Delighting Customers with Design Thinking

The main aim of your organization's product or service is to help your customers achieve a specific goal or overcome a problem. This is where the concept of design thinking comes in. Design thinking is a customer-centric approach to determining how best to meet customer needs. In this course, you'll explore ways to develop customer focus to help you define problems. You'll explore design thinking strategies, including how to reframe problems, how to brainstorm solutions, and when to use prototypes. You'll also identify best practices for user testing, as well as for and gathering and reviewing feedback for effective problem solving.

Rapid advances in digital technology are compelling businesses to change and adapt the ways they operate. Developing agile thinking will help ensure your organization doesn't get left behind, unable to compete in a market that is constantly changing. In this course, you'll learn why it's important for organizations to cultivate a culture of agility and the characteristics that distinguish an agile mindset from a fixed mindset. You'll also learn how to encourage and build an agile enterprise, and how doing so will help your business flourish. This course also covers how developing and supporting an agile mindset can benefit both your corporate culture and your business success.

In changing markets, leadership matters. And for businesses adopting agile thinking, appointing a strong product owner who maximizes the value of a business's products is essential. Employing a product owner can help businesses increase their agility, allowing them to adapt to change and enhance the value of their products. In this course, you'll learn about the role and responsibilities of a product owner in an agile enterprise, and the qualities necessary for effective product ownership. You'll also learn the best strategies for empowering product owners and removing obstacles that impede their success.

Agility in today's business environment is essential, and changing to an Agile enterprise can propel your business forward. With Agile thinking, you can adapt to each change as it occurs. In this course, you'll learn about the benefits of building Agile capabilities in your organization, as well as the best practices and the right conditions for doing so. You'll also learn about the leadership styles necessary for agile success. Finally, you'll explore how to measure the success of and overcome challenges to your organization's Agile transformation.

Engaging directly with stakeholders increases empathy and helps identify motivations and unmet needs, enabling the creation of successful solutions. In this course, you'll learn how to identify and interact with key stakeholders and communicate their point of view through effective design thinking methods. This course was developed with subject matter provided by PDD. (www.pddinnovation.com)

Effectively communicating with customers increases customer satisfaction and projects service excellence. This course provides valuable advice on how to improve client service (CS) by building customer relationships with better customer conversations. It covers how to improve conversations with customers by speaking effectively, using vocal cues, listening actively, and using paraphrasing to convey your understanding of the customer's needs.

Effectively communicating with customers is essential to the success of any customer-oriented business. Adapting to the different communication styles and emotions of customers will help you build customer relationships through better customer conversations. Improving conversations with customers enables an efficient, high quality client service (CS). This course explains how to adapt to the different communication types and identify the common emotions that customers experience when contacting a support center. It also explains how to adapt your writing skills to communicate through e-mail and to document incidents.

Today in the Age of the Customer, competitive advantage has been redefined. Customers are in control. They have more choices than ever before resulting in sky-high expectations. The only source of competitive advantage is the obsession with understanding, delighting, connecting with and serving customers. Organizations need people who are customer obsessed. People who are so interested and committed to the people they are creating and designing for that they are willing to spend time, take risks and admit that they personally might be wrong. People who are so customer obsessed that they never settle but are continually trying to understand what else they can do for their customers.

Agile projects are only successful if the Agile team is cohesive, productive, and engaged. When managing projects for your organization, you must encourage active involvement to ensure your team has a clear understanding of project requirements and stakeholder expectations. In this course, you'll learn about team leadership and the characteristics of effective stakeholder engagement when managing Agile projects. This course also introduces you to some important Agile project management tools and techniques, such as team development strategies and developmental mastery models. Finally, this course covers effective communication tools and the benefits of using facilitation techniques like Agile games to foster collaboration and cooperation in the Agile team. This course is one of a series in the Skillsoft learning path that covers the objectives for the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)(r) exam. PMI-ACP is a registered mark of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

Of all the different types of skills and competencies a project manager uses when managing projects, "soft" skills are the most important. The ability to communicate effectively with team members and negotiate between different demands enables the project manager to manage project conflict. Effectively resolving conflict helps stakeholders remain positive and can mean the difference between project success and failure. In this course, you'll learn about change management and dealing with conflict. You'll explore how to handle it when someone requests project changes, how to create a plan for communicating with stakeholders, and approaches for dealing with conflicts that arise.

Engaging with stakeholders produces valuable data, which can be constructively used for analyzing the stakeholder experience. In this course, you will learn how to translate data into actionable insights and define opportunities through tools like experience mapping and affinity clustering. This course was developed with subject matter provided by PDD. (www.pddinnovation.com)

The growth of mobile devices and social media have dramatically changed how consumers interact online. This has had a profound effect on how businesses market services and products to their customers. The facts about Digital are compelling. People prefer to interact online, mobile devices now account for over 50 percent of web page views, the current worldwide total number of Internet users is 4.5 billion, and social media users worldwide represent 3.2 billion people. In this course, you'll learn how digital provides opportunities for understanding the customer journey, creating sustainable business growth, and fostering more highly functioning organizations, teams, and individuals. You'll also learn how organizations can benefit from applying digital technologies and practices to their marketing plans and strategies. This course was developed in partnership with the Digital Marketing Institute. (www.digitalmarketinginstitute.com) For those who are interested in pursuing a certification, please contact the Digital Marketing Institute directly via this website: https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/lp/skillsoft

Creating a business plan helps you clearly see the opportunities and obstacles you'll inevitably face as you pursue your business idea. By implementing a business plan, you stand a better chance of getting the support you need to succeed. In this course, you'll learn about what a business plan is, the business planning process, and the steps you need to take when creating a business case. You'll also learn how to carry out an internal analysis and about the key elements examined in any external and SWOT analyses. Finally, you'll learn about activities that can help you when implementing a business case, including developing action plans and determining how the implementation should be measured, monitored, and assessed.

Presenting a business case to the executives of your company is a daunting task. You need to put time and effort into business planning, writing, and presenting to be successful. This course prepares learners interested in the development of effective business cases. You'll learn what a business case is and when one is used, how to align it with your company's goals, what research you need to do, and what information should be included in your business case. Finally, you'll learn how to present your business case to decision makers.

Big-picture thinking stretches beyond the short term and considers how an organization can succeed in the long term. By thinking strategically about a problem using the bigger picture, you can elevate your perspective and get a better idea of the forces at play within your organization. This course describes how systems thinking can help you become skillful at making sense out of opposites and contradictions and better understand cause and effect while managing your department according to the business strategy. It explains actions you can take to encourage creative thinking and come up with solutions that take into account the bigger picture. You'll also learn how understanding your organizational value chain can help you connect to the organization's strategy and implement it more effectively.

Brainstorming without structure rarely yields plentiful and new results. In this course, you'll learn techniques to spur creative thinking, and techniques to communicate and critique ideas. This course was developed with subject matter provided by PDD. (www.pddinnovation.com)

You might not describe yourself as a creative person, but everyday activities - like problem solving or spotting opportunities - rely on your creative thinking and innovation. Originality is key, but your ideas also have to work within real-world constraints. In this course, you'll learn about the different stages of innovating and techniques for verifying the workability of your ideas. You'll also discover guidelines and techniques for building on and testing an idea, such as brainstorming. The course outlines when to use research and simulations to check the workability of an idea, and it discusses ways to build on ideas effectively.

Believe it or not, everyone has the potential to be creative. If you're struggling to express your ideas, then something is getting in the way. But with the right approach and techniques, team leaders can provide a safe space that encourages brainstorming, innovating, and creative thinking. In this course, you'll learn about characteristics of creative people, how to overcome personal barriers, and how to foster team innovation in a work environment. It describes personal barriers to creativity and how to overcome them and provides strategies for enhancing creativity in the workplace. It also outlines key requirements for promoting creativity and explores techniques for fostering creativity in teams.

In this course, you will learn techniques for developing a team of "creative gurus" - team members who excel at generating innovative ideas. You will learn ways to assemble your team, generate creative ideas, overcome barriers to team creativity, and foster a creative workplace.

Innovating is the only way to adapt and keep speed with the pace of change in today's business world. Building and supporting an innovative culture is the responsibility of leaders and employees across organizational hierarchies and is aided by an effective change management process. In this course, you'll learn about business innovation cultures and types of innovation leadership. You'll also learn about the importance of experimenting, managing change, and executing a project. Finally, you'll learn how to attract and nurture innovation in your organization.

The Design Thinking approach advocates early stakeholder engagement in the co-creation and development of solutions. In this course, you'll learn about techniques for prototyping and testing in order to iteratively develop solutions more efficiently with stakeholders. This course was developed with subject matter provided by PDD. (www.pddinnovation.com)

User-friendly apps are more than just a pretty user interface (UI). They ensure the user experience (UX) is pleasing. People expect interacting with a digital product, be it a smartphone, laptop, or tablet, to be a friction-free, pleasurable experience. By understanding the relationship between the UI and the UX, your company can provide just that. In this course, you'll explore UI/UX design and how together, they result in user-pleasing apps with effective user interface design. You'll learn about basic principles as well as current trends in UX and UI design. Finally, you'll discover how to evaluate the emotional impact of user experience.

Your organization depends on its ability to win every customer interaction. User personas - detailed descriptions of archetypal end users - are the gateway to designing customer-centric products and experiences that address customer needs. Building user personas will help you develop products and services your customers truly want. In this course, you'll learn the essential elements of user personas and the business information to be gained from them. You'll also learn how to build a user persona, which data to include in a persona, and the qualities of an effective persona. And you'll discover what customer-centric design can tell you about your customer, and how it will benefit your business.

To understand the different feelings and cognitive processes a customer undergoes when dealing with your organization, you need a tool that can document every step of their experience. Customer journey mapping is one such tool, and is essential in helping you understand customer needs and define problems highlighted by their experiences. In this course, you'll discover how to create a customer journey map, a customer-centric problem solving tool that can enable you to brainstorm effective solutions to key customer pain points. You'll also explore how to recognize and prioritize specific actions to improve your customer focus while avoiding common mapping mistakes.