Spreading the love: Industrialisation of common sense in a large organisation

There have been two traditional approaches when trying to transform organisations to adopt customer-centric design. One approach is isolating a section of the organisation to work as innovation centre of excellence, but it’s hard to change an organisation without a connection. The other is embedding specialist designers across the organisation hoping for transformation by osmosis, which is a tough for even the most influential designers.

The NAB is currently implementing a Net Promoter System as part of an approach to become more customer centric. This has provided the Customer Experience Design Team at NAB an opportunity to attempt an alternative path forwards to transform the organisation to adopt customer centric design. The team created a tool – the target customer experience – which effectively industrialised customer research insights when applied with simple journey mapping. The method is simple enough that is can be used across the business, not just by the limited number of experience design experts. This allows real evidence to be considered when making design decisions that will affect customers without their direct input.

So, the big question: Is it possible for a team effectively understand, prioritise and satisfy user needs without using the gold standard – talking to customers? From a purist perspective, the answer is no. But a more pragmatic approach understands that talking to customers is not always possible in a large corporate organisation. Even if the money and time was always available there is still limited number of professionals with appropriate research skills.

This talk will recount at the development and implementation of the Target Customer Experience. There were high hopes and early ‘learning experiences’. But whilst there are remaining challenges the tool has shown success. Teams adopting this user centered method are making different decisions. But the greatest effect seems to be that tool has helped change the conversation and promotes a customer centric culture.

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