Before the design thinking process was created, most businesses failed to put themselves in their customers’ shoes. The traditional model of problem solving left the user out of the conversation. Companies would come up with a solution and simply hope that the customer liked the result. Design thinking allows for continuous feedback loops through its five-step methodology: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test.

A Human-Centered Approach to Business

We strive to keep empathy at the heart of innovation at Genesys. To deliver exceptional customer experiences, it’s crucial to take an empathic approach to business. This all starts with a customer-centric model like design thinking.

At its core, design thinking is a way to humanize problems; and empathy is the tool used to sculpt this method. This process enables businesses to better understand problems by asking better questions — and that results in more creative solutions for prototypes and testing.

According to Adobe, design-led firms excel at customer experience strategy. Half of the companies Adobe surveyed say design thinking creates more satisfied and loyal customers because it focuses on the end-user.

Design thinking isn’t new; it has roots dating back to the 1950s. However, it wasn’t until 2015 when the Harvard Business Review released an article that made this phrase buzzworthy. In his 1962 book “Synectics, The Development of Creative Capacity,” William J. J. Gordon argues that, in the creative process, the emotional component is more important than the intellectual. He states that emotions must be understood for the problem-solving process. This was revolutionary. Until then, the intellectual was the focal point.

User Experience Teams in Product Development

In the contact center, empathy is currency. It’s how businesses connect with consumers and create individualized, personal experiences.

The Genesys User Experience team puts itself in our customers’ shoes — leading with compassion to drive product innovation. Through design thinking, we can provide superior experiences, making life easier for engineers, professors, consultants and other professionals.

Just as William Gordon argued, sometimes emotions are more important than the intellectual side when it comes to problem solving.

Lydia Ward, UX Researcher at Genesys and Simon Doyle, Principle Designer at Genesys, recently led customers through a prototype of a new Genesys CloudTM experience. Her team wanted feedback and planned to use the insights to inform strategic decisions moving forward.

“For me, this research project was exciting because it was an opportunity to work on something truly visionary and because of the joy I got to witness in people’s faces when they saw the potential direction of the product,” said Lydia.

The work Lydia’s team is doing will prove revolutionary with new Genesys Cloud features and releases. “The participants were happy to see that we were coming to them with a vision that solved some of their pain points,” she added. “And it was apparent that the empathy they show for their customers is so strong.”

Design thinking techniques bring about these meaningful interactions and create a continuous feedback loop that allows for deeper insights.

Empathy as a Means to an End

Operating with empathy is more relevant now, as the world continues to face the COVID-19 pandemic in these uncertain times. But one thing we can be certain about is that helping others will persist.

Genesys Cloud will continue to fuel meaningful connections, thanks to the creativity of those like Lydia and her team. With continuous innovations through artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can humanize the subjective, provide smarter data-driven decisions to create more compassionate interactions and make others’ lives easier in the process.

To learn more about design thinking, listen to the latest Tech Talks in 20 podcast episode.