How can design thinking transform the quality of your service?

The principle of focusing on the human dimension of a service and product is enabling organisations to better serve their clients.

Design thinking seeks to break free from traditional and rigid task-orientated approaches to doing business. It encourages collaboration among teams, the pooling of knowledge and creates the space to experiment with new ways of working.

Woven into the organizational fabric

These principles have been widely diffused throughout EY and the consultancy is now spreading the word to its clients. But they need to be fully understood to make a difference. Design thinking is not the last step of the process; it should be woven into the very fabric of an organization.

Ideas are introduced during on-the-job training, so that staff members can take a lead role in their implementation and become co-authors of new people-focused approaches. This process can be facilitated – structured sessions can yield results quickly – until team members are more experienced and become comfortable with the principles. The focus should be on creating an environment where this transition can flourish.

Tangible results

An EY client specializing in legal insurance has experienced first-hand the transformative impact of design thinking. The client had a very qualitative financial product, but it wasn’t receiving sufficient market traction. Instead of just focusing on further product refinements or marketing initiatives, EY carried out a thorough examination of the problem using a wide set of human-centric research methods.

In discussions with both the brokers and the end-users (SMEs), a few things became clear. Brokers felt uncomfortable to sell this more complex product, they have limited SMEs in portfolio, while SMEs didn’t understand the need for this product. To overcome this gap, EY developed a few tailored concepts to allow the broker to better and easier explain and discuss the product, such as a digital legal risk calculator that demonstrates clear advantages to potential customers. Two years after the exercise, the product demand trebled, conversion rates doubled, and the average premium grew x 2,5.

Improving interaction

In fact, the growing popularity of personalized insurance and healthcare options are areas of particular relevance for design thinking. The five principles provide a working framework for improving the interaction of companies and their prospective clients.

However, Management has a key role to play in making this thinking an eventual success. It has to create an environment that stimulates this mindset in their teams, where they look to cooperate with colleagues in different departments and are comfortable with trying new things that may not always work. Better informed teams that are driven to achieve the wider mission, rather than specific tasks, can have an incredible impact.