Customer Journey Engineering At Wipro Digital
by Nicole Dufft
Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC)
In the classic IT services domain, the notion of customer-centered design is not yet commonplace – unfortunately. Agile and iterative approaches to technology development that strictly start with the customers’ needs, have so far been mainly applied by innovation and design agencies or software developers in the B2C space. Traditional IT service providers are often still stuck with the traditional plan-build-run mode rather than following the empathize-build-measure-learn way. Exceptions can be found in the digital business units of large IT service players that have popped up over the last two years. One remarkable example is Wipro Digital, the digital business unit of Indian IT services giant Wipro. The division was launched about a year ago. I had the chance to talk to members of their management team a few weeks ago in London as well as this week in Frankfurt at the Wipro Analyst Summit. I had the impression that these guys are not only younger and come to stage in jeans – they also work differently than their parent organization. Wipro Digital credibly promotes – and applies – an agile, user-centered service design approach. And they start to inject their new approaches back into the larger organization.
They have understood that digital transformation is about “being digital rather than just doing digital”. I couldn’t agree more! Wipro Digital calls it “the new, digital way of working”: agile and iterative co-creation in multi-disciplinary teams, applying methods like design thinking, hackathons or crowdsourcing, and focusing on customer journey mapping.
As compared to the agencies that have been pursuing user-centered design for years, however, Wipro Digital’s “Customer Journey Engineering” encompasses not only customer touchpoints in the frontend. It aims at re-engineering the entire customer journey in the frontend AND in the backend. Or to put it differently: re-engineering the backend process to provide for a superior customer experience in the frontend. Again, I couldn’t agree more! Digital transformation is more than a facelift to the frontend – it has to encompass and integrate all backend processes that impact customer experience, such as logistics, billing, production, customer service etc.