Using design in customer experience

Barclays has recently built in a large in-house design team at its Canary Wharf headquarters, with staff including design director Lee Sankey – a judge at this year’s Design Week Awards – and designer Peter Dalton, formerly of rAndom International.

Grinyer talked about how customer experience was a compelling way of getting senior staff to understand the value of design.

He said: “I don’t think any chief executive wakes up in the morning and thinks – ‘do you know what I need? Some of this service design’. But they probably do. Customer experience is a good way of wrapping design in.”

Grinyer plotted a customer experience “journey” that most consumers will have with an organisation: “choosing” “joining”, “using”, “growing” and “staying”.

He says that traditionally, each of these customer journey points has been the responsibility of a different part of the business – for example the marketing team being in charge of encouraging customers to “join” and “stay” and the product development team helping them “use” services.

Grinyer says that a customer experience-drive organisation should work across all these aspects of the journey at the same time – looking at how each can be influenced by proposition, innovation, customer touchpoints and brand.

He added that there are “still plenty of brand teams who think their brands are just logos and graphics on the walls”.

Grinyer says he also believes that one of the key roles of the designer is to create “context” for research – he says: “Only when the context becomes real does research have a value.”

However, he revealed that when Barclays was developing its Pingit service, which allows people to “text” payments to each other by smartphone, the team hardly did any market research. Grinyer says: “We knew people were doing this in Africa and we could see that it worked.”

Clive Grinyer was speaking at the Festival of Marketing, a two-day conference organised by all Centaur’s marketing and creative titles, including Design Week, Creative Review, Econsultancy, Celebrity Intelligence and Marketing Week. Details here.