One of the pressing problems organizations encounter today is to understand customers’ needs. And this goes beyond having beautiful designed personas or bringing your offers as fast as possible to your end customers. Our clients’ strategic and experience design projects suggest that what keeps leaders up at night is to solve the right problems for the right customers.
So, why is meeting customers’ needs proven to be harder to achieve? From the strategic standpoint, rushing to create solutions and not taking enough time in problem space to truly understand and identify untapped opportunities is what causes the most waste of time and resources. Problem reframing is one of the most overlooked strategies.
Today, we delve into the case of Home Credit, Vietnam’s leading FinTech to deepen our learnings on the process of framing problems strategically.
Home Credit has a great purpose to empower Vietnamese consumers to take control of their lives by bringing them sustainable financial solutions. With more than 15 millions customers, Home Credit is one of the leading FinTech companies that is well recognized by the community.
Even the most data abundant company has unanswered questions. Home Credit is not short of information and knowledge of their customers but such access doesn’t stop the company from being curious about what the customers’ true needs are to shape for product and strategy design. With the purpose to be customer-centric, collaborative and iterative in their new value added product and strategy roadmap design, the company starts with a slightly broad challenge:
To take it from there, the leadership team decided to bring great minds from diverse stakeholders together to ask questions to challenge their internal assumptions through a vigorous design & testing sprint. Through the process of ‘design and test’ sprints, new insightful value propositions that the team didn’t anticipate emerged and an expensive and costly launch has been avoided. We take a look at 3 main successes.
As a Financial Technology Company, data is available but understanding customers’ true needs to make sense out of all the available information is not an easy job. The company’s challenge is to frame the right questions on the areas that they need clarity on and that guide them to the newly identified opportunities beyond what is known at hand.
For instance, the Insurance product Home Credit would like to develop requires a deep understanding of the customers’ needs, behaviors and key pain points that they want to solve. The project team was on the journey to define the unique value proposition and the easy, fast and simple experience to enjoy the products. Building from a researched picture of the customers, the team collaborated together to form some hypotheses and initial questions. The process of deep empathy invites the team into users’ real experience, mapping out the entire users’ experience. From there, they created meanings out of the insights to pose important questions.
Through this process, a shared common language of customers was created. The team challenged each other by looking at the smallest stories, connecting all dots of observations and validating with various data.
The questions that the team formed unleashed new creativity and invited them to new areas of opportunities.
So how can we become an obsessed tester? Doodle is no short of Design Thinking led ways to create prototypes of ideas. Home Credit is no short of talented researchers and designers to engage customers and users throughout. The success lies in the right mindsets. Owning the right mindsets of a user-centric tester is crucial. The common trap we fall into is to fall in love with our ideas. And this is only justified for the fact that we have invested our heart, time, resources into the process and become ‘protective’ of the ideas’ we made and put on a fence around them. To test ideas, first of all, we should remove our attachment to our own ideas and get ready to ‘fail’ and to receive feedback.
“We test in a way that we know we may be wrong, not in a way that we want to be right” shared Yen Nguyen -Design Team Lead, Doodle Design.
This mindset is not only encouraged but proven to be viable. In fact, before the Home Credit team took the testing sprint, they had a different hypothesis and ideas of their solutions. Until they presented what they thought worked in front of the customers, they managed to find out 80% of their understanding is completely misaligned. Without this process, the team would have gone ahead investing in making the solutions, running campaigns, investing in resources and could have wasted time, money and lose out to their competition.
“By engaging end users in the early testing stages, we managed to achieve first MVP of the product that the team is confident to launch as plan.” – continued Khon Tran, Product Assistant Manager – VAS Products Home Credit
At the backbone of our process, collaboration is the north star. Collaboration is not about great minds thinking alike but coming together. Across Doodle Design’s projects, we collaborated with industry leaders to identify top issues including “Poor alignment”, “Ineffective communications”, “Team disconnection”, “Decision-making process”, and “Time to market”.
These roadblocks are more deadly for strategic and experience design projects that require multi stakeholders like Home Credit. To a product innovation project, for example, speed is really the essence of it all. Quite often, the internal process holds this back and creates frictions that slow down the race to the market. As for another strategy planning project that Doodle and Home Credit collaborated on, the broad and multidisciplinary perspectives help identified:
As we observe, Home Credit’s success lies in the effort to create a diverse team of different stakeholders, backgrounds, opinions who are committed and driven to deliver the desirable outcomes. This approach establish a consensus way of working where together, the teams dived into a series of team sessions, workshopping and co-creation and simulation of our user testings to challenge status quo and build new desirable ideas..
In short, re-framing, simply put, is the art of asking questions and challenging questions asked. According to the Harvard Business Review, “How might we…” is today’s innovator’s most secret sauce of success. To ask alternative and creative questions, we need to take healthy paces in problem identification space to truly empathize with customers’ needs and to lessen our “time-love continuum” that hinders our perspectives for new discoveries.
“By healthily looking again at ideas and through internal critique, the project team managed to invite everyone’s input into the process, creating super opportunities for ownership and most of all, bringing in more and more genius ideas to drive the success of the project.” – Khon Tran, Product Assistant Manager – VAS Products Home Credit
To help you answer the most important question above. “Do we understand your customers’ needs?”, let’s walk away with an even more pressing question. “Do we ask enough alternative questions to challenge our own assumptions?”
