2 minute read
Design Thinking: A Critical Key to the Customer Experience
By Mark Campanale
When it comes to promoting your business, everything matters. Just as we need to be problem solvers, we also need to be designers. Every aspect of our store must be developed with the customer in mind – from the products and services we provide, to how we greet customers when they call or enter our store, to the architecture of each location – including our web presence. Pawning can be an emotional experience, where customers may be parting with treasures in order to pay rent. With that in mind, we need to be accommodating in every aspect of our business.
Looking for the human behind everything.
Finding the human element in your operation is about becoming mindful about everyday transactions and situations that happen in your store. For example: when a new customer walks into your store, do they know where to go or who to talk to? Are they crystal clear on where the layout takes them (or doesn’t)? Try from your perspective to walk in your customer’s shoes – when you enter your store. What do you see? If the layout isn’t crystal clear to you, then it’s even worse for your customers. Customers who feel comfortable always come back.
Wayfinding is critical on and offline.
While you strategize your in-store wayfinding plan, you must also keep in mind other mediums. Take a look at your website - is the wayfinding intuitive? Do the links help them find what they are looking for? What if they need help? – Is it easy to find and contact someone? Customers who can’t find what they need, or find someone to help them easily, will abandon the site altogether.
Design thinking is a critical component to the ultimate customer experience.
Often, we get so deep into working in the business that we need to step back and work on the business. Having a roadmap is helpful.
Here are the core principles of design thinking: Begin with people, culture, and context:
understand human needs deeply enough to know where to begin design—the biggest challenge is ensuring that you’re asking the right questions. Engage: enable participation from customers, employees, and even those outside the company to build upon ideas – a fresh set of eyes is always a benefit.
Rapid prototyping: learn rapidly by building, testing, failing, and honing. Essentially, take notes on your employee and customers’ experience in your store and online, then sketch out what your design needs to look like on and offline.
Execute: change is hard—especially the type of transformative change realized with such a reimagining of the customer/company interface. It’s for these reasons that empathy in our design is so important; Empathy forces us to be creative. Empathy insists that we enter another person’s world, experience first-hand what they are experiencing, and then interpret their experience for ourselves.
