Design Thinking: An Effective Strategy To Boost Customer Engagement

The past years have made brands realize the value of customers and the importance of creating value among them. This has led to an innovative methodology called design thinking. This approach centers on the human aspect of branding and enables the brands to identify the core problem with its users while eradication all other worldly assumptions to devise a solution. A number of organizations and brands have already incorporated this methodology to think outside the box and find boost their customer engagement. You can also implement the same methodology to boost engagement and this write-up would help you achieve the same.

Understanding Design Thinking

Devising a solution-based approach and strategy to solving any problem is what quickly defines design thinking. This methodology involves thinking outside the box to find solution to ill-defined problems. It adopts the human-centric approach to reframe problems and deal with them while keeping their focus mainly on the users. Through design thinking, design teams can carry out user-centered research and create prototypes for products and services to meet the expectations and requirements of the users. There are five stages of design thinking. These are:

• Empathize: This stage is where the design team needs to perform in-depth research of the problem from the user's perspective.

• Define: This stage allows the design team to synthesize all the information collected and define what the user's core problems are.

• Ideate: This stage pushes the design team to start thing of the problem and identify new and innovative solutions for the same by looking at the problem in alternate ways.

• Prototype: This is the stage where the companies employ their teams to make prototypes of products and services that would best solve the user's problems.

• Test: The last stage is to test the products or services offered by the company and see how their function. This stage is iterative as the test results usually begin the whole new stage where teams again empathize with users, define their new problems, ideate solutions, prototype them, and test once again until the right solution is found.

How To Boost Customer Engagement

Design thinking offers a number of ways for the brands and organizations to boost their customer engagement. Whether one is planning to engage customers in the real world, in the virtual world, or keep the mobile app users engaged, design thinking can have a positive impact on the overall process. Here are some ways to do so.

• Know What Customer Engagement Means For You The first thing to boost engagement, using any methodology, is to know what customer engagement is for your brand. Is it about increased dwell time? Or more visits? Or more comments? Once you have defines how you exactly want your customers to engage with your brand, it becomes easier to boost it. Design thinking enables the organizations to incorporate a more emotional and human-centric approach to deal with the users and their problems. This calls for interaction with the users, asking their feedbacks, and working on them to discuss the solution approaches. This would ensure your customers not just engage with the brand but also advocate it further.

• Put Yourself In Their Shoes Design thinking requires the design team to set your own assumptions and judgments about the worldly matters aside. They need to step into the users shoes to get the actual insight into their requirements. In order to boost the customer engagement, it is crucial to improve the customer experience. The point is to empathize with the users and understand what they want. The notions of the self should not be able to bother the designers while thinking of the solution.

• Understand The Problem To Devise Solution Though it always moves in the aforementioned five stages, there can never be a particular formula for design thinking. It is always about understanding the problems of the users by getting in their minds. Many brands try to find a solution just by seeing through the surface of the problem. They need to dig deeper and see everything through the user-centered lens. One might blame the placement of the page's CTA for lower engagement and brands might start to collaborate with web design companies to improve that. But design thinking enables them to find what the real problem is and what feeling in the customer's mind is killing the engagement. All touch points in the solution should center on the customers and only then can a solution be devised that could fully and satisfactorily solve the users' problems.

• Iteration Is Always The Key Many brands tend to follow the formula for identifying a problem and finding its one perfect solution. Whereas, in design thinking, iteration is the key to finding how the problem of the users can be effectively solved. They need to empathize with the users, define the problem, devise ideas for solution, create its prototype, test it on the users and re-test it until they find it to be perfect. Iteration enables you to gather more information through customer interactions and surveys. This enhances the customer interaction and boosts the overall engagement.

Brand value is always created by and reflected in the customer experience and engagement. And design thinking works to boost this. Brands can set up their design teams to incorporate this new methodology into their innovation process. In fact, in the past, many companies who have implemented this technique in their customer engagement process have agreed to it having a positive impact on their customer experience as well.