Design thinking: A strategy to enhance customer value

Abstract

As the business environment evolves and innovations are introduced, organisations need versatile product designs to achieve success and growth that comes by increasing customer value. Organisations are constantly challenged to adopt new approaches while keeping their business goals in mind, increasing sales, and market share, and delivering quality customer service experiences with the offered products. This allows businesses to adopt design thinking concepts to create unique products that provide a differentiated value proposition. Evolving markets and changing customer behaviours call on businesses to develop products that address the customers' unmet needs. The purpose of this study was to explore and gain insights into the application and effectiveness of design thinking as an approach to addressing customer problems to enhance customer value. A deep understanding of design thinking to enhance customer value will help management use design thinking techniques to address unmet customer needs and create a better customer value propositions. This study provides an understanding of the application of design thinking methodology its dimensions, factors that lead to successful implementation, benchmarking practices, and how organisations can enhance customer value and gain competitive advantage. This study uses an exploratory and qualitative design with data collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews with 11 decision-makers including executives, design practitioners, and entrepreneurs in South Africa. The conceptual framework that emerged from the research study outlines the key concepts of design thinking and customer value and their relationships, thereby confirming and adding to the existing body of knowledge and providing potential future contributions into the design thinking literature. Two new findings identified in this study as potential additions to the design thinking literature include removing internal competition to create a collaborative culture. Second, develop a differentiated value proposition model that is independent of the core operating model to create a differentiated value proposition. The key findings of this study was the assessment that organisations need to have the right skills and competencies to implement a design thinking process successfully. Organisations need to build a culture that supports design thinking and prioritises it as a strategic imperative. Key recommendations based on the findings include ensuring management and various stakeholders hire the right talent, develop a unified culture of collaboration to achieve common organisational goals, and be progressive in implementing design thinking