Design and Management, if applied systematically, businesses today can become all-inclusive and can maximize value and improve self-esteem. The said solution integrates business strategy, collaborative design methods, and substantial creative capacities so as to create strong foundation for the business innovations. Of late, Design academia has implemented Strategic Design and Management (SDM) as a part of Graduate Specialization. The management and leadership institutions are also introducing Design Thinking and SDM within their regular curriculum.

Conclusion: Changing the Mindset:

We are now living in an Experience Economy as people transformed themselves from being a part of agrarian followed by industrial to beyond service based economy with evolution and advancement of products - services - ecosystems. Businesses now need to stage meaningful avenues to engage customers in a memorable and personalized way. Rise in consumer's personalized demands and increased focus on cost factor has led to competition; and thus “Usage and Service Experiences” must be a differentiating factor. Such consumer behavior can be categorized as emotional-tangible experiences and served, for the feelings of customers by engaging them with seamless customer products and services journey.

Moreover people are ready to pay more for convenience and better experiences with products and services. It also means businesses should map people behaviors with financial strategies, goals and outcomes. For example customer self-service can be mapped with channel performance and support cost. This needs development of people centered business models and people focused business. Business needs to develop financial and customer (targeted people) perspectives to succeed financially by delivering value to the stakeholders, shareholders and deliver better experience to the customers. Business’ growth perspectives are fully dependent on how constantly innovative they are; and thus embrace change in business capabilities through continuous improvement and optimization in the way they do business.

Lastly, people’s mindset matters. Acquiring design thinking approaches or design led development is good to cover hygiene issues, but it is significantly important to map business outcomes with design outputs so as to synchronize it with customer’s needs; and must be followed through with verifying how products and services are imagined and delivered to the customer, every day in a specific way. Business transformation means instantaneously forming the right values. Good aims can only become reality if strengthened by a tangible, operational design ecosystem built on solid business foundations. Undoubtedly, today’s companies can become influential companies of tomorrow if they embrace Strategic Experience Design and Management as “Cultural Shift”.