Victor’s business challenge
Victor recently started a company that sells and rents solar panels using pay-as-you-go technology. He noticed many people in his town couldn’t afford national grid electricity. Others, like himself, who could afford it were fed up of paying high fees, the frequent power outages and its terrible impact on their business and home. He discussed his idea with a few people in his network and motivated by their positive reaction, he obtained a business loan and proceeded to build his business. Now several months on, he struggles to get customers interested in his product. Victor is perplexed. Everything seems right, a brand new team is in place and the product works so what can be wrong? If nothing changes, Victor will have to send his team home and go back to his old job to pay the bills. Frustrated, but eager to understand his customers, he decides to use Design Thinking to try and solve this issue.
How Victor used Design Thinking to overcome his business challenge:
First, Victor began reflecting about his context. He asked himself, “who are the people I am designing for?”, “who are my competitors?” and “what are the technological developments at the moment?” Quick online research revealed that the government was investing in extending power lines, private providers were marketing their new payment plans, and some NGOs were offering subsidies for solar-based solutions. This initial research helped him identify key stakeholders who could impact his business.
Secondly, he thought deeply about the problem he wanted to solve. He asked himself “why would solar panels be a good solution for his target audience?” and “why would they want to use a pay-as-you-go service?”. He noticed he had a few assumptions of his own. He assumed that customers, especially those with low-income, prefer not to be bound by a fixed electricity contract with unpredictable power cuts and would prefer the flexibility to pay for use of the solar panels in small instalments. He also assumed that it was mainly men in the households that managed utility payments and plans. Victor and his team developed a profile of their target customer and decided to go out and interview customers in their neighbourhoods.
One of the most important things they found was that customers didn’t understand how pay-as-you-go worksed. For example, what was the minimum amount they would need to pay on a weekly/monthly basis and when they would own the solar panels. In many households, the wife, and not the husband, was in-charge of making utility payments. When they heard the opinions of these women, they realised many were looking for stability and security in a service. He did further research to confirm this feedback and adjusted his marketing accordingly to explain to customers how they could see exactly how much electricity and credit they were using at any time through his product. Today, his startup is picking up and Victor has been including customer feedback throughout the whole process. He has realised that he can leverage customer feedback and profit from it.
