How Design Thinking will help you adopt a customer-centric approach

Design Thinking is a fancy word these days, but did you know it can really increase the chance of a positive outcome for your projects? Essentially, it means that you involve all parties, including your customer, from the beginning or the ‘design’ of a solution. If you apply this idea to your own way of working, you can successfully move from a product-oriented to a customer-centric approach.

For some time now, I have been exploring and applying the concept of Design Thinking. When serving a customer, many companies still start from an inside-out perspective. It means they have a structured methodology where they first define the strengths and weaknesses in a process and then develop a prototype of a solution that can be presented to the customer.

However, because the end user is not actively involved, the adoption of the solution runs the risk of encountering a lot of obstacles. For example, if a product does not meet the customer’s expectations. If you then have to figure out why a solution does not work and how to adjust the concept, it may cost a lot of time and effort, and perhaps it will even drive your customer to the competition.

Design Thinking turns the process around. End users are immediately involved when you identify a problem and decide how to develop a solution. While the initial steps will probably be more chaotic and less structured, you end up with a prototype that has been validated by all stakeholders and has a much better chance of being successfully adopted. Ultimately, this will significantly reduce your costs.

Breaking down the silos

Design Thinking helps you move from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach, but it also breaks down the well-known silos in a traditional organization. We frequently see that companies have multiple departments all working separately on a project or customer. Moreover, they usually have never even looked at a process from an end-to-end perspective. If you bring these people together, they are often surprised to see how one department can influence another team in the value chain.

At Salesforce, we have been focusing on Design Thinking for a while now. Where we used to have separate interviews with the different stakeholders in our customers’ organizations, for example with the sales manager and the marketing director, we now prefer to include everyone right away by emphasizing cocreation. Involving the customer from the beginning creates more buy-in and increases the likelihood that we can design a vision and solution that all stakeholders buy into.?

Inspiring our customers

We also encourage Design Thinking among our customers. In May, for example, we organized a workshop together with our implementation partner Spire. Five companies from various industries – finance, utilities, retail, manufacturing and medical devices – were invited to participate. The topic of our Design Thinking workshop was ‘Direct to Customer’ (D2C). For businesses that do not have direct contact with the end user, it is a challenge to get a complete picture of their customers. Especially now that cookies are disappearing, first-party customer data becomes very important.

The goal of the workshop was to find a customer-specific solution to this challenge. The day started with a speech from an inspiring speaker, Design Thinking expert Peter Bertels . Each company was then joined by a subject matter expert from Salesforce. During the workshop, the teams defined personas, developed a mood board, created a vision of how they want to approach the problem in the future, and even generated an action plan. Afterwards, the participants were encouraged to rotate and look at each other’s challenges. Since they were no competitors and all came from different industries, they found real added value in the feedback and ideas from other companies.

Interested in your own workshop?

Do you think this workshop based on the principles of Design Thinking could also be of interest to you? Good news: we are planning to hold another workshop later this year. This time we want to focus on sustainability. For many companies, this is another familiar challenge.

For example, how do you collect data on sustainability? How do you communicate this to your customers? How do you bring up the subject in conversations with suppliers? How can you make your employees more aware of sustainability?

Would you like to participate or are you interested in hosting a Design Thinking workshop in your own company? We are happy to help. Just reach out by sending me a personal message.