Understanding Consumers in Design Thinking Brings Providers, Clients Closer

In today’s outsourcing relationships, the more a service provider can understand its client’s customers, the more value it can add. This is a critical premise for applying design thinking, which enables service providers to help their clients better with identifying, articulating, and addressing business problems, opportunities, trouble spots, etc.

“Household Consumption Patterns” is a compelling datatool that helps service providers gauge their customers’ business actions and, in turn, helps design strategy that considers the “H” factor –  smart humans that engage with them rather than mechanically serving them.

Nations across the world are at varying levels of development, reflected in how their household spending patterns contrast from each other. In September 2015, The Economist’s “How countries spend their money” brought out anecdotal evidence that suggests a country’s spending reflects its citizen’s priorities and challenges alike.[1] For example, Australians spend large sum of their income on recreation, and South Koreans, above average on education.  While the chart covers economical differences and spending, it also gives us another avenue to analyze end users needs, its consequences on the peripheral industries and services such as customer care, technology or perhaps the outsourcing spending patterns.

Analyzing the consumption pattern by each country provides some insight on how companies are gearing up to respond to the growing or dwindling demand by end consumers in a particular industry sector, along with the changing regulatory environment and its impact, if any. This, coupled with the application of design-thinking ethos, helps prepare you to be a strategic outsourcing partner with timely and relevant recommendations to augment capacity as well as capability.

Here are few consumption patterns that have impacted the growth of the respective sector in that country. 

• Healthcare in the USA. As per the household expenditure data compiled by Eurostat, private health care in America eats up over a fifth of each household’s budget. This explains why the US Healthcare IT market is witnessing an overwhelming growth where every service provider across the globe is hurrying to differentiate using advances in technology. The differentiation also comes from the way one engages which is something we explore in our research, such as what engagement means in healthcare.
• Canada, EU, Australia and Saudi Arabia have larger Utilities markets. The Middle East, Australia, Canada and a number of Western European countries in particular are investing heavily in creating extra capacities in power and energy to keep up with the growing demands of the region. This invariably has increased the demand for IT spend and need to outsource non-core work to focus on integrating new agile technologies to come up to the speed with the demand side needs.
• Japan an obvious higher spender on housing and construction. Four years post a devastating earthquake and tsunami, Japan is still far behind a complete recovery. This has pushed the need for sustainable housing and infrastructure planning, energy and new technologies to speed the process. This could therefore be the next place to see a rise in IT spend based on the reconstruction.

Mass customization of the products and services doesn’t appeal to today’s consumers who are sophisticated, well informed and ready to adopt changes quickly. This attitude affects the buying patterns and disrupts the state of the business environment. HfS Research believes that service providers’ alertness towards the needs of end users of their clients will further enable the understanding of the business environment. This in turn can help them become more strategic partners in their client’s journey to deliver the best products and services to the markets they serve.