In a fast growing Indian market, rapid growth for this global FMCG organization meant finding it difficult to meet the demands of its customers and making its products available faster.

‘Reimagining Customer Service’ for this FMCG was accelerated by facilitating a vision lab and a design lab, spanning cross-functional business leaders from the organization.

The vision lab combined the power of visual business narratives with systems thinking frameworks, to help the customer envision a ‘big picture’ view to redefine their real problem – “how to craft an efficient, scalable and delightful customer experience to drive growth”.

Shifting from ‘how can we make products available faster’, to ‘why is customer experience important to driving growth’ helped this FMCG major to reprioritize the context to influence growth. Rapid development of minimum viable products and services validated the business case for scaling impact.

A global Pharmaceutical organization, decided to disrupt its India based business model and identified key customer journeys to impact through digital strategies.

The design lab exposed cross-functional stakeholders to inputs and insights shared by external experts who have leveraged digital strategies to disrupt business models elsewhere.

Applying learnings from these insights to their own customer journeys resulted in a funnel of ideas and concepts across five prioritised areas for digital impact.

A shortlist of 3-4 initiatives were crafted with champions to own the execution of the concepts into reality.

The collective experience of diverse stakeholders was applied strategically to the customer journeys through acceleration of idea and concept ‘bursts’, resulting in an enriched ‘where-to-play’ landscape of initiatives. Prioritisation of high-impact initiatives with funding commitments by business champions resulted in jumpstarting digital strategies.

‘Lost sales’ opportunities led this global agro-chemical firm to streamline its forecast accuracy across sales and demand planning functions.

The design lab simulated business scenarios inspired by a ‘day-in-the-life’ of sales and demand planning teams. Cross-functional team assignments inspired consideration of global best practices, identifying emerging patterns and themes, generating ‘user-needs-insights’ and opportunities to prototype more robust forecasting models.

Empathy to business realities and optimised forecast accuracy models allowed the sales and demand planning teams collaborate in a more integrated way, reducing risks for revenue leakage.

When a Fortune 500 FMCG firm decided to simplify the way it communicates complex success stories within the organisation, it considered the art and science of storytelling as an innovative medium to inspire change.

We listened in closely to the stories waiting to be told, otherwise presented as tons of powerpoint slides. We helped presenters sharpen the story they needed to narrate to our talented scribes as naturally as possible. We helped visualise powerful metaphors for the key messages, and had these visually represented as draft storyboards. These evolved into beautifully illustrated prescribes on large white board canvases that could become backdrops for great corporate stories waiting to be shared with others.

Besides demystifying success stories through such ‘visually’ inspired storytelling, these works of art became a repository for future communication within and across business functions.

A Fortune 500 Fintech firm used design thinking to accelerate the engineering and development of its financial products and services, to stave off competition from non-traditional startup FinTechs.

Incubating and accelerating a product or service requires a business/function to think like a startup. How will promoters of the product or service discover their values, culture and product/service journey towards creating a unique customer experience? What will a minimum viable product look like? Are these customer experiences designed in alignment to customer personas and customer journeys?

Using industry standard toolkits from The Design Thinkers Group, participants were introduced to gamification scenarios based on the basic principles of design thinking. Participants are assigned personas and roles across potential customers and startup promoters. Products and Services are crafted based on personas and roles through a process of co-creation and co-design.

Promoter roles build empathy for client personas, as they begin to build their product and services around such real needs. Customer journeys and prototypes are rapidly built, tested and presented to the rest of the team – potential investors who validate their intention to invest in such products or services. Feedback propels the teams to iterate their assumptions and designs until it evolves into an acceptable minimum viable prototype. Thus a culture of design thinking, applied to real business challenges allowed this team to collectively think like a startup as they kick-off their new product development teams.