Date: 06 May 2022
I often come across teams and individuals who struggle to articulate what problem they’re solving clearly? This naturally demotivates them, and they feel frustrated with their work as they don’t understand why they’re designing something.
Statistically, design-led organisations increase their revenue and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts. Many of us have read the case studies on the world’s leading companies like Google, Netflix, and Amazon, who have an unwavering focus on their customers. The tools and methods they use are widely available and applicable to your businesses today. You too can now drive customer-centric step change within your organisation.
So, what do we mean by customer-centricity?
Simply put, it’s seeing the world through your customers’ eyes, hearts, and minds, understanding their perceptions and expectations to identify their latent needs.
You do this by leaning in and listening, watching, and talking to your customers. We need to go beyond our own assumptions, keeping an open and curious mind to gather insights from our customer’s life. We call this ‘discovering uncomfortable truth’. This empathy for customers’ problems often provides teams and individuals with objectivity to make better decisions. And we notice teams anchor back to what they heard through these customer interactions. We also notice, most often, we see the problem statement we started with gets refined after the interaction with the customers.
Value proposition
We can use the value proposition to narrow down on the value you’re delivering for your customers rather than focusing on the features and attributes of your solution or product. Download one of these value proposition templates below to summarise what your product or service is trying to achieve:
For
Describe your customer segment. Who are you designing for? Who are your most important customers? Whom are you creating value?
Who needs a way to
Identify your customer’s pain points and problems. What keeps your customer awake at night? What are the main challenges and difficulties that your customer faces?
This solution will
What value do you deliver to your customers? What is your offering?
Unlike
Who are your competitors?
Unique value proposition
A clear, concise statement that describes why your product/service is worthy for your customer.
If you’re stuck, reach out, we have education courses that will empower you to fill in the blanks on your own value proposition quickly – ‘Fundamentals of Design Thinking’: https://assurity.nz/courses/fundamentals-of-design-thinking/
