Service Innovation

I noticed this small article in the New York times the other day about a restaurant that has started to use the iPad as a wine list. To me, it makes perfect sense – wine is an emotional affair and the iPad give emotionally rich experiences – a great match. Not only does it give more information than most wine lists, it also has reviews of the wines that they stock. This allows people to make more informed choices and seems to tempt them to trade up and try generally more expensive wines than they would normally choose. In fact, the restaurant claims that the average purchase is 11 percent higher per diner compared to the previous non iPad solution.

I really like the customer insights in the article, citing the stress of choosing the right wine for a group, or avoiding being sold what one customer described as a used car special.

The article also made me think of the book Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling in which he explains how the digital presence of products will eclipse the products themselves over time. He uses the example of wine and particularly the experience of choosing a wine bottle as an example.

I am not writing this to advocate the wonders of the iPad (although I think it is a really great product)  but to show how innovations in touchpoints can provide improved experience and higher profits. Innovating touchpoints is one of the five lenses of the AT-ONE process, and we have just updated our touchpoint cards to add tablets and surfaces, as we expect these cards to be used a lot.

Tags: Experience, Interaction-Design, Touch-point, User experience

I just wanted to link to a blog created by two clever students at AHO. They are in the middle of their master project in which they are attempting to transform 100 products into services (their blog is mostly in Norwegian here). I like this project for several reasons. Firstly, I think its a nice summary of the servitisation that is happening in contemporary society (the example of jet engines not being products, but incorporated into services (guaranteed fly time) is one of the examples that repeatedly crops up). I think also that its an ambitious project that will most likely give some unexpected results and could go in any direction, all positive. Finally, I like it, because it plays on a lot of these coffee table books on design – 500 chairs etc. Its nice to see a service version. Reminds me also of the film Julie and Julia in which a frustrated writer decides to to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year, one recipe a day, and to blog about it. The project could almost have been called Ane and Anne, since that is the name of the two students doing the project.

I know that Ane and Anne are confidently scared of what they have initiated, so if you have some thoughts, examples, references or even just words of support, then please go over to their site and get in touch (even if you don’t read Norwegian).

Tags: concept, innovation

Tags: Behaviour, Multi task, Social media, Touch-point, Trend

There seems to be a major gap between businesses’ view of design as essential partner in innovation projects and research that shows the value of design. This is something I have been thinking about for a long time, and my experience is that companies have to experience the value of design to be able to use design. This might be a recognition of the famous saying “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” by Confucius, but I think there is more to it than that. Companies have spent huge amounts of money on ICT investment and CRM investment just from hearing about it, even though it has not always delivered on value.

As economically controlled beings, companies would be expected to invest in something that gives a higher rate of return than other investment alternatives, such as banks, bonds or shares. Design consistently delivers value that drives this home, and still, the use of design as a central part of innovation processes is lacking. I’m not moaning here, although it might sound like it  – I would just like to understand why we are in this slightly absurd situation, and crack the code to get design into innovation earlier and stronger.

Anyway, two new reports show the benefits and potential benefits from using design. The first one is from a piece of research from the Netherlands, The Design Effectiveness Industry Report (available for download here). This is quite an interesting study, that again shows:

Emphasizing design, and including designers in new product development teams, contributes to new product success. Likewise, involving designers in developing web sites and corporate visual identity helps to improve firm image. Together, this translates to better firm performance.

An interesting aspect of the work is that they looked specifically at design with an experiential quality. Again they found that design increased success, but there is one very interesting piece of information there. It looks like when it comes to the design of experiences, it is a good idea to let designers take control and  to give customers a back seat. The study found:

The combination of high experiential design emphasis and high customer involvement does not work out well for experiential quality of products. Customers can be expected to focus on features and functionality based on what they already know. Designers, on the other hand, can be expected to take a more innovative approach. When these two influences come together, the result is poorer experiential quality.

This is another piece of data in the long disputed discussion regarding customer involvement. It is however interesting, because it is one of the few studies that has linked experiential design, customer input and performance. Translated into the services innovation area, this means that it might be wise to take customer input with a pinch of salt. This is one of the reasons why in AT-ONE, the letter N for need, comes towards the end of the process rather than at the beginning. Its not that needs are  unimportant, they are of course vital. Its just a matter of balancing customer expressed need with opportunities that customers might not see.

The second set of data that supports the use of design as part of customer experience innovation is data from American Express. They highlight the increased focus customers have upon good customer experiences (thanks to our friends at LRA for this). American Express have an annual global customer service barometer and the findings are interesting from the most recent one:

A majority of Americans report that quality customer service is more important to them in today’s economic environment (61%) and will spend an average of 9% more when they believe a company provides excellent service.

A negative service experience is an important factor for most Americans: 81% have decided never to do business with a company again because of poor customer service in the past

Importantly, customers are spreading the word willingly and widely when they experience good service. In fact, contrary to conventional wisdom, customers are more inclined to talk about a positive experience than complain about a negative one. Three-quarters (75%) are very likely to speak positively about a company after a good service experience in contrast with 59% who are very likely to speak negatively about a company after poor service.

Consumers are far more likely to give a company repeat business after a good service experience (81%) than they are to never do business with a company again after a poor experience (52%).

If you put these two things together,it paints a pretty clear picture that design as part of service innovation creates long term value, develops services that people are willing to pay more for, and will tell friends and family about. Maybe now, this will tempt some companies to try out design as part of their innovation processes.

Tags: Customer, Design Management, Experience, Service Innovation, User experience

I have been meaning to blog about this for a while – the old spice adverts (link) and their effect. Almost everyone has seen and talked about the Old Spice adverts on YouTube (if you were holidaying this summer – look here), and the clever way that he created YouTube answers to questions received via Twitter (look here).

A fantastic ad campaign, with several nice touches. Well, not surprisingly, it has been a success, and sales of Old Spice have doubled (link). Not only that, an old-fashioned brand has been modernised and revitalised.

This advert has got me thinking about what it triggers in viewers, and its applicability outside of aftershave. Firstly, it links to our emotions through several hooks – immediate reactions to his good looks, emotional reaction to humour, and also its appeal to the intellectual side (thats cleverly done). In addition to this, it differentiates itself through its weirdness (Not many adverts end  with “Silver Fish Hand Catch”).  The appeal to visceral, learned and intellectual experiences covers three out of four (only missing idealistic) of the base pillars of customer experiences.

Thinking some more, I realised that this advert could have sold almost anything – old spice did of course fit the bill. But I think he could even have sold insurance. The advert could have created a coolness, even for insurance – get insurance from X and be like me. Don’t believe me? Well, I was unsure at first, but then thought about Compare the Meerkat in the UK. A memorable series of adverts for an insurance price-comparison site, with spoof websites (link) and videos (link), linking a cheeky Meerkat to compare the market for car insurance.

This post is to salute those people who made the right choices when creating campaigns that give experiential effects like this. I can imagine the response when somebody suggested using a meerkat to sell insurance during a project meeting!

If you have something that appeals and differentiates, together with a certain degree of wackiness, then you have the ingredients of innovation. How many times do innovative ideas get shot down, precisely because of this?

Tags: Desire, Emotion, Experience, User experience

Way back, I worked at Telenor R + D together with a clever technology guy called PÃ¥l Malm. We worked on a large project looking at how the internet would change our lives. At that time, PÃ¥ls hobbyhorse was how internet connections from things (that think) communicating data to each other, would eclipse internet connections from people using terminals and would accelerate from there onwards. Examples were thermostats, road signs, fridges, cars and even shoes. At that time, a lot of people thought that this was a strange thought, and not worth thinking about.

Well, today, PÃ¥l can celebrate and say told you so. Gizmodo, announced that the two lines have now crossed. New connections from things are now far outnumbering connections used by people, and PÃ¥l, it did happen quite quickly.

I am not just writing this for nostalgic reasons. I think that with all that data zinging around, there must be incredible opportunities to mash up some very interesting services. Linking data from objects together with data from organisations and data from people offers an incredible potential for new services. Will this be the next big thing, and who will make the breakthrough app? I’m looking forward to it!

Tags: innovation, Trend

A recent article in the New York Times (link) highlights the frustrations we all have with services. They refer to a consumer reports survey (link) in which people were asked about everyday annoyances, with 10 being the most annoying, and 1 the least annoying. I guess it doesn’t take much to guess that high up on the list, and second only to hidden fees (a score of 8.9) comes, yes you guessed it, failure to get a human on a customer service line at (8.6). Even the annoyingly wrong weather man scored only 4.3.

Not only is this a shocking number, but more than this, its a strange comment on society that we accept this terrible service. If we translated this to the product world, to say, unreliable products, then there is no way that we would accept such poor results. We would move on to a competitor. Its strange, but we have an acceptance for poor services, in the same way that we had an acceptance of unreliable products twenty five years ago. Since then, thanks mostly to the Japanese quality circles, we just expect products to be reliable. It is no longer a problem for us, and we just expect products to work nowadays.

I strongly believe that in 25 years time, we will look back on things like this as being the period in which services came good. We are in a period now where customer focus and customer experience is coming to services, and in the same way that competition raised the bar in products, the same will happen in services. Service leaders will gradually lift the level of service, so that in the end, poor service will stand out as an outlier and not the norm. Lets hope the consumer reports study in 2030 reverses the numbers, and that the most annoying thing for consumers is the weather forecast.

Tags: Experience, Touch-point, Trend

I re-found a treasure today whilst looking up the bakery that tweets as its produce comes hot out of the oven (link). Its the global rich list and a very nice (and so old its retro-trendy) website that does one thing incredibly well. It makes you step back and think about your own financial situation and puts things into perspective. All it does is rank you on the list of the worlds richest people. As a humble academic, I didn’t expect much, but was surprised to find that I am in the top 0.61% of the world. This gives an ambivalent feel good/feel bad experience at the same time, and luckily, there is an outlet for the feel bad, through the give to charity link.

What I like about it is its simplicity compared to the power of the message. It caters to our innate needs to position ourselves in relation to others and does so in a good way. I wish my bank statements reminded me of this each month, or even my tax statement. In a period of nudge (link), this is a perfect example of how to design a simple, yet effective, nudge experience.

Tags: Emotion, Engagement, Experience, Interaction-Design

I am working in the project planning the 2010 Government design competition in Norway, which will be focused upon healthcare. I am also hungrily looking for references related to user experience. Today I found some really useful documents that show how the NHS in the UK is really beginning to focus upon a patient-led health service.

The first document I found is  a pdf titled: “Now I feel tall - What a patient-led NHS feels like”. (link). This gives a useful overview of the field, argues why improving the emotional experience of patients matters, and the main drivers for improving patients’ emotional experience. The documents makes a nice distinction between feelings during the service journey, and the feelings that result from the experience. This nicely takes into account the research showing what we recall when describing experiences,

The second document I found is called Creating a patient-led NHS (link). This document focuses upon the challenges of implementing a patient-led NHS in terms of strategy and tactics. I found a nice description of a future service vision that was both pragmatic and descriptive at the same time.

Finally, a quite detailed document from the Kings Trust in the UK: Seeing the person in the patient by J. Goodrich (link). This argues for the benefits of patient-centric approach, describes the dimensions of patient-centred care and a framework for the analysis of factors underlying patients’ care. It also includes the following quote from Gilbert 2006 ( Stumbling on Happiness. New York: Knopf.) regarding who can tell you about the patient experience:

If we want to know how a person feels, we must begin by acknowledging the fact that there is one and only one observer stationed at the critical point of view …she is the only person who has even the slightest chance of describing ‘the view from in here’, which is why her claims serve as the gold standard against which all other measures are measured.

Finally, a practical and pragmatic approach to how to go about designing for the patient experience is the Experience Based Design (EBD) approach, which gives a nice step by step guide to how to design for experiences (link).

I think that the NHS is on a fantastic trajectory, and I really hope that the recent election and power change does not disrupt it.

Tags: Emotion, Experience, Health, User experience

At this years annual innovation conference run by the Norwegian research council, the AT-ONE project was invited to run a two hour workshop to give an introduction to service design and the AT-ONE method. We had 17 participants from a broad range of disciplines and companies and had a busy two hour session.

We chose to focus upon using touch-point cards (link) for innovation in primary healthcare. The touch-point cards were used to identify relevant touch-points for different stages in the service journey using the methods that are described on the cards.

The results were very positive and confirmed many of the expectations and earlier experiences  we have had regarding the cards.

1. The visual and tangible aspect of the cards was highlighted as very useful, not only allowing visual orientation, grouping etc, but also as a common reference for all.

2. Participants were enthusiastic, and the idea generation process couldn’t go fast enough. People had queues of ideas to discuss and note down.

3. The role of designers in each group was important. We had placed a designer in each of the three groups, to facilitate the process and to draw out ideas, and this  was seen as a really useful way to continually integrate ideas into experiential solutions and visualise them.

Here are some of the quotes from the evaluation afterwards:

Everyone can use these cards, and they open up the process

The difference between innovating the whole service and its parts became apparent, particularly the interplay between these. The service became more interesting when we moved from the whole to the parts

Makes you both concrete and experimental at the same time. I have found a new way to trigger associational processes

A good way to draw out the overall system, to then dive down later into individual touchpoints

I’m really happy that the cards are receiving such positive reviews. We also identified a couple of new touch-points to add to the list, so will be updating these soon.

Tags: Touch-point, Visualisation