Design

Steve Jobs said that design is not just what something looks like but how something works. It's important to use design thinking in the creation and evolution of your customer insights program because this gives you the opportunity to lay the ground work for how you will bring your strategy to life. For how things will work. To start your design, the second step in the process, by using your strategy as a baseline brief. Use your strategy to instruct and inform what your design solutions needs to address. Approaching your design in this way provides a nice come to center point and a way to assess your decisions and to ask and answer if the solution is on brief. Then work through the necessary design research to identify and document who your customer's insights program needs to support. If you have a Chief Experience Officer, then they will be among your internal customers. So will your head of marketing along with any other supporting groups and people who are upstream of impacting customer experience. One of the things that you can do is orchestrate collaborative workshops and co-create with these individuals and teams that you've identified and asked tough questions to get everyone thinking about the possibilities. Now as a result of developing this base of research about who your stakeholders are and where they need support, you can work to distill that information into a set of possible projects and requirements. So for example, will you be responsible for market research or do you already have a team that you could partner with there? So as a result of delving into this list, you assess where you might need talent, new personnel, new systems, and new or evolved processes. One tip here is to consider the value streams that are present or needed in your organization. And from that vantage point, assess how customer's insights might be used to enhance the flow and the outcomes from these operating models. In other words, how can you bring the insights to your stakeholders instead of your stakeholders having to come to you or to your team to get the insights that they need. So for example, let's assume you're in the fashion industry. New styles are coming and going all the time. So wouldn't it be beneficial for product development to have a steady stream of data to help them to know what's trending with your customers right now. Now that you've figured out where you are today, what your users need and what those needs represent in terms of functionality, it's a good point in your process to identify what subset of features will provide the most value and then you can start creating your MVP, or your minimum viable product. This way, you could put tools in the hands of your users ranging from business intelligence integration to standardized reporting sooner rather than later. And you can start gathering real time feedback and seeing results as soon as possible.