All successful small businesses make customer service a top priority, but does yours have empathy for its customers?

“Empathy,” or “empathetic design,” is the driving force behind the design-thinking movement, in which businesses try to see the customer or end user’s experience through his eyes, step by step, from start to finish. The goal is to solve a problem or improve upon the customer’s experience by mapping every step of the customer’s journey and seeing which areas can be improved upon, often through entirely new concepts and designs.

Tim Brown, the president and chief executive of IDEO, an international design and consulting firm founded in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1991, famously described design thinking as “matching people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and viable as a business strategy.” In short, find a way to give your customers what they need when they need it, and you’ll create an enjoyable customer experience that will drive your business’s growth.

Dr. Thomas Lockwood, author of the book “Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value,” said that one of the most famous examples of design thinking is the Swiffer mop created by Proctor & Gamble, which uses disposable wet wipes attached to a plastic mop to clean floors.

Lockwood said that in searching for a way to build a better mop, a design research team made appointments to visit homes and watch people clean their floors. The first thing they noticed was that people typically would clean their floors in advance of the visit, which told the researchers that people really took pride in having a clean home, especially when guests arrived.

Researchers then noticed that people would spend a lot of time filling a bucket with water and cleanser and repeatedly dipping the mop back into the bucket in order to clean the mop itself and to get more water to clean the floor. And when they were done, they had to spend time emptying the bucket by pouring it down a drain.

“The researchers asked themselves, ‘Isn’t there a better way to clean a floor than to turn dust into mud and then to pick up the mud?’” said Lockwood, founding partner of Lockwood Resource, an international recruiting firm specializing in design and innovation leadership. “If they had just done a survey to ask people how the mop could be improved, they never would have come up with the concept of the Swiffer. They only came up with it by getting out and seeing how people act, what they actually do.”

Another well-known example of design thinking is Bank of America’s “Keep the Change” program. The bank found that many customers dreaded getting their credit-card statements because they were focused on how much money they owed each month. So, working with IDEO, Bank of America came up with a program that automatically rounds up each credit-card transaction to a round number and puts that additional money into the customer’s savings account.

For example, a $97.50 transaction might be rounded up to $100, and the additional $2.50 is put into the customer’s savings account. At the end of the month, customers are pleasantly surprised at how much money they have saved, with no effort on their part. The idea is to change the customer’s experience and level of satisfaction simply by addressing a need – to save money – in an unconventional way.

Design thinking can be applied to virtually every service sector or industry, Lockwood said. As an example, he said, a major hospital hired a design research team to help it reduce the number of cases in which a patient was given the wrong medication or the wrong dosage. The design team visited the hospital and noticed that nurses who were dispensing mediation were constantly interrupted by patients, doctors or other nurses asking questions or even just socializing.

The design team then came up with the solution of giving nurses who were dispensing medication orange uniforms that signaled to other staffers that they were not to be disturbed so that they could focus on dispensing medication. As a result, the error rate plummeted.

Changing the nurses’ uniforms illustrates one key to design thinking: prototyping. Once researchers identify a possible solution to a problem, they must test it out in a low-cost way to determine if it is effective, before the company or institution commits to a large-scale and potentially expensive rollout.

“In most cases, the solutions are super-simple, but the problem is getting there,” said Jakob Schneider, co-author of the book “This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases.” “The key is to ask the right questions. People always say that they’re customer-centric, but they’re really organization-centric, and changing that mindset is often the biggest challenge.”

Schneider, a design-thinking business consultant based in Cologne, Germany, pointed to two very simple customer-service changes that stem from design thinking.

In one case, a bank found that when a customer applied for a loan, the process could be somewhat confrontational because the customer was on one side of a rectangular desk, and the banker was on the other side, looking at a computer screen. The customer had no way of knowing what was on the screen. What personal information about the customer was being used to judge his creditworthiness?

By simply prototyping a triangular desk that allowed both the customer and the banker to see the computer screen, design researchers were able to come up with a setup that made the customer more comfortable and enhanced his experience.

In another case, a cellphone service provider was telling its front-line staff to ask every customer, “Do you need help?” Since most customers were just browsing and didn’t need help, they would say no. But do you really want the first word out of a customer’s mouth when he’s in your store to be “no?” Design researchers instead had front-line staff simply say, “If you need help, I’m here.”

Schneider said the key to solving problems with design thinking is to bring together just a handful of customers so you can observe and map out their experiences step by step and then conduct a focus group or in-depth interviews. The in-depth, small-group approach provides far better insights than businesses’ typical approach to getting customer feedback – having them fill out short surveys or call a phone number found on their receipt so that they can rate their experience.

“Just invite 10 people to talk at length about your product or service, and I promise, you will get insights that you never dreamed of,” he said.

Lockwood said carwashes’ uses of RFID tags, which store customers’ preferences and preferred payment options, is a great example of design thinking in action because the tags improve the customer experience by making carwashes quicker and more efficient. He said possible areas to look at in the future would include finding a way to schedule customers, perhaps through a smartphone app, to minimize wait times when the weather turns optimal and carwashes are slammed with long lines.

Lockwood said some small business owners might think that design thinking is only for big companies with large research-and-development teams, but that’s not the case.

“Design thinking is just about having a small group of people working with end users,” he said. “My argument is that small businesses are in the best position to do design thinking because they have the least amount of bureaucracy and can change things more quickly and easily than big businesses.

“The main thing is to listen to your customers and ask open-ended questions to find out what pleases them and where they find frustration and disappointment, and then have the courage to do some simple tests around that, just really simple prototypes. You don’t have to change a lot of things and invest a lot of money, but just change one thing and see if it works.”