Design thinking for a world class business school

Enigma used its service design knowledge and design thinking toolbox to help a world class business school get insight on the future of education and increase customer experience.

Ambition

A world class business school was on the process of a transformation of its IT ecosystem. Their ambition was to create a new “set of system” to allow them to deliver a value that customers and other stakeholders really want, more effectively and more efficiently. In order to turn opportunities into realities, they needed a design thinking approach to map the customer experience and get insight for long lasting impact on their clients.

Action

Enigma used its expertise in design thinking, lean ethnography and service design to conduct a 4 months research. During this time, Enigma conducted more than 80 qualitative interviews with all kind of stakeholders such as alumni, clients, prospects, staff and faculty members.

Along with interviews, experiments were conducted in order to gain other types of information. The techniques of shadowing that is often used in service design were applied on the campus. 9 participants were followed by 8 shadower and 126 touchpoints were identified. By observing how users are evolving in the environment and how they interact with it, specific insights on how to improve services could be drawn.

In order to imply the staff in the process, Enigma provided regular updates to the strategic committee through workshops called “infusion sessions”. Those sessions fostered discussion and allowed to get instant feedback, reactions and open discussions. With this method, Enigma could work in a serie of iteration between learning, designing and testing. This agile method of short adaptives cycles allowed us to constantly re-adjust the reach of the study in an open and participative process.

With a deep immersion and extensive research, highly valuable information could be gathered, which was then digested, tested, and transformed into meaningful knowledge and actionable recommendations.

Impact

Using service design as a toolbox, Enigma was able to provide the business school with insights on customer experience and actionable recommendation to improve the customer experience. On a deeper level, using grounded theory, Enigma provided the business school with challenging insight on the future of education and business schools place in the post-modern society.