Cocreating concepts based on customer needs with Design Thinking tools

A global utility company with a focus on digital innovation had a track record of slow-to-market launches that didn’t always meet customers’ needs. While account teams stay close to their customers, the one-on-one, needs-based conversations weren’t a particular focus for them. Their conversations didn’t generally involve innovation ideation.

The client was challenged to understand their customers’ needs, pain points and possible solutioning to meet those needs, in addition to bridging internal customers’ desires and motivations for developing and bringing to market possible innovation offerings.

Aspirant conducted a full-scale Design Thinking project to understand internal and external customer needs. By starting with comprehensive interviews, we developed journey maps and personas for customer  groups and conducted a hybrid workshop to ideate on ALL customers’ needs, pain points and possible solutioning.

We then worked with external customers to cocreate concepts that would meet some of their digital innovation needs. We tested four distinct concepts in Digital Discovery® among internal and external customers to attain both quantitative and qualitive understanding of concept attractiveness and potential for Go To Market (GTM).

Comprehensive interviews to identify key personas and their journey maps for both internal and external customers (45 interviews, resulting in 6 key personas – 3 internal and 3 external).

Conducted half-day hybrid Design Thinking workshop (virtual global/local participation along with in-person attendees) to vet personas, journey maps and identify areas of opportunity for concept exploration.

Tested four distinct concepts in Digital Discovery® with quantitative results and deep qualitative insights.

Developed digital innovation roadmap for ‘22/’23 – resulting in the progression external  GTM pursuance and internal process improvement use.