Amira’s business challenge
Amira is a mobile kiosk agent. She’s been working for a few years selling phone credit and other mobile products. Amira has noticed that her customers often ask her to help them set up and use their mobile products and services. For example, downloading apps or creating a mobile money account. Amira has been helping her customers for free, but she sees a real opportunity to offer it as a paid service. To make sure that she offers training and prices that will suit her customers, Amira would like to test her different ideas first, then collect feedback and use the results to create a successful business model.
How Amira used Design Thinking to overcome her business challenge
First, Amira had to think about the types of training and pricing plans she could offer. Once she had unpacked these ideas, she could then test some working solutions. She began by asking herself, “Where will I provide my training services?”, “What type of training(s) should I provide?” and “What and how would customers be willing to pay?”
Amira created a customer journey that followed what she thought were the ideal steps in a successful training business. She then built a miniature model of her solution using cardboard, sticks and paper cut-outs of people and different mobile products and services. By making her ideas tangible and visual, Amira realised that being able to move from one location to another – using a mobile kiosk, for example – would help her reach more potential customers.
At the same time, Amira noticed a few pressing challenges. First, she was the only person providing the training, and this would not be sustainable in the long term. Also, she was relying mainly on word of mouth to raise awareness of her training services. Finally, her target customers came from different income brackets (some were more well off than others), so a single pricing model might limit the number of customers.
Luckily, Amira could start testing some of her ideas and solutions without spending a lot of time or money – through prototyping. To do this, she quickly sketched ‘screenshots’ of a few popular mobile apps on paper with bullet points of her key training points. She then created a visual storyboard that walked her potential customers through the training steps and the options for paying for it.
Amira selected different customer groups to test out her prototypes, including women, men and people of different ages and income groups. Amira guided them through a series of questions about the content, format and process of her training and gathered their feedback. By creating cheap and simple prototypes and asking thoughtful questions, Amira was able to quickly learn how her customers might experience her training and what they would be willing to pay for it.
Although people were generally positive about Amira’s training idea, they mentioned a few key points. First, they could not take time off from work or their home responsibilities to attend in-person training. Second, most people already had a mobile phone and were very familiar with basic calling and SMS, though struggled to find and use new apps or web-based tools. Third, many suggested that Amira offer different pricing plans, from basic training to more personalised services.
As Amira tested her idea using a prototype and not a final product, she was able to easily integrate the feedback she received. She adjusted her service from in-person to over the phone and via SMS. She would also use SMS to market her services and send out short step-by-step instructions on how to download apps. If needed, a customer could choose to pay extra for personalised training sessions over the phone.
By making these adjustments, Amira would not have to be physically present to give her training and she could reach more customers at once with a diverse service offering.
Amira is now developing a second round of prototyping with smaller versions of her training that she plans to test with her customer base via SMS. Amira now sees that customers are not just consumers – they also offer important insights about the design and development of her service, and ultimately save her valuable time and money.
