Makpar Brings Design Thinking to CX Training for Government Customers
With CX rising in prominence in the government arena, federal agencies have become laser focused on bringing dynamic citizen and constituent digital services into the forefront.
For Makpar’s Innovation Lab, the concept of CX encompasses “Design Thinking,” which includes Human-Centered Design (HCD), User Experience (UX), User Interface (UI) and User Adoption (UA). These combined elements all put the human user at the center of IT development.
Design Thinking essentially is a clear and continuous understanding of the target market (i.e., customers), the problems they are facing, and the job that needs to be done.
This is done through a 12-step CX development process that ensures any new customer-facing innovation truly meets end-user needs. This process is based on SAFe 6.0 and the CX playbook developed by Makpar partner NuAxis Innovations.
Following are the steps:
CX Step 1 – Customer Interviews: The Makpar Innovation Lab usually starts with a use case from the BD team or the government customer. During this step, the entire team interviews all levels at the customer to uncover all pain points.
CX Step 2 – Persona Development: Personas are then created for each role, so the team can start to identify and empathize with the customer. Personas can convey the problems end-users are facing in context, and provide key triggers for using the new solution.
CX Step 3 – Develop an Empathy Map: Information is taken directly from the interviews to create Empathy Maps that imagine what a specific persona is thinking, feeling, hearing, and seeing as they use the product. An empathy map helps in developing a deep and shared understanding for others.
CX Step 4 – Synthesize Interview Questions and Create Goal: This process synthesizes the interview responses, and defines the overall themes and roles, as well as groups the solutions for each theme and role. Then the team ultimately creates a benefit statement for each and votes to determine the overall goal.
CX Step 5 – Lightening Demo: Every person on the team is tasked with coming up with an existing solution in the marketplace that provides stellar customer service. Then each team member will give a three-minute demo to share what’s so awesome about the company, product, or service they researched. From there, the team selects best product features from each demo.
CX Step 6 – Ideate on Customer Solution (Crazy 8s): Then the team does the Crazy 8s exercise, where each person takes their strongest ideas on the proposed solution and rapidly sketches eight variations in eight minutes.
CX Step 7 – Storyboarding the Solution: Storyboarding is a 30-minute exercise, where a detailed solution sketch is created of each team member’s best idea. Each one is an opinionated hypothesis for how to solve the challenge at hand.
CX Step 8 – Create a Heat Map: The goal of this exercise is to decide on a solution that will be prototyped. The team looks at the best outcomes from the storyboarding exercise, and then they vote on the best aspects.
CX Step 9 – Develop a Group Storyboard: The team then combines all the best features of each individual storyboard into a group storyboard to create a final concept of the new innovative solution.
CX Step 10 – Define the Prototype: From here, the team defines the prototype, and builds out the proposed features guided by the overall vision of the solution to the customer for feedback.
CX Step 11 – Develop the Release Map: This is where the team builds out the product release map and timeline based on quarterly goals and deliverables.
CX Step 12 – Develop the Customer Journey Map: The development of the Customer Journey Map shows how customers/end users will interact with product(s) (Team and Customer reviewed).
Once these 12 steps have been completed, the Makpar Innovation Lab aligns with the Customer and moves forward with Agile software delivery that is ultimately focused on Human-Centered Design. This process retains customer alignment, provides faster time to market, and reduces costs for quicker mission success.
For the final stage, the team implements a CX Thermometer for the onboarding of end-users, which is based on an AI chatbot that gains direct feedback for ongoing product improvement.
Interested in learning more about how Makpar can help to bring your agency’s CX goals to life through Design Thinking? Please contact us here.