Baxi – using design thinking to understand customer experiences
Find out how Baxi heating overcame their challenges.
Through the Innovate UK Design Foundations programme in 2017 £4 million of funding was awarded to 93 businesses of varying sizes. The objective was helping businesses work with designers to identify innovation opportunities and find viable routes to market.
This insight series selects several of those projects to highlight a variety of design approaches.  Baxi Heating is an established business with over 150 years in the heating solutions market. To maintain their position as one of the largest suppliers of heating and hot water in the UK, they know they need to lead with innovative services. Funding from the Design Foundations initiative enabled Baxi to bring in designers from Tenshi and Freestyle Innovation to help develop an in-house design-led innovation unit.
“As a non-design lead business Innovate UK introduced us to the benefits of design thinking and KTN introduced us to some key contacts in this space. Engineers are the developers of our products and they mostly work on optimising the function of the boilers.  Working with Tenshi and Freestyle Innovation taught us not to do innovation aimlessly, but to really investigate what our customers’ experiences are. The crucial element was to get our colleagues involved from the start. Our R&D engineers rarely get to talk to customers. We wanted to understand what heating and hot water means to a person?” said Baxi’s Customer Insight Manager, Oliver Moffat
“We developed an internal programme working to a design process with Tenshi. We didn’t just want a training programme, or a few exercises. We wanted new skills, a tool kit with longevity and some really good insights”.
Find out how Baxi overcame their challenges in their case study here
If your business is facing customer experience challenges and want to talk to someone about using design thinking to tackle that challenge, talk to Jake Larson from the Design in Innovation team at KTN.