human-centered design
Transforming your customer and employee experiences with human-centered design
A proven approach to your thorniest business challenges
Competition crowding you out?
Revenues going down?
Employee expectations going up?
The answer to these and other challenges might be closer than you think.
Step inside to learn how four business leaders adopted a human-centered design approach to open new doors to unprecedented insight, innovation and results.
Employee retention
Customer acquisition
Customer segmentation
Employee recruitment
People across the city rely on their local public broadcasting station for insightful news, community engagement and educational programing they can’t find anywhere else. As the chief experience officer for the station, Gabe is at the helm of a deeply loved and respected cultural and journalistic institution. It’s his job to ensure the station continues to meet the needs of its audience today while building the audience of tomorrow.
the challenge
the solution
the lesson
the result
While the local public broadcasting station plays a critical role in maintaining the culture of the community, its importance wasn’t matched by its revenue. With limited ability to run ads and no taxpayer support, most of its revenue comes from individual donors. But as its audience aged, its donor base wasn’t being replaced by younger viewers. Millennials and Gen Z viewers, along with traditionally underserved demographics, didn’t feel like the station resonated with their interests.
Gabe worked with his human-centered design consultant to seek new ways of reaching new audiences so that the station could continue to serve the entire community. By digging deep into how these audiences consume news and entertainment, Gabe pushed his station beyond the tried-and-true traditional approach of fundraising drives to reimagine the donor journey. In addition, Gabe uncovered new insights into the types of content that would attract these audiences, allowing him to make programming changes to bring the station in line with viewer desires.
By revolutionizing his donor outreach and content strategy, Gabe revitalized the station while positioning it to meet the needs of the next generation of donors. He also uncovered an opportunity to partner with a large local media company to generate new revenue streams, reach new audiences and grow his content creation base. A new community outreach campaign allowed the station to rebrand from stodgy to essential, while a new vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion helped the broadcaster be more relevant to audiences it used to ignore.
Human-centered design can help you create a customer experience that is relevant to today’s customers. By leveraging human-centered design to reimagine your offering, you can acquire more customers and drive top-line revenue growth.
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Residents depend on their local gas and electric utility to power work, education, entertainment and everything in between. As chief strategy officer for the city’s energy utility, Sophia is responsible for overseeing how it meets the needs of customers while driving enough revenue to fund operations.
While energy plays a central role in the life of every user, Sophia knows all too well that a rough economy means that some of her users are struggling to pay bills and make ends meet. As a result, the utility began to see a rise in unpaid bills, with customers going deep into debt. Traditionally, the utility would first go after the people who owed the utility the most. But no matter how much the utility pursued these customers, the utility struggled to recoup its losses.
Sophia worked with her human-centered design consultant to dig deep into her customer segments. Based on their research, they were able to determine a segment of customers in debt who were most likely to pay back what they owed. More importantly, Sophia was able to identify new customer segments that the utility had previously ignored, allowing it to invest in new customer outreach programs that would more than make up for the bad debt.
By focusing on a specific segment of customers in debt, Sophia helped the utility collect what it could without wasting time and resources going after customers who won’t pay. In addition, Sophia now leverages data-driven sales funnels that help her target new psychographics, such as people installing backyard fire pits, allowing her to significantly increase new customerleads and drive revenue.
Human-centered design isn’t just about creating new products or services. It’s about understanding and empathizing with your audience to uncover new ways to meet their evolving needs and behaviors so you can unlock growth.
The vitality of a health care provider comes down to its people. As chief talent officer for a regional, multi-hospital system, Javier is responsible for recruiting and retaining physicians, nurses and caregivers so that people throughout his community can get the care they need, when they need it.
With demand for qualified health care professionals skyrocketing, Javier found himself in fierce competition for new talent. His hospital system is located in a tier 3 market, which means it struggles to offer the same high salaries and advancement opportunities as hospitals in larger markets. The recruiting campaign he had previously run to attract talent was no longer bringing in enough applicants, which was especially critical at a time when the hospital was losing staff to competitors.
Javier worked with his human-centered design consultant to understand what applicants truly want. As part of the process, he discovered that they found his marketing materials outdated and conservative, inadvertently driving off interest. He also found that his hospitals tended to attract caregivers already in the community; he was wasting his dollars when targeting out-of-market caregivers. Thanks to his new insights, Javier created a fresh and dynamic approach to his recruitment efforts.
The hospital system fixed process issues hindering recruitment. For example, Javier found that differing benefits across the system were hampering recruitment at certain facilities. He also refocused his spend on clinicians living within 45 minutes of a facility and created new advertising that better connected with potential recruits. To retain caregivers, Javier oversaw the remodel of staff breakrooms, and a new mobile app provided employees with easy access to laundry service, childcare and other amenities.
Human-centered design can help you align your organization with the needs and interests of employees and recruits, creating an advantage that can pay for itself when competing to hire and keep the top talent that ultimately drives revenue.
Organizations like the department of transportation (DoT) don’t have time for bumps in the road. As chief human resource officer for her state’s DoT, Audrey is responsible for overseeing how her sprawling department hires, trains and retains an expansive workforce ranging from DMV administrators and city planners to snowplow drivers and road builders.
When compared to attractive industries like technology or finance, infrastructure-based industries can struggle to attract new graduates. This goes double for an old-fashioned, slow-moving government agency like the DoT. As her workforce continues to age and retire, Audrey needed to modernize her operations by transitioning to a new ERP. However, her existing aging workforce is resistant to change, which meant she was at risk of alienating old and new users alike.
Audrey worked with her human-centered design consultant to evaluate how her existing workforce engaged with the organization’s old accounting system in order to create a change management plan centered around their needs and concerns. In addition, she created a new, user-friendly training program that helped existing employees stay engaged and learn the new system faster.
Thanks to the plan, Audrey successfully transitioned her existing, older workforce from the outdated system to a modern ERP application. While she was fearful that the prospect of major change would alienate more seasoned employees, she was able to retain those workers, giving her more time to attract new talent. Thanks to the modern platform, her organization can now compete for talent that demands a more modern experience.
Change can be hard for employees. Human-centered design can empower and engage your talent base in a way that encourages growth through new tools, processes and programs that meet the needs of your business and its workers alike.
SOLVING CHALLENGES
We leverage human-centered design as part of a holistic approach that taps into the global reach of RSM US LLP’s assurance, tax and consulting services. RSM is uniquely positioned to incorporate human-centered design when solving customer and employee challenges related to:
Enabling strategic decision-making across the employee experience continuum
Managing aggressive growth
Transforming and reinventing business operations
Enhancing and enriching entrenched cultures
What makes RSM's human- centered design different?
RSM leverages human-centered design to target moments that can be crafted into amazing experiences grounded in human understanding.
FRAMEWORK
APPROACH
Designing and implementing human-centered strategies to improve the customer and employee experience
Using a structured approach that ensures products, services and work processes meet real-world needs
Maximizing impact and driving business outcomes
Through surveys and conversation, we dig deep to understand the nuances of how employee behaviors affect business outcomes.
We then holistically integrate physical and digital design into our solutions to ensure a seamless user experience regardless of channel.
Our solutions then come to life thanks to a multidisciplinary team of more than 70 in-house well-trained professionals.
Leveraging both quantitative and qualitative research, our solutions draw on data and the real-world experiences of users.
To learn more
Realizing total experience transformation in your business
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about how RSM’s approach to human-centered design can transform the experience that your employees, partners and customers have with your business, read our article:
