Design thinking in the post-COVID economy Part 2

By Jeffrey Koh

While COVID-19 has accelerated everything from digitalisation to scientific research, there’s one aspect where a slower, more deliberative approach is needed: the customer experience. In the previous article of this two-part series on design thinking in the post-COVID economy, I discussed how customers have become more discerning and react best to businesses who exemplify the ideals of the Slow Movement—the emphasis of quality over quantity, and doing everything as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible. 

Here, I’ll be delving into how visualising a customer's experience with your brand from start to finish can help you apply the principles of Slow Movement in the design thinking process.

Customer journey maps, explained

Through the years, Chemistry, the design consultancy firm where I work as Partner and Director of Strategic Ventures, has had several opportunities to help organisations envisage their customer journeys in our work at the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA) PIXEL innovation space.

At first glance, customer journeys appear deceptively simple. Your company offers a product or service, and a customer decides to buy it—or not. If it’s the latter scenario, then it’s likely that somewhere along the way, your customer’s journey was derailed. This, of course, poses a challenge to your business. Ideally, you want to ensure that your customer’s experience is seamless throughout.

This is where customer journey maps, or CJMs, come in. From complex offline interactions at physical spaces such as hospitals and hotels all the way to fully digital interfaces, CJMs enable organisations to better understand their current customer journeys (what we refer to as an ‘As-is’ state) and uncover opportunities for positive change. At its core, CJMs seek to address the following question: What happens before, during and after a customer experiences a particular service or product?

To begin answering this question, it’s crucial to first consider your target customer’s motivations, behaviours and even preferences. At Chemistry, we even create distinct personas for each type of potential customer with the help of ethnographic methods like interviewing and observation. From here, a narrative of how a customer interacts with a particular offering naturally emerges, giving organisations a bird’s eye view into how they could serve their customers better and build a long-term relationship.

Once this whole customer experience is verified via testing and validation, an organisation can begin to imagine how a better customer journey could look like—what we call the coveted “To-be” state.

Reinventing the shopping experience

One notable project we’ve taken on at Chemistry is the rebranding of baking supply company Phoon Huat into Redman, which was completed before our collaboration with IMDA. A beloved household name in Singapore, Phoon Huat started out in the late 1940s as a small mom-and-pop store that provided high-quality baking goods to businesses and members of the community. In 2011, the company decided it was high time to modernise their brand and retail experience.

The old Phoon Huat stores were utilitarian in nature and filled with bulk goods. For professional bakers, such a format worked since it allowed them to buy supplies in a fuss-free manner. As the company started to rebrand itself as Redman, they wanted to appeal now to a wider audience including home bakers and casual hobbyists.

Applying the principles of Slow Movement to our CJM for Redman, we began to develop a much more immersive concept for their new retail stores. Instead of retaining the store’s original, functional format in hopes of making a quick buck, we encouraged them to explore the romanticism that baking offered. From kitchen pods with live cooking to product demonstrations, Redman’s planned concept stores weren’t just set to sell products—they were now also selling a lifestyle.

Slow but steady wins the race

In many ways, Phoon Huat and Redman’s successful rebranding effort is worth emulating, especially now with the existence of dedicated innovation spaces like PIXEL. With most customers hesitant to spend immediately, it’s worth thinking of similar strategies to convert the challenge of COVID-19 into an opportunity. For instance, how can we use CJMs to align our products and services with the behaviours of the customers? How can we continue to engage with them as they journey through COVID-19? And finally, how can we ensure that our product or service is at the top of their mind once they are ready to engage with us again?

As we formulate our strategy, this is where the idea of Slow Movement surfaces. Instead of focusing on quick wins and low-hanging fruit, we can reimagine parts of our operations, communications and activities into fostering lasting relationships with our customers. This starts by drawing up an As-is CJM of your current product or service journey, in order to develop a new To-be one.

Via CJMs you might identify that as people spend more time at home and online, your communications via social media could be geared to discuss how your product or service would benefit their new lifestyle. Meanwhile, an office supply company that normally caters to business environments, could pivot to outfitting the home office.

All these possibilities and more can be explored at IMDA’s PIXEL, which offers workshops and project-based coaching to guide organisations through the principles of design thinking and mapping better customer journeys. Ultimately, by investing time to undertake a design thinking project at PIXEL and foster stronger, longer-term relationships with your customers during this downturn, you can be top-of-mind when there’s an upturn.