Challenge:

The challenge we are facing is the fact that in the last 24 months we have only landed two accounts, however our sales  remains the same, our sales even present a little growth. So you may think why if things does not sounds so bad, why do I  want to use a Design Thinking tool to solve this so called problem?. Well the situation here is that we are relevant in the  industry, however we are not growing in number of customers and nowadays it feels like we have our eggs in so little baskets  so eventhough right now this may not seem so problematic this will be a trouble in the short term..

Selection:

I have chosen this tool because gives me more liberty in order to map all the posible solutions, problems and every concept  involved in this issue, helping us to expand as much and as creatively as we may need.

Why is this relevant for us? Because throught the years we have faced a number of situations with our customers that had  deteriorated our business relationships with major customers in a wide range of industries. Due this today we have less than  10 clients in our portafolio and going falling shorter. While we were discussing this we realized that all the situations that we  are seeing today we saw them before and we want to stop this infinit negative loop.

Therefore we have decided to map our way in to the problem and our way out with possible solutions. This hopefully will help  us to also remember what makes us good and why we should aimed to higher results.

Application:

I began making a shortlist with all the headlines of the group of things that makes a sale happens and then we started to ask  ourselves questions around them. This is the result,

COMPANY GROWTH:

  Value proposition.- Question: Which is our corporate value? What do we offer? Why do our customers buy our  services?

  Corporate Sight:- What moves us as a Company?

GROWTH

Value

Proposition

Staff

Market

Feedback

from

Customers

Competitors Business

Relationships

Communicatio

n with our  customers.

Type of users

Corporate

Sight

  Staff.- Question: What kind of hard and soft skills we need in our Company? Are our employees well paid? Can  we make a market comparision of this? Is the salary we offer enough for the skill-set we aimed to have?

  Market. – Question: Which companies can we provide with our services? Is there a way to shortlist them?  Which of those companies already worked with us? Did they have a great or a bad experience with us? Can we  make them come back? Can we offer them other services?

  Feedback from customers.- Question: Do we have a satisfaction survey we can analize? Can we reach our ex  customers for feedback? How can we ask for feedback from our current customers?

  Competitors.- Question: Whom are our competitors? What makes us different? What make us alike?

  Business Relationships.-Question: Are our BR effective? Do we get close to our customers? Do we know how  to do it? The customers trust us? How they see us?

  Communication with our customers.- Question: How often do we see our customers? Is this important for  them? How often we should go and pay them a visit? How often our directives visit/communicate with our  customers? Do we e mail them information related to the market that they can use and/ or be relevant? Would  they like that? Can we do that? Our customers are informed when we implement a new Service in our portfolio?  How would it be the best way to do that?

  Type of users. -Question: Who in a Company has the power to buy our services? Who in a Company  (including current customers) use our Service? Are we meeting their needs? How can we make them happier?

  Possible solutions.

From there we started to mapp all points related to this and asking ourselfs questions in order to get us closer to possible  possitive outcomes. The stakeholders involved where:

  Service Manager.

  Consulting Manager.

  Support Manager.

  Office Manager.

  One Former customer.

Insight:

Well this tool make a lot of difference in how we approach this. First it takes you away from the “formal” tensión of  resolving a situation, it also gives you the liberty of giving more and more options and you do not limítate your self to  what you think you know (thinking in the word Design makes all the difference). We researched more concepts about  the things that we should be looking at and that gave us a lot of perspective in how to approach this.

We could clonclude that in this and every process we want to assest it is really important to stretch your options and  think widely, sometimes the issue is not where you think it is and you need to force your self to have more approaches,  to look different at the users of the Service/product, to see your competitors closer to you and you can see them clearly  so you can stop thinking that they are in other lever far away from you, instead you can see if your processes just need  to be adjusted in order to keep up and excel in your field.

The Mind Mapping help us to understand that a close communication it is important for the costumer, it is not so hard to  do, makes a lot of difference and we where falling short in this. We could validated the size of our market and even  though we lost some customers, we saw that there where others we could reach if we where clear about what makes us  different.

Approach:

For another escenario I would deffinitly try to involved more customers, this would help us to go deeper in the problem  and get more insights about our services. Also I would ask for our CEO and/or COO to be involved so we can cross the  things we think we need to do and the things the Company are willing to do and of course the strategy they want to   implement. All of this would help us to chose wisely the solutions we need/can implement and also we could have a  budget to use in the possible resolution.

