Lean, Six Sigma, Design Thinking and Agility: the inseparables of a successful customer experience

The inseparables of a successful customer experience

On Wednesday, February 19, I participated in the Desjardins Lab lunchtime conference organized by the innovation coach Joyce Bouchard. A conference that particularly appealed to me. An outstanding popularizer, Ms. Bouchard deconstructed and demystified all these approaches one by one before showing us how they could be integrated into our strategic thinking.

Here is what I learned from it, hoping it inspires you too!

Its leitmotif: all these practices can coexist and be adopted. Why are we seeing them more and more now? Because we no longer have the choice to integrate them if we want to adequately meet the needs of an ever more demanding clientele. People now have a central place in all the products and experiences we create. These approaches create precisely this opportunity to get closer to our customers in order to offer them something that has this ultimate value: meaning.

During her conference, Ms. Bouchard gave us a 101 course on these innovative approaches before explaining their relevance to any reflection.

1-Understand the origin

(Attention, scholars, do not jump to the ceiling. Explanations (express)

• Design Thinking: comes from the industrial design sector. The objective is to create new objects that perfectly meet customer expectations.

• Agility: comes from the technologies and limitations of traditional project management in waterfall mode. The problem came from the fact that we planned for the long term and that we ended up delivering a product that no longer met the customer's needs at all, several weeks/months/years later.

• Lean Six Sigma: comes from the manufacturing sector. The objective was to eliminate waste on the production chain and to implement a continuous improvement process in order to successfully deliver a quality and standardized product.
  

2- Solve a problem and provide an adapted solution

All these approaches aim to respond to problems and to find appropriate solutions. They are completely complementary as soon as we wonder about the best way to proceed and deliver a product (or service) that best meets customer expectations. They start from one principle: the customer is part of the solution. Sometimes called practices, approaches, methods, they are above all ways of thinking that involve questioning and actively examining responses.

You just need to know how to use the right approach at the right time! So what do they really allow?

• Design Thinking: is meant to be creative! Like an ethnologist, we try to understand what the client is thinking and feeling. The aim is to design new products or services, eliminating irritants. It's about generating ideas, leaving the status quo behind. Co-creation is the key word where nothing is done without the customer. We explore, we create, we propose, we question, we prototype and we experiment.

• Agility: focuses on the delivery of service to the customer. Team work is essential. We think together about the value created and all the solutions that could improve the final product or service. It is an incremental process where the product is built as you go. We therefore allow ourselves to learn by progressing in order to perfect our product and our practices.

• Lean Six Sigma: focuses on the process, that is, on how things are done internally. The aim is to reduce waste and unnecessary steps as much as possible in order to be as efficient as possible. We are committed to continuous improvement where we are constantly looking for added value for the customer.‍

3- A concrete example: the queue

Nothing better than a simulation to understand not only how these approaches can be intertwined, but above all to become aware of their usefulness for those who want to create a memorable experience for their customers, free of any irritants that would have the opposite effect of what you wanted at the beginning.

The problem? A queue that is too long for a one-day X event and customers are getting impatient.

The first thing to do to prevent this situation from happening again is to put yourself fully in the visitor's shoes, to understand exactly what they are going through and the emotions they are feeling at each stage (or minute that goes by). You have to completely rethink the experience beforehand.

In your team, you must think together about the problem posed by this experience (which you did not necessarily anticipate and which may have previously unsuspected consequences). Indeed, waiting can become a serious irritant (impatience, discomfort, etc.) and cause your customer to feel upset, angry, lost or abandoned. While he could very well feel happy, safe, helped, or pleasantly surprised.

In this exercise, each approach has its place. Just a question of prioritization... and common sense!

• The priority is naturally to redesign the queue experience, as it is currently seriously affecting the experience that the visitor must experience next during the event. We then use Design Thinking. We prototype (Does the queue have to be one-sided? Is it wide enough? Is it safe? Can we add distracting elements?) and we created different versions of the perfect queue to see what the best option would be.

• Then, you have to deliver the product and this is where agile processes make sense in order to break down the project and ensure its delivery. Here, we will improve small things in the queue: the colors of the carpet, the scents in the air, the animations, the water points, the benches, etc. The important thing is to set up an iterative process (we build as we get feedback) to ensure that the customer is satisfied with each progress (we test the ideas!). We observe the reactions of our visitors, we gather their opinion, we are interested in their emotions... and we adjust.

• We've finally found the perfect queue experience and we want to replicate it for each of our products and upcoming events. Lean Six Sigma is taking over. We ensure that the management of this experience is as healthy as possible and as effective as possible (management of costs, waste, deadlines, resources, materials, etc.).

Across all industries, we are increasingly interested in these approaches because they make it possible to put the end customer at the center of all decisions. The tourism industry is no exception. All business sectors are facing the same challenges: an increasingly demanding and unfaithful customer. This reality requires us to go above and beyond in the way we design our products and services in order to offer our visitors an experience that makes sense to them and for which they will come back to us.

More than simple problem-solving techniques, they are the foundation of modern working methods, and not to mention... the inseparable elements of a successful customer experience.

Do you want to discuss these approaches with us? Write to me.

To (re) see the Video of the conference.