Design thinking will enable Indian enterprises to deliver customer-centric business solutions without compromising growth and revenue.

Innovation is a key feature to enhance business growth and customer experience. Worldwide businesses and industries are adopting various methods like automation to increase production efficiency across their development and IT networks. Indian enterprises are also running this race by digitizing business operations but lagging in embracing design thinking. Design thinking is nothing but understanding the needs of users, developing customer-friendly products, and innovating business processes. Now you might be thinking that if this is design thinking then there is no way Indian enterprises can leave it out since they are efficient. Here is the fact, the working ecosystem of Indian enterprises is slightly different and thus it might get difficult to carry on design thinking. In one of his blogs Dr. Pavan Soni, Founder and Innovation Evangelist at Inflexion Point Consulting says, “For one, our office spaces depict a clear sense of hierarchy and an overt sense of order, the sure dampeners of a DT mindset. This is coupled with our rigid office architectures, which are thankfully getting disrupted of late, but largely remain as the proxy of ‘arrival’ in the corporate lives.” He further writes about some other factors branching from the Indian mentality that hinders the implementation of design thinking.

Design thinking offers a vast space to innovate your business ideas and break conventional barriers hindering the business flow. Thus, Indian Enterprises must include design thinking into their business development strategies.

Customer-Centric Business 

A Forbes India article by Anubhav Gupta quotes the Harvard Business Review that cites a 228% growth of stock performance of design-led companies over the Standard and Poors’s (S&P) Index over the past decades. Many successful companies like Apple, Microsoft, and PepsiCo increased their revenue by introducing design thinking to their business. Focusing on customer experience and innovating according to their needs can gain more traction and loyalty among the target audience.

Design thinking makes your business more creative by striking a balance between analytical and intuitive thinking. According to an Economic Times report, the user is the ‘WHY’ a business is trying to solve a problem, and design thinking helps keep getting back to that ‘WHY’ while empathy empowers to understand and feel the problem to be able to solve it better.

The coming years will see customers demanding more personalized services and design thinking will help understand their choices so that the products are delivered accordingly. The current scenario demands continuous innovation from the enterprises to achieve growth and agility. Digitization and automation have enabled easier interaction with customers. Hence, the enterprises just need to create customer value through investing in strategies to learn the users and continuously transform according to changing trends.

Companies should be able to identify customer needs, ideate them by having brainstorming sessions, develop prototypes, and deliver them successfully to the customers.

A YourStory article states, “Merely hiring designers isn’t enough, it’s critical for leadership teams to harness the power of design thinking to create unique experiences for customers, which are awesome, by design.” Therefore, it is high time Indian enterprises invested in design thinking practices by involving the whole organization to stay on par with the competitors and increase productivity.

Conclusion

In today’s business landscape, thinking out of the box can efficiently transform the business to inculcate engaging customer-centric practices. Indian enterprises should start thinking creatively and innovate consistently to enter into the disruptive business world. Design thinking makes your business human-centric and that is exactly what enterprises need right now to reach the heights of success.