How Design Thinking can help identify Opportunities for Growth
Design Thinking is at its core a process of solving problems by keeping the customer at the heart of everything you do.
And once you have the customer up front and central, there isn’t a problem you can’t solve using this process.
The question that plagues nearly every company is how to keep the pace of growth going once they’ve hit a critical mass and started plateauing, and this is a question we’ve often been tasked with solving.
Understanding the existing and potential customer bases, their needs, their triggers & motivations, identifying all those cohorts who use the said product, ascertaining the way/ways that they use it, all of this helps us identify new opportunities for growth.
Take for instance the case of a web hosting services company targeted at Small & Medium Enterprises that wanted to understand why its numbers had started stagnating, despite the continued explosion in the number of businesses being set up.
Deep qualitative research revealed that while there was definitely a growth in the number of businesses being set-up, and while that should have implied a corresponding increase in their business as well, unfortunately the decision making was typically not always being made by the business owner himself.
On the contrary, we found that the decision was increasingly being taken by the third party web developer, and the fact that the company had been talking to the business owner cohort thus far, meant that there wasn’t much focus being given to the developer.
What this meant for the company was that they needed to create a new channel, one that was tailored to this new cohort who seemed to control a chunk of their revenues. The product, the offers, the communication, all needed to be customised afresh for this audience, so as to be relevant to them!
This flip in terms of how they viewed their customer base allowed them to go after this new cohort and shore up their business as a result of this change!
This example illustrates an opportunity by identifying a new user cohort!
Do you have any examples to share of how being customer centric has allowed your business to identify new growth opportunities? Would love to hear from you…