UNIT III
Designing Customer Experience: Understanding
Innovation through Design Thinking; Enhancing
Customer Experience; Service Design and
Development Process and Case Studies; Service
Experience Cycle and Case Studies .
Definition and Importance
Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to
innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to
integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of
technology, and the requirements for business
success. It focuses on understanding users,
challenging assumptions, redefining problems, and
creating innovative solutions.
Key Stages of Design Thinking:
1. Empathize: Understanding the end users' needs by immersing oneself in their
environment and developing empathy for them.
2. Define: Clearly defining the problem based on the insights gathered during the
empathy stage.
3. Ideate: Generating a wide range of creative solutions to the defined problem
through brainstorming and other ideation techniques.
4. Prototype: Building scaled-down versions of potential solutions to test ideas.
5. Test: Engaging with users to evaluate the effectiveness of prototypes, gathering
feedback to refine solutions.
Role in Innovation
Empathy-driven innovation: Through Design Thinking,
innovation is rooted in understanding the real needs of
users, which fosters meaningful and customer-centered
solutions.
Cross-disciplinary collaboration: Design Thinking
encourages collaboration across various disciplines, making
it effective in solving complex problems with diverse inputs.
Enhancing Customer Experience
Customer Experience (CX) refers to the overall
perception customers have of a business, based
on their interactions across all touchpoints. It
encompasses every step of the customer journey,
from discovering the product to post-purchase
services.
Key Components of Customer Experience:
1. Customer Journey Mapping: Visualizing the entire journey a customer takes when interacting with a
product or service, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. This helps identify pain points and
opportunities for improvement.
2. Touchpoints: Any interaction between the customer and the company, whether in-store, online, through
customer support, or via product use.
3. Customer Feedback: Collecting customer insights through surveys, reviews, or interviews to continually
improve the service or product offering.
4. Consistency Across Channels: Ensuring a seamless experience across all customer touchpoints (online, in-
store, mobile apps, social media, etc.).
3. Service Design and Development Process
• Definition
• Service design is the activity of planning and
organizing people, infrastructure,
communication, and material components of a
service to improve its quality and the interaction
between the service provider and customers.
Key Elements of Service Design:
1.People: The users and service providers involved in the
service.
2.Props: Physical or digital artifacts needed to deliver the
service (e.g., brochures, websites, mobile apps).
3.Processes: The workflows, steps, and systems that enable
the service to function.
Phases of Service Design and Development:
1. Research and Insight Gathering: This phase involves researching the market, customer behaviors, and
competitor offerings. Using interviews, surveys, and observation to gather data on customer needs and
pain points.
2. Concept Design: In this stage, insights are transformed into service concepts, where designers envision how
the service will be delivered, and what key features will make it unique or improve its usability.
3. Prototyping: Similar to product design, service design uses prototypes to simulate customer interactions.
These prototypes could be in the form of role-playing, storyboards, or mock-ups of service scenarios.
4. Implementation: The final service is launched after thorough testing and refinement. The service design is
integrated into business operations and training is provided to employees.
5. Evaluation and Iteration: Post-launch feedback is crucial for understanding how the service performs in
real-life scenarios and where improvements can be made.
Service Design Tools:
Blueprinting: A tool that visualizes the various elements of a service, including physical evidence, customer
actions, frontstage actions, and backstage actions.
Customer Personas: Detailed descriptions of typical service users, capturing their behaviors, needs, and
challenges.
Journey Maps: Visual representations of the end-to-end service from the customer’s point of view,
including all touchpoints and interactions.
4. Service Experience Cycle and Case Studies
• Service Experience Cycle
• The Service Experience Cycle outlines the steps customers go through when interacting with a service. It includes:
1. Pre-service: Customer expectations, awareness, and decision-making before engaging with the service. This
could include marketing, reputation, or online presence.
2. During service: The active interaction between the customer and the service provider, such as buying a product,
receiving customer support, or using a platform.
3. Post-service: The follow-up interaction after the service is completed, such as receiving feedback, loyalty
programs, or after-sales support.
• Understanding the service experience cycle is crucial for businesses to ensure customer satisfaction and
encourage loyalty. Mapping the customer journey through these stages allows companies to identify pain points
and optimize the user experience.
• Case Studies:
Case Study 1: Airbnb’s Customer-Centered Design
Airbnb uses Design Thinking to create personalized, customer-centric experiences. Through continuous
feedback from both hosts and guests, the company was able to enhance its platform’s usability and
improve customer satisfaction by focusing on empathy and iterative design.
Case Study 2: Starbucks’ Customer Experience Overhaul
Starbucks implemented service design thinking to improve the in-store experience. Through journey
mapping and feedback from customers, they introduced mobile ordering, improved store layouts, and
retrained staff to focus on customer needs, increasing convenience and customer loyalty.
Case Study 3: Amazon Prime
Amazon Prime redefined customer expectations by focusing on seamless service design and enhancing user
experience at multiple touchpoints. The integration of fast delivery, customer support, and personalization
offers an exceptional service experience, leading to strong customer loyalty and market dominance.
5. Strategic Design Thinking for Competitive
Advantage
• Linear Innovation vs. Non-linear Innovation
Linear Innovation refers to incremental improvements to
existing products or services, following a predictable path.
Non-linear Innovation is disruptive, involving radical
changes that create entirely new markets or customer
segments.
3-Box Thinking for Strategic Innovation:
• Developed by Vijay Govindarajan, the 3-Box framework helps businesses manage the present, selectively
forget the past, and create the future:
1. Box 1: Manage the present (optimize current business).
2. Box 2: Forget the past (let go of outdated assumptions and methods).
3. Box 3: Create the future (invest in breakthrough innovations).
• The Box-3 ideation process encourages companies to focus on developing entirely new business models or
services that will give them a competitive edge in the future.
