Creating seamless customer experiences

Seeing your business through the eyes of your customers and employees. Listening closely to what they are saying. Observing their behavior to uncover the motivations and needs that go unspoken and unmet. Solving problems before they even knew one existed.

That’s the essence of our design-driven approach, and it’s where we find the greatest opportunities. We help reimagine and digitize end-to-end business processes and services to power remarkable customer or user journeys.

Examples of our work

Simplified and digitized the mortgage-origination process

at a large bank, cutting approval time for new loans from 2–10 days to 15 minutes, and reducing origination cost by 70 percent

Helped a telecom company transform its service-dispatching process through automation,

yielding better management of service technicians and customer-service calls

Cut the time it takes customers to open a new account

from 1–5 days to 5 minutes at a global bank, contributing to a 25 percent increase in new account openings

The need is greater than ever

Technology has handed end users unprecedented power to dictate the rules in purchasing goods and services. Whether you’re focused on customers, patients, internal users, or employees, they all demand experiences that are delightful—seamless, immediate, secure, omnichannel, on-demand, convenient, and personalized.

How we get there: It's a journey.

The impact is rapid and dramatic on multiple fronts: customer satisfaction, revenue growth, cost to serve, and employee engagement.

Companies are swimming in a sea of metrics, and your customer has needs and expectations at every touchpoint that you are likely already measuring. But it takes an operational and cultural shift to see how your customer’s cumulative experience—beyond traditional touchpoints—unfolds into a journey over time, with a clearly defined beginning and end.

Design thinking helps us to empathize with customers and users at every step in their decision journey and to create a map for meeting your organization’s underlying experiential, technological, and operational requirements:

Quantify

what matters to your customers

Apply ethnographic research

behavioral psychology, and digital technologies to reinvent the experience

Create prototypes

quickly and iteratively test them with end users to better engage them

Scale

throughout your organization: IT, legal, marketing, sales, and design

Impact story

Transforming customer experience in wealth management

Our client had been advising high net worth investors for over 100 years. But times were changing—fast.

An unrivaled design heritage

Award-winning design firms and leaders joined McKinsey to deliver change that matters. We have assembled a world-class team of more than 350 design experts, including specialists in industrial design, research, engineering, and color-material finish. To learn more about our 50 years of design heritage, we invite you to visit the websites of LUNAR and Veryday.

Meet our designers

Xenia, Berlin

Meet our designer, Xenia, and discover how her DIY ethos is inspired by the many places she’s lived. Catch a glimpse of her home and enjoy a snapshot of her work environment, the Experience Studio in Berlin, where the magic of cocreation occurs.

Malcolm, Berlin

Immerse yourself in Malcolm’s world! Let our experience designer guide you through Berlin and explain why he finds the city so inspirational. Learn what being a designer means to Malcolm and how he enjoys getting lost in nature—either in his van or on his bike.

Jared, Austin

Join Jared as he takes us on a tour through Austin and the places he finds inspirational, including running at Barton Springs and a class he teaches at the University of Texas.

Allison, London

Meet design director Allison. Get a glimpse of her everyday life—a project she's been working on, her biggest hobby outside work, and the things she loves best about London.

Connect with McKinsey Design