Design Thinking Tool – Mind Mapping

Challenge

I work as a junior project manager in the customer experience team of an international  emergency assistance company. One of our tasks is to collect customer feedbacks from different  channels, perform analysis to evaluate customer satisfaction and find solutions to pain points to  ameliorate customer experience. We recently noticed that the customer satisfaction of roadside  assistance drops significantly in July and August every year, and we only know from data that it’s  due to the large volume of cases in “Peak Season”. In order to find the root causes and design  innovative solutions to customer pain points, our team decided to hold a design thinking  session.

Selection

The scope of the project includes 3 European markets: France, Italy, Iberia (Spain & Portugal),  and the country managers know their market better than anyone else, including us central team  in headquarter, so their mind really matters and is the key to the project. In order to map out  the full picture of the project, a collective design thinking session with in-depth brainstorm such  as mind mapping workshop is a good fit to us.

Application

We took a whole day and organized 2 rounds discussion for the mind mapping, the first round  mainly to come up with all possible causes for customer complaints, and the second round to  kill the non-relevant ones and merge repetitive ones to have the final root causes.

It’s just like organizing a yard sale and inviting shoppers (indicated in the design thinking  course), we listed out all relevant colleagues within the scope and defined 12 key stakeholders  as participants to the sessions.

In the first discussion, our team listed most common complaints from customers, and for each  of the complaints, country managers would have 5mins to come up with ideas on root causes of  the complaints. The discussion was completely online and we used virtual sticky notes so that  every one could think independently and not be influenced by others voice.

After gathering all possible root causes for all complaints, we entered next round of discussion.  In this round, we reviewed all sticky notes again, killed the non-relevant ones and tried to find  the internal links between the causes and build a mind map to connect the dots.

Insight & Approach

Using the mind mapping tool, our design thinking session was more efficient than ever. Even  though we had so many fragmented pieces of information and data, we were managed to sort  and categorized them and transformed them into structured insights. The result of the session,  a clear mind map of real root causes for each customer complaints, has been a good guidance  for our team to plan for next steps to close the loop: we quickly proposed several innovative  solutions to experiment in the soon coming “peak season”, and defined baseline and KPI for the  experiments.

Our team have had many design thinking workshops before, but after having this course, I had a  clearer view on what a structured design thinking process should be, and how to use the design  thinking tools to achieve the most outcome. It’s been a very useful course for me.

