 Welcome to the session, How to create products and services that customer love, which would be taken by our panelist, Alisha Raghavan. Alisha is the Chief Design Officer at Pensar Design. She has 13 years of experience in designing systems. She is very passionate in delivering experiential solutions that are meaningful and help in resolving problems and solving knowledge problems. Without further delay, over to you, Alisha. Thank you. The focus of the topic is how to create products and services that customers love, and how do we do this by being customer obsessed? A little bit about Pensar Design, the company that I work for, our process is anchored in design thinking, and that allows us to be customer obsessed, to delve deep into customer journeys, understand their context, and uncover opportunities, that then help nurture strategic innovative solutions for our clients. The reason I wanted to show you our clients was, being customer obsessed isn't limited to a particular industry. Being customer obsessed allows us to work with companies across different industries, across different domains, and across different business challenges. Ever there's a thought that, you know, this is not for me, this is not going to work in my industry, being customer obsessed is looking at the customer for your particular business problem and understanding them and making sense of that. So why customer obsession? And how does that help you create products and services that the customers love? We really believe that being customer obsessed creates a competitive advantage that helps galvanize business group. And what do I mean by that? Because if you truly start by really understanding your customer, understanding how they feel, understanding how they think, what their belief systems are, and how they behave, then you possibly understand them better than they know themselves. And it gives you the leverage to create awesome product and service experiences that customers can't keep quiet about, that they want to share with other people. And that leads to many happy active customers. And if you have many happy active customers, I think that's a dream for every company. It allows you to directly connect to business growth. Now, to be able to create that customer value and grow your business, there are essentially two areas for every company to look at that is solving the problem, solving the right problem and solving the problem right. And you have to go through both of these processes to be able to be customer obsessed and create that value. The first area of focus, which is solving the right problem, is about asking yourself, are you truly solving the right problem? Is this a problem that's worth solving for? Is it a problem that the customer truly cares about? And this stage requires you to be curious to build empathy and to really be able to save its certainty that's backed by customer stories that what you're doing and what you're going after is the right problem. And if you're solving the right problem, then that's half the job done. Now, let's say you have all of the certainty that you're solving the right problem. The next part of the piece is solving the problem right. When the second area of focus comes into play, it looks at are you addressing your customer's needs with the solution that you have in mind? Will this help the customer achieve their goals? And when I mean this, I mean the solution. Will it help the customers achieve their goals? This stage of solving the problem right, it has to make you want to be relentless. It should make you want to dream big. Think of multiple different solutions for that problem that you have identified. And really go into a more iterative process until you're able to showcase that customer value. Now, for any organization, this is not a one-time process or one-time step. As your customers are evolving and growing, you're hopefully going through a continuous channel of understanding whether you're solving the right problem and solving the problem right. So I wanted to be able to illustrate this through a case study today. But very quickly, I wanted to go into, what does it take to solve the right problem? Of course, it requires curiosity, empathy, and the ability to act. But it also means checking in on your unconscious biases and understanding your customers better than they know themselves. And what does it take to solve the problem right? It means falling in love with the problem. Not going after the first solution that comes to mind, but literally falling in love with the problem until you almost maniacally obsessed about it and finding the best solution possible to solve that problem right. And when you are solving the problem right, you're also evaluating and measuring to see what is the benefit your solution is delivering to your end user or customer. So when it comes to unconscious biases, we've come to believe that we all have unconscious biases when it comes to the perception of the customer. And really, this is very deeply and heavily influenced by our own perceptions, by our own lives. And so even if we have the best intentions in mind to truly understand the customer and believe that we want to understand the customer, if we don't take the time to go and listen to them and understand them, then these biases come into play. These confirmation biases start to work within our solution. And to be able to put those assumptions aside, to be able to put those biases aside, the only first step to take is to be able to do that with empathy, to truly get into your customer's shoes and understand them better than they know themselves. So I wanted to illustrate this through a case study like I mentioned. The case study that I'm going to walk you through is a project that we did with E-commerce company, one of the largest Indian E-commerce companies. Working with the seller side of the platform, as you can imagine, E-commerce is a marketplace. There are end customers. There are sellers who are selling these products on these platforms. The particular focus of this project was on the payment speed. To give you a little bit of background, the E-commerce company was getting multiple calls to the customer service from the sellers, trying to understand their orders, trying to understand their payments. And you can imagine, this is a frustrating process not only for the company, but even for the seller to have to call in and get the details that they want. So when it first began the project with the product and design team, the focus was, hey, they're obviously not getting the information that they require. So let's provide more information on the platform so they don't feel the need to call the customer, okay? Now, that's where we decided to pause and check our biases. We said, let's go in and truly build that empathy for the sellers. Understand problem from their perspective, understand what their challenges are. So together, we spoke to sellers across India, across tech savviness, across literacy level, selling different varieties of goods. And I want to be able to very quickly illustrate the problem that they were going through. Now, imagine you're a seller and I'm a customer. I buy a shoe from you. After a few days, I decide that I don't like the shoe, doesn't fit right. I return that shoe to you. So you receive the transaction when I bought the shoe from you. And when I decided to return it, that transaction was debited and some more money was taken. Now that's one customer. When you multiply that by millions of customers, you can understand the level of complexity and confusion. So through the process of research and spending the time with the customer and understanding the customer, we realized that the problem wasn't that they needed more information. The problem was they really wanted to understand whether they were being profitable on the platform, whether they were making money. And what money could they safely spend? So if you look at the unconscious bias that we had, and had we gone ahead with that unconscious bias and redesigned that payment experience, we were looking at, sellers need more transaction than payment related details. So let's add that kind of details so that they can run their business on the platform. But by spending the time to understand the customer and building that conscious understanding, we realized that the seller wanted to know how much of their money was saved to spend that was saved from reduction. That was saved from, hey, money being transacted, given to you, and then being debited. So it was really that they were unsure of being profitable on the platform. And they were nervous about future reduction. So right away you can see that being customer obsessed allowed us to change the way that that product design and experience would have been. And understanding the right problem to solve. Now going into solving the problem right. Here is where, like I mentioned, we focus on falling in love with the problem versus falling in love with the solution. And what is that benefit that we're delivering to the end customer? Going back to the payments project. Once we understood what was the right problem to solve, we caught multiple teams together, the product team, the data team, the engineering team, the design team, the customer care team. Everybody worked together to truly understand that problem. And then to be able to solve it right, we did simulations so that those who couldn't come to the field with us were able to understand and empathize with the customer and step into their shoes. We looked at multiple ideas, there were ideas, amazing ideas that looked at maybe an AI system that could give just-in-time responses and feedback and any help that the seller needed. Looted proactive error finding, looked at giving them deep business insights on how they could grow their business. All of the ideas were great. But remember the focus was, are we solving for what the customer requires? What is the customer looking to achieve? And is it truly benefiting the customer? So when we put that lens on and we looked at solving for that problem, we were able to create an impact with very simple and focused design that allowed once the product was launched, the redesign decreased calls for the customer care by 25% in just the first three months itself. So, yes, there are multiple ideas, all great ideas, but at the end of the day, when you're deciding to narrow down and look at what is solving the problem, right, you look at what is the value of your product to service you deliver to the customer. And if you look at the world of values that you can provide to the customer, essentially there are values can be described in three functional metrics. Saving time for the customer, saving or making more money for the customer, increasing the frequency of something good or reducing the frequency of something bad. In the case of the seller for the e-commerce company, there were the larger benefits of course of being able to make better business decisions, helping them make more money on the platform. But at the level of this particular objective in brief, it was about understanding what was safe to spend and quickly understanding how the business is doing on the platform. So, when we were able to put ourselves in the shoes of the customer, understanding what the real problem and problem statement was and understanding what their benefits were, we were able to evaluate all of those different solutions to look at the solution that was right for the customer that really helped them achieve that goal. So, to close it up, how can you as leaders role model customer obsession in our organization? One is to be responsive. It's to be not just listening into what is a customer feedback, but really building, going out there and speaking to customers, capturing, understanding and caring and generally listening to them. To be aware of the gaps, to mind the gaps between what is customer intention and behavior, to be able to discern what they want to do and what they actually do. So, unless you go out, spend that time, observe them, really look at what they're looking to do. It can be a challenge. See the work through your customer's eyes. A lot of times you go and ask the customer what they want, what is their desire. That's not where you're going to get solutions from. That's not what's going to drive your product to service, but really observing their past and current behavior, saving surprises, really taking the time to look at what the challenges are there when they're doing certain things. And finally, take the spotlight off the customer by spending that time bringing in interactive tools that helps you get to those tacit attitudes of behaviors from non-verbal ways of communicating. At the end of the day, how can customer obsession help you create products and services that customers love? When you are customer obsessed, you're not just aware of your customers and what they do. Your product and services are led by the way customers think and feel. You are not just driving decisions by data of what customers are doing with your product, but you are driving it by why they do what they do, by unobvious insights that inspire that kind of innovation. You aren't just looking at something that is perfect, that you're taking the time and money to create something that you believe will succeed, but you're being iterative, you're being fast, you're okay with failure, fail fast, fail often, and making sure that you are making progress and moving forward towards the right solution for your customer. And finally, we've seen this a lot in a lot of different organizations where there's lots of siloed thinking and siloed creation of features and functionalities for products. But it's really about working together, collaborating to find ways that you can create that better product and service experience for your customer. I hope it wasn't over time. No, we still have three more minutes to go, Alisha. Sorry, I raced through that because I wasn't sure if I'd be able to finish that. Okay, thank you, Alisha. Thanks for sharing your experience with us today.