Design Thinking Mindset and Digital Transformation

TL;DR:

Profuturo faced challenges with customers receiving outdated and unclear reports, leading to communication gaps and missed opportunities to update important information. To address this, I led a six-month transformation project, working with a team of six subject matter experts. My role was to teach them how to apply design thinking for rapid problem-solving and service innovation. Over the course of the project, the team fully adopted a design thinking mindset, which has now become a driving force for ongoing innovation at Profuturo. As a result, the employees I worked with have become advocates for change, shifting company processes and improving service delivery. This initiative is expected to bring long-term benefits, as Profuturo continues to refine its approach and better meet customer needs.

Profuturo is a company that manages retirement savings from employees in Mexico. The problem is that most of the employees have very poor information of how these companies manage their money, how savings works, and what is the final amount they had saved through the years.

My role: Service Designer and Design Thinking Coaching

The company was looking for a “Digital Transformation” innovating in their services by changing the mindset of employees and operational process. So they were looking to change, learn and apply solutions in a very fast way. For this, I was chosen to be the leader of a team of 6 Profuturo leaders SMEs to teach them how to develop a Design Thinking Mindset, that will help them solve different problems for the company. I worked with them: 40 hours a week for 6 months in a constantly workshops to transform their minds into a disruptive thinking and help them analyze problems outside the box that will lead to transforming the company as well.

Context of the project  (technical, financial and stakeholders constraints)

• Team Members : 6 Profuturo key employees (SMEs) from different areas (marketing, customer service, call center, IT)

• Investment and timing: This project represented a big effort for the company because they were investing the time of their best employees in this project.

The Challenge: Provide to all customers their total balance from retirement savings by digital media instead of the mailbox.

*Before beginning the process, we did a design sprint of 4 days where the employees needed to solve an internal problem for their teammates, with the objective of helping them understand a few concepts and to start introducing some of the exercises we were planning to apply for the next 6 months.

Everything starts with a problem

We needed to find a problem to solve for the users, so we started with the Design Thinking Process.

Understand Business

I had a big task of understanding all the services the company was providing, how the company was divided, area responsibilities, and all the processes applied for each type of customer.

Empathize (Research stage)

We needed to start by knowing our users, learn about what was their impression about owning a retirement and the services the company was providing.

• Collecting Data (from marketing, store attendance and time spent from customer trying to solve a need)

• Proto-personas

• Chain stores observation, contextual inquiry & listening to customer phone-calls

• User interviews & over 300 surveys around the country

• Stakeholders and internal employees interviews

• Focus group with call center employees to understand common problems of the customers.

• Competitive Analysis ( Interviews to customers from Sura, Banamex and Banorte)

Outcomes and Deliverables:

• 6 Empathy Map

• 6 Personas

• 2 Service Blueprint

• 2 User Journey Map

• Detected Pain point for user and problems from service

Key Pain Points: We found with all the research that there was a huge problem with communication between Pro-futuro and their customers. 

• The customers didn’t know what were the services and benefits provided by the company

• Most of the time, customers misunderstood their account reports and didn´t understood what was their total balance, since the reports show a lot of data.

• The customers were receiving their account reports at old addresses and they didn’t know how to update these addresses.

Finding a problem statement

We did a huge list of How Might We´s that lead us to 3 primary problem statements:

• We were losing opportunities to contact users and update their data, like email and update address

• We were losing the data of the users, because each area (touchpoints with user) were saving the customer´s data in different systems

  (they even had customer´s data duplicated)

• The customers didn´t know they had the option to receive in a digital format their saving reports and balance

Solution Statement

• Based on the user’s needs, we needed to find the correct tools to provide access to information about the benefits of the service and keep them updated with their saving reports.

• We needed an efficient and low cost system that provided access to the different company channels (touchpoints) to update and save data.

• We needed to take advantage of every touchpoint with customers to update their data and provide them an omnichannel experience and information about the service.

Some of the constraints...

• Budget to update the ERP system, it was necessary to clean a large amount of incorrect data.

• Change actual process for each channel and teach the employees how to collect data in a correct way

• Clients are not interested in updating data unless they need their money and sometimes they wait until retirement to contact Pro-Futuro

Brainstorm & ideation

• Mind Mapping

• Crazy eights ideas

• Collaborative Design

• Team ideas generation

• Quick Wins

Methodologies & exercises that the team learned to use and help them a lot:

• Research Wall

• Sense-making and Affinity Maps

• Voting ideas

• User stories

• How might we

• Focus Group

• Ice breakers (help them relax and work in team 8 hours daily)

• Proto-personas and Empathy map

• User Journey

• Mind Mapping

• Lego Serious Play

• Design Critique / Voting Techniques

• And other bunch of different activities to keep the team involved in project.

Results:

Pro-Futuro is changing a lot and I am happy to say that the team of employees whom I worked with, are the ones that are inspiring and motivating Pro-Futuro to change internal process and apply new ideas as a result of working with a new design thinking mindset that I proudly taught them. At first the team was very skeptical about methods but when the days were passing they change their mind. At my last day they gave me some written and video testimonials of how Design Thinking changed their minds and opened new perspectives, new ways of questioning and solving things. For me these were the best results. And for the company .. they will find, over the time that this was the best project to invest and find results in short-long term to improve the service.