Why is Customer Centricity important?
Customer Centricity helps us create compelling consumer experiences. These not only deliver better sales figures, but also turn our consumers into fans and thus create greater loyalty to the brand. But we can only achieve these successful results if we actively involve consumers in our development process right from the start. Too often we observe (also with ourselves) that new offers are developed, which are then not as successful on the market as hoped. The human-centred design approach helps us to consistently focus on the consumer when it comes to developing new market solutions.
What is the Mibelle Group’s role in this?
We work closely with our retail partners. Because interdisciplinary teams, whether internal or across company boundaries, deliver successful results. Our shared knowledge helps us to design the best for our consumers, to turn something ordinary into something extraordinary. Retail partners can get actively involved with the entire process, from determining consumer needs and designing new solutions through to testing them. If we find a promising solution, we can directly implement the created solutions for our partners.
How do you bring customer centricity to life?
Customer centricity permeates our entire organisation, from leadership and proposal preparation through to agile working methods, such as design thinking and Scrum. We go where our users are, where things are happening. We listen, observe and analyse. The goal in all of this is to discover both explicit and implicit needs, then use them as the basis for developing the best possible products and services for users. To this end, we invest in our employees and regularly continue our education, for example by mastering Design Thinking at MIT, read more here.
What does that look like in practice?
We implement various methods along the entire value chain – from creative to operational excellence – to achieve the best possible results for our customers. Human centred design involves improving existing solutions from a consumer and customer point of view, developing new, creative ideas and then implementing them.
Design thinking is accomplished in multidisciplinary teams. Consumers are included in the search for creative solutions, which unfolds in several stages: understanding and observing; summarising the issues; developing ideas; creating prototypes; and testing. One example is the Good Mood products, which were developed in close cooperation with the retail partner and consumers.
Another agile process framework we use is Scrum, which helps us project-manage formulation development. We’ve adapted the framework to our requirements and make regular improvements to it. And by implementing lean management we seek to ‘create value without waste’. Continuous improvement loops involving all employees help us in this regard.