How to rethink the Customer experience with Design Thinking?

The Executive Director of Mindoza, Véronique Christmann, intervened at this One to One Biarritz conference to present the potential of Design Thinking in improving customer experience.

When we talk about digital transformation, we think very quickly about GAFAs. These giants represent 300 billion euros and have half of the world’s population in their databases.

However, technology is not the most innovative thing these companies have. Their strength is rather how they have placed the customer at the heart of their development. For Google, this force is omnipresent in the customer journey of users, until payment. Google does not hesitate to buy back some of its competitors for this. Facebook started directly from the user to create a community. In the field of commerce, Amazon has revolutionised the way you buy, offering a wide variety of items and providing a simple, clear and intuitive user experience.

What is Customer experience?

Customer experience is all the interactions, from the most insignificant to the most complex, between the customer and the brand, and the memories that flow from it. These are the questions that can be asked as: Was the experience simple? Pleasant? As far as the merchant is concerned, so is the non-market. It is these memories that will create or not the customer’s loyalty to the brand.

Starbucks is an example. If we’re talking about a product that everyone owns at home, namely coffee, then Starbucks offers a real customer experience by inviting consumers to come to a nice place with its decor, its atmosphere or the complicity that one has with the baristas. What matters is not just the product you consume, but everything around it.

If the Customer experience is an important aspect to work for brands, it is because where 80% of them consider that they deliver a good Customer experience, only 8% of the customers interviewed feel that they have had a good experience. This means that when the retailer feels that he is doing well, the consumer is not always satisfied with his customer experience.

It is important to note that, according to Forrester, 89% of consumers say they will make purchasing decisions based primarily on user experience rather than on price and product.

The important thing in our time is the technology, the digital tools and the other tools available to simplify the customer journey. But for consumers, the human aspect or the payment facilities are also important. In short, everything related to customer support.

Finally, they increasingly want to make sense of their purchases, especially the Millennials. A perfect example is that of the Unilever brand which through the marketing of a cosmetic vegan product, committed to return all profits to the homeless. Customer experience also consists in leaving the non-merchant to serve the merchant.

What is the relationship between “Employee experience” and “Customer experience”?

Employee experience is also an important concept to consider. It is the attention paid by employers to their employees. Customers like to go to brands where they know employers are treating their employees well.

Apple has even combined Customer Experience and Employee experience to offer some remarkable things to its customers. As Véronique Christmann, Director General at Mindoza, sums up very well, “Apple Stores sellers are not trained to sell, but how I can introduce new uses to products to consumers and how can I involve them?” The human dimension here goes far beyond selling a product.

How to build a customer experience through the Design Thinking method?

Mindoza is a communication agency that addresses issues from the point of view of innovation management. After reading the brief of the company that requests its services, it challenges the user by observing them, talking to them and discussing their inspirations.

For the e-commerce sector, it is a matter of observing how customers navigate the site and what the points of difficulty are. It then defines archetypal behaviours of attitudes and uses, repetitive patterns and frustrations to improve. The agency then talks with the brands and all stakeholders, to build a Customer experience that makes sense by correcting faults.

To illustrate Mindoza’s work, Véronique Christmann talks about the work that takes place with the company Toupargel, which delivers frozen products at home, and whose user experience was poor. Customers returned the image of a brand that thought only of profit and at the same time who weren’t customer friendly.

The work carried out focused on how to make the brand more attractive, useful and visible. Packaging was rethought, then the communications were customised according to the different consumer profiles, and then by organising physical meetings with the latter to make them taste the products.

Finally, was created «Belle Envie», a subscription to menus delivered to home all week. Enough to satisfy customers who are not mobile, like seniors. An example of a partnership to significantly improve the Customer experience.

Speaker:

Véronique Christmann, General Manager - Mindoza