Assignment submission for Design Thinking

1. Challenge

I am an employee of the largest optical chain in the country.   My role will be responsible for business development and   supporting sales growth for the organization.  Due to the impact of COVID-19, traffic to the stores had declined and consumer behavior had change   whom will be minimizing the need to store visit.  Our challenge is to understand what we need to change to meet the customers’ needs in the new  norm. Our objective is to maximize sales and optimizing the marketing budgets to drive online traffic  to the stores, developing new model to deliver to their home, and understand what works for the ne   norm and finally how do we re-prioritize the stores and headquarter staffs to achieve the business  goal.  We will focus on understanding the type of consumers that buying from us, getting to know what  changed in their buying behavior, what's their needs and expectations, with in depth understanding t   guide us on uncovering what our staffs' roles and responsibility needs to be changed by creating and  delivering value to our customers.  It is essential to get it right at the what if stage.

2. Selection

The first tool we selected was journey mapping to grasp a clear understanding of what had  changed in terms of purchasing behaviors and expectations from consumers. This allow us to  provide the same perspective to all different stakeholders being those supporting in-store front  line employees and those working in headquarter that provide functional support from marketing,  sales, merchandizing and operations. Able to align all stakeholders on the same understanding of  what consumer needs, allowing and support the organization to be able to focus and making  changes to new infrastructures that can drive growth through the new ways of working.  The next tool that will be used is the value chain analysis tool, to provide analysis on the who,  what, how as the driver to deliver the value chain to meet the customer needs.

3. Application  Applying the journey mapping techniques:

a. Identify and select the specific groups of consumers that we want to understand more fully.

In this case, we will select the group that present the biggest opportunities for the organization.  For the optical retail business, we have decided to go for age group between 20 to 50 as they  represent almost 58% of the population, sharing some similar attributes where majority should  be under employment, and financial independence. Further divided them into 3 groups to map  the customer experience as a representation of life events:   Group 1: 20 to 30 years old, where they are newly into the working reality, moving to early  stage of their career and maybe meeting the most important partner in their life time.   Group 2: 30 to 40 years old, where they are advancing in their career, setting up family and  need to take care of both children and parents.   Group 3: 40 to 50 years old, very settled in their career and planning for retirement

b. Layout hypothetical view of what customer journey looks like from beginning to end.

Setting hypothetical view of what individual group of customers of their vision needs, for  example need to see clearly at the laptop, any associated symptoms such as dry eyes, the  solutions they preferred and how they would like the solutions to be delivered to them.

c. Identify a small group of customers representing the 3 groups identified at point 1 above.

Plan and conduct next stage: interview.

d. Conduct a few pilot interviews. Identify 2 customers per group to validate the accuracy of  the consumer journey and being clear on the data that we intend to collect.  e. Finalize the questionnaires through the pilot interviews paying special attention in  capturing the emotional and feelings on the experience. We will arrange with 2 persons for  executing the interview, one focus on the interview and the other support notes taking.  f. Identify the essential moments of truth and other themes from the interviews. when each  group making decisions on what, when and how they will buy. This will be done by asking  the interviewer to summarize the learnings during the interview. We will then map the  summaries and looking for similar and important insights.  g. Study the themes we had uncovered. We had identified some dimensions:  - consumer who will conduct research online prior deciding which store to visit versus those  that prefer convenience and randomly select and walk in stores that is within their  neighborhood  - consumer who pays attention to stores that provide comprehensive after sales service  and engagement versus those who cares for the service at the point of delivery  h.   Select the two dimensions that we feel are most revealing.

4. Insight    Taking step 3j by mapping the consumer journey using the low and high points providing us  good insights of which process shown opportunities by improving the process.

Able to understand the high and low of consumer journey that require vision corrections, the following  are some of the insights that we may gathered during the journey mapping process:

i.  What's the priorities for elevating the quality of service by delivering above customer's expectations,  helping us to capture the considerations of how we wow them at later stage of design thinking  ii.  Upsell and cross opportunities by not upsetting the customers  iii. How likely will the consumer be a returned customer  iv.  How likely the consumer will refer their friends and families    5. Approach    An alternative approach for this case in understands better at the what is stage will be  Visualization.  The potential learnings were through observations, collecting information, visuals, photographs  of a specific demographics of consumers for example, someone aged 22, gotten their first job,  getting very excited moving to new phase of life and exploring a new world. Using simple tools,  sketching their journey and emotions that how by solving their visual problems and able to  meet their lifestyle needs helps and prepare them better to venture into the new experience.  We can then sketch and craft this into a story through story telling in the mode of story board.

i. Position interviewee into one of the quadrants. Based on the two dimensions archetype

persona crated in (h), the actual interviewee candidates will be position in any of the 4  quadrants.    j. Map the journey of each persona. Finally map the insights gathered in the journey map in  part (b) based on the low and high points.

