Service heroes
Posted: 06/08/2010 Filed under: service design, Uncategorized | Tags: service design Leave a comment »One of the main challenges of conducting a holistic service experience design project is that your client is very likely to be a person. A person in an ocean of corporation.
Service/customer touchpoints are almost never the responsibility of one team or individual. Take Telco A for instance: grossly simplifying things, there are VPs and divisions for everything: products, services, marketing, consumer, B2B, customer services, design, retail, IT, real estate, logistics, engineering, maintenance sub-contractors, procurement…
OK, corporations need to organise their ocean of people and activities into manageable parts, but usually they end up with lots of self-contained puddles which don’t network very well.
But customers, oblivious to this complexity, see only BRAND and SERVICE.
It’s no good to invest on a new brand campaign if your customer-services are done by some careless contracting company, not aligned with your brand values. It’s no good pushing your customers towards self-service if your digital channels are badly designed and inefficient. All the touchpoints need to be aligned and complement each other, as they are “the company” in the eyes of your customer after all.
There is where you, CEO, need a champion. If it can be yourself, even better. But you need empowered service champions who can can make sure your vision survives the messiness of divisions, hierarchies and P&L structures which discourage people to have common objectives.
For us, customer experience designers, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing our concepts implemented. But beyond our contribution, it is this strong champion (or champions) from the ranks of our client who will make it a reality.
Starbucks service experience map
Posted: 01/05/2010 Filed under: service design | Tags: service design Leave a comment »You might not like Starbucks coffee (I don’t) but this service experience map shows that the quality of the coffee is nearly irrelevant when you consider what happens when customers visit their shops. The opportunities and risks are all in the service. From the Little Springs Design blog
Forgetful and happy
Posted: 13/04/2009 Filed under: Product design, user experience | Tags: customer research, service design, user experience 1 Comment »I have been reading some interesting articles on how service designers have been using Behavioural Sciences to improve customer satisfaction and… to make more money.
Behavioural sciences have shown that customers have a short memory span and we should bear this in mind as we design and manage services. It’s not as evil and deceiving as it sounds – it is more about leaving the best to end. Some of the findings that are relevant to user-experience include:
- We prefer progressive improvements. We can tolerate weak starts and decent middles if what follows is a good end (the concept of Beta services). But we are cruel and judgemental when services start well and disappoint in the end.
- We prefer to resolve unpleasant things early, getting them out of the way and taking our time with lighter/ fun things. Kind of obvious but it gives us the clear hint that if we need to ask the user to make an effort (e.g. registration) or to inform them of a limitation (e.g. availability, delivery policies) it should be done sooner than later.
- A positive end is the part of the experience that we remember the most.
This is a great endorsement to UX designers and clients who understand that they need to dedicate as much attention to homepages as to lower level/exit pages – knowing that any page can be an entry point and that they have little control over the user’s exit points.
Using some basic Behavioural Sciences concepts to improve business is no evil plot to control the customer’s mind. It’s about sustaining the quality along the whole user-experience and surprising the user positively at the end – whenever that is.
Read more:
Want to Perfect your Company’s Service? Use Behavioral Science
Richard Chase for Harvard Business Review
Are we doing product or service design?
Posted: 05/02/2009 Filed under: Product design, user experience | Tags: customer experience, design, marketing, online, product development, service design, user experience Leave a comment »Sometimes when you try to decide if the output of an interactive project is a product or a service, things get blurry. Traditionally products are defined as tangible goods as opposed to services which are defined as intangible goods. Not so helpful… What is that tangible on the web? Perhaps the interface, but not much else.
I prefer the definition which says a product is something we own whilst a service is something we can use temporarily. The difference between buying and hiring a dinner jacket.
This definition seems useful, so I’ll try to apply it to a few real life projects (the output of which I would have called generically Product in the past):
An e-learning platform – Definitely providing an education service
An online newspaper – An information service
A software-as-a-service online shop – Can provide a similar service to a sales assistant offering expert advice and guiding the customer towards a suitable service package.
A mobile mapping application – A tricky one. I have downloaded the software (so I own it), but for it to be useful at all I need data provided by the mapping company (a service) facilitated by my network operator (also a service).
A multinational corporate website – Essentially a marketing and communication tool between company, customers, investors, press, etc. At the same time you can consider it as a provider of self-customer-services.
Why is this differentiation relevant to interactive projects?
It is pretty clear that many online projects will generate hybrid product-service offerings, just as in the physical world. But I think we (practitioners) are developing more services than we imagined, yet treating them mostly as products.
Services usually involve longer or repeated engagements with the user and perhaps we can contemplate that more efficiently. It would be really interesting to start using rich design tools such as service blueprinting in addition to content maps and prototypes.
Let’s see how it works in practice.
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Some interesting reading: Better than owning
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