Embedding customer centricity
This is the age of the customer. Customer expectations, choice and power have never been greater. If brands and organisations fail to meet these expectations, they risk being left behind. But meeting these demands and delivering relevant, seamless, personalised experiences is proving more difficult than ever.
"To thrive, businesses need to put the customer at the heart of what they do – in other words, become ‘customer centric’."
How do you exceed your customer’s expectations?
Customers - whether consumers, a large multinational client or your own employees- now have a vast array of channels with which to interact with organisations. They are taking complex, non-linear journeys to achieve their goals and out-of-date operating models and technologies are struggling to cope with these more advanced customer needs.
At Oaklin, we recognise the importance of centring around the customer, by placing the user at the heart of experience and service design. Our service design approach shifts the perspective from the product to the whole ecosystem. We design holistic services and experiences that exceed customer expectations and keep them coming back.
What is service design?
If customer centricity is the new standard, then service design is the tool. Service design is the process of designing end-to-end services and it encompasses everything from customer experience to backend systems, data and the processes needed to enable that experience.
Who is Service Design for
Service Design is for innovative leaders who want to:
- Better connect with and understand their customers
- Uncover opportunities for innovation
- Rapidly investigate problems and build holistic solutions across the organisation
- Define a clear vision for the future and build the confidence of how to get there
- Ensure smooth, seamless, and consistent user journeys, improving experience or conversion rates
- Reach new audiences or markets or explore new revenue streams
What else we offer
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Innovation and problem solving
- User research
- Competitor analysis
- Design Thinking
- Innovation sessions and ‘strategy hacks’
- Business cases and roadmaps
Experience design
- Customer experience strategy
- Customer persona definition
- Customer journey mapping
- Wireframing and rapid prototyping
- UX and UI design
Launch a new product or service
- Business strategy (product-market-fit)
- Wireframing and rapid prototyping
- UX and UI design
- Build rapidly, test often, learn always
- Product management
Our approach
Our end-to-end service design approach starts with what our clients are trying to achieve. We then work collaboratively, putting our client’s customers at the centre of the design process and focus on the rapid delivery of value.
The empathise, envision and experiment stages feature rapid iteration. We form hypotheses and constantly test them to define the overall solution blueprint and target areas to deliver this change.
The develop, deliver and scale and adopt stages can occur separately for each area of the new service. They operate with a defined target for delivery and use feedback from users in a live environment to drive agile delivery of the new service components. Activities here aim to deliver working solutions to users in the form of MVPs (minimum viable products).
“Service Design helps organisations in centring around the customer, recognising that people don’t interact with organisations in single moments, but within complex journeys of multi-channel touchpoints."Mark Croucher, specialist in Service Design
Mark Croucher
Associate Partner
Mark is a Digital Transformation Consultant with strong experience delivering technology change across a wide variety of industry sectors. He has experience across the full project life-cycle, including digital strategy, product design, agile methodology definition and digital delivery. Mark enjoys helping clients make the most of the latest digital technologies and has a keen interesting in driving customer experience. He has an open and collaborative style of working and thrives on driving sustainable business results through new technologies.
Mark is currently supporting an Automotive startup to define their portfolio of customer-facing digital initiatives. Recently, he was the Lead Digital Business Analyst for a large-scale customer experience transformation programme; he scoped, mobilised and led the delivery of a cloud-based document management platform at a “Big Six” UK energy supplier; and worked with a major UK bank to lead teams of business analysts in a global supplier assurance programme.
"The best part of the Digital Capability at Oaklin is that it keeps you on your toes and up-to-date with the latest digital trends. We meet regularly, with everyone bringing an advancement in digital technologies they have seen as a potential topic for discussion"
Case Study
An end-to-end service design approach for the automotive sector
Oaklin embedded a team to lead the design and development of a direct-to-consumer, digital retail model, disrupting the traditional dealer model.
The team utilised our end-to-end service design approach to develop a future state service blueprint for the sales journey of the new 4x4 vehicle. This allowed the team to develop a prioritised roadmap of capability and functionality to be delivered based on business value, and design the business required to orchestrate the desired sales journey.
The team was trusted to support throughout the lifecycle of the programme, providing both product owner and programme management expertise. We mobilised and ran the programme and ensured product excellence by putting the customer at the heart of delivery.
Oaklin’s efforts resulted in a successful launch, and on-time delivery of “Reservation Day” which surpassed internal sales targets. Oaklin's support has continued through to launching online sales and our next target is customer deliveries.
