So, how do companies develop great digital,
end to end customer journey as just described.
Design thinking provides a compelling framework to re-imagine customer journey,
with the customer at the center of attention.
Let me explain what this means.
In essence, the design thinking process is iterative,
is flexible, and focused on collaboration between designer and user.
It consists of five steps.
The first stage aims to give the designer team
and empathetic understanding of the problem they are trying to solve.
What is the customer looking for?
What are the so-called moments of truth?
What really bothers him or her?
Is it a complicated online purchase process for the airline ticket?
Or is it the missing information on the flight delay? Or both?
In the next stage, the team analyzes
this observation from the first stage and synthesizes them.
They might need to re-frame the problem in
human centric way or even define a new unmet need that should be tackled.
In this example of my flight,
it is the lack of transparency on gate changes on delay,
and on alternative connection.
In the first stage, the ideating stage,
the team members start to identify new solution to the problem.
How could you create transparency?
By providing push messages on the smartphone.
How could the airline go further?
Anticipate customer questions.
In the fourth, the prototyping stage,
the team produces a number of inexpensive skill
down version of the product or services feature they want to change.
It is an experimental phase,
and the aim is to allow rapid improvement on the initial solution.
The app I used to buy my tickets and get notification might
have just been a "draft version."
A minimum viable product.
It doesn't need to look fancy,
but it incorporated the key features that are important to the customer.
In the fifth stage, the testing phase,
the team tests the prototype in real life condition,
to see how it impacts the customer experience along the whole journey.
That is basically a trial and error process.
The successful features will be rolled out as skill.
The failed one should direct the team back to the drawing board, talk to the customer,
again, we think new solution,
prototype them, testing them and so on.
This five steps approach is carried out in a very flexible nonlinear fashion,
meaning you can always jump back to an earlier step or different groups within
the design team may work at different stages depending on their respective features.
I want to stress that this approach is equally
relevant for products and service innovation,
for back end operations,
for go to market,
and even re-thinking support function.
The difference is that,
if we are talking about,
which are for example,
the end to end digital journey is the internal employee's experience during recruiting,
on boarding, skills development, etcetera.
If you want to hear more about the different type,
have a look in our conversation with Antoine,
our senior partner from our Paris office who will walk us through some real life example.