REFLECTIONS – VISUALIZATION

CHALLENGE:   As part of my company’s drive to enhance customer experience and to promote loyalty, there

was a deliberate attempt to revisit the concept of customer journey. One of the challenges my

organization faces is the management of its B2B retail prepaid card, previously customers have

to spend hours at the company head office to recharge or top-up their cards for future use. All

activities involved in the process were manually done at a designated customer service points.

Considering the inconveniences being created, for instance customers spending hours to be

attended to, management seeks to know what wows and what works.

SELECTION:  Being a member of the company’s digitalization team, we adopted “VISUALIZATION” as a design

thinking tool to find innovative ways to improve customer experience. The team was tasked to

employ visual thinking to offer innovative solutions to wow the customer.

APPLICATION:

The team adopted the four scale design thinking framework; what is, what if, what wows and

what works. A group of twenty (20) cross-functional and diverse backgrounds, was inaugurated

to begin the journey of innovation.

First, the team observe what the current situation or customer experience is and to gather some

data on the current condition. We wrote down what we observed to be the current customer

experience, these are in the form of sticky notes which are posted on a big board in a hall

dedicated to this exercise.

Then, the team moved to the ideation stage where the individual team members brainstorm to

find solutions to the problems identified at the observation stage. The solutions are mapped to

the individual problems posted on the board.

What wows? The team then proceeded to refine the solutions identified against the individual

problems to identify the best matching problems and solutions. The act is repeated several times

until the best possible solutions are identified and properly matched to the identified problem,

The team proceeded to actually test the proposed solutions with selected group of customers to

measure the acceptance and impact on service delivery. Customer feedback is very important at

this stage, the team listen attentively to the customers to know why this solutions will not solve

the problems or what to improve to offer the best possible customer experience. This approach

is conducted using “Learning Launches”, experiment or test to assess the viability of the new

idea before rolling out.

Finally, an electronic customer service desks were developed to provide self service solutions to

the customers. Time spent at the recharge point reduced from above an hour to less than 30

minutes and customer feedback was truly overwhelming.

INSIGHT AND APPROACH:

My personal exposure to this great design thinking tool cannot be overestimated, visualization

provides the opportunity to move beyond verbal communication to actually visualize the kind of

customer experience the company wants to put in place. The diverse nature of the team also

provide a very rich experience, different levels of cognitive blindness and also helps to minimize

confirmation biases.

