How can marketers use design thinking to optimize the digital customer experience ?

Abstract

In a business world where customer experience has become a top priority and a key competitive differentiator, companies are trying every day to create delightful experiences for their users to gain competitive advantage. What makes this challenge even harder is the digital transformation that is disrupting the way customers are experiencing products and services. With the technological evolution, users gained more power in terms of dictating the rules and they are looking for simple, consistent, and personalized experiences. This means that the customer experience is different when we are in a digital context and the customers’ expectations are shaped by new standards. In order to be able to meet those new requirements, marketers need new ways of thinking innovatively and of designing products and services that are user centric and that put the customer first. Design thinking can be seen as a promising method to achieve this, as it is a human-centered problem-solving method that starts from human needs and creates solutions around them through a creative and iterative process. This master thesis tries to explore how can marketers use design thinking to optimize the digital customer experience. Through an exploratory market study, we have interviewed professionals from different Belgian design agencies to discover how is design thinking used today to solve marketing challenges and how can its’ process be used to optimize the digital customer experience. The results showed that design thinking has a great potential to optimize the digital customer experience, and when applied properly marketers can beneficiate from it to create exceptional experiences around their offerings. The process of design thinking allows to be more creative, to start from real user’s pain points, to come up come up with innovative solutions and to test them with end-users before launching them. The user centricity and innovativeness of this approach allows companies to improve the user experience and offer the simple, personalized and engaging experiences that customers are dreaming of when interacting with companies through digital touchpoints.