Service Innovation

There has been a lot of interest recently about the touch-point cards we developed and gave away to the conference participants. Jeff posted a short description and review (link) and Qin Han wrote about the welcome package (link). Qin followed up with some interview questions for me, and the answers are now posted online.

If you are interested in information about why the cards were developed, how they were developed and what you can use them for, then hyperlink yourself over here.

Just in case you are interested, we don’t have any more left, but will be putting them online together with the other AT-ONE tools in the future.

Nike is about to launch a city guide app for the iPhone. They are not the only ones that are competing to provide city guides, so that is not the main news item. There are several reasons why I think this is interesting news.

Nike True City from NikeSportswear on Vimeo.

Firstly, the collaboration between Nike and Apple for the Nike+ was strong on user experience and could be seen as a good building block for this new move. Secondly, I instinctively feel that the Brand DNA of Nike would fit well with a city guide. Finally, I think that it marks an interesting transition for Nike, moving from products to product/service systems (Nike+) and now to services. Continue this trajectory and Nike could go a long way.

I read a quote a long long time ago from the BBC when commenting that the digitalisation of TV would produce entertainment overload. They said:

“in a sea of content, people will look for islands of trust”.

Is Nike about to become and island of trust?

Tags: Brand, Experience

I have received a lot of mails recently about the Touch-point cards (link to a review) that we have produced in the AT-ONE project (we don’t have any left, but will put them online). One of the cards, and one common service touch-point is the letter.  A few days ago I received two letters that really show how companies miss the opportunity to make contact, inform and start a dialogue through the letter.

The first letter is a standard letter from the municipal transport authority regarding renewal of my season ticket. I think it is a legal requirement over here in Norway, that they send me a letter to inform me that they will be debiting my account (which kind of defeats the point of automatic renewals and self service I guess).

Anyway, the letter is totally devoid of any personality or any relevance to me. Come on, its date is just before Christmas, its for January, the new year. It could inform me about any number of things and even wish me the seasons greetings.

The second letter is from my bank. It informs me that I now have a different contact person in the bank.

Its a shame that it is in Norwegian, but basically it just informs me that I have a new advisor and it gives his contact info. I thought this anonymous kind of autocratic letter  was history, but obviously it lives on. Now I guess that DnB, which is one of Norways largest banks, has invested a huge amount of money somewhere on CRM, and that they know a lot about me and my economy. Why can’t they show that they know a bit about me, and that they are there for me? Even a picture and short profile of the new guy would give me some kind of emotional response, rather than a purely dead piece of information. As I understand the letter, they are trying to say that they value personal contact between the bank and me, that they would like to increase this contact and would like to create some form of loyalty from me due to this. But the content, and tone of voice just say that we don’t really care about you. The letter is one of the biggest turn-offs I could receive, and I am already looking for a new bank as a replacement (not just because of the letter).

I am not suggesting that every touch-point should be used as a means of ramming a message down my throat, but rather arguing that the letter is an important touch-point, and one which offers huge potential. Firstly, I don’t receive that many letters these days, so letters get more attention than they used to. It gives the opportunity to gain my undivided attention for a number of seconds (where else does that occur?). Secondly, the letter communicates the personality of the company and its DNA  through both content and tone of voice. It is an important ambassador, particularly for a bank, since direct contact with a bank is a rare thing these days. Thirdly, the cost of printing and sending a letter is high for any organisation. The extra cost of thinking about wording and even personalisation, is small in comparison.

So, please consider the letters you mass produce and send out. Consider them from the customers point of view and use them to create some positive emotional response.

I blogged a long time ago (link) about the CD Baby cover letter that immediately creates an emotional response and encourages dialogue and loyalty. Its not something a bank could use, but it has the perfect personality for the alternative music scene. How could your company innovate itself through letters?

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, November 18th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.

Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year.’ We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh…

We have received lots of positive feedback about the conference, which is really nice to hear. We put a lot of effort into the experience that we wanted people to have, and it seems we managed it pretty well (apart from the Anker Hotel being a building site that started work very early in the morning). We did a bit of service design thinking, and experience design prototyping as part of the planning (taking our own medicine) and it paid off.

Its too much to go through everything from the conference, (there is a nice review here) but a couple of things are worth mentioning …

Images from the conference and the great (participatory) conference dinner are up on flickr (here). I would never believe that 95 people could cook a meal together and enjoy it afterwards, but it was a great success.

Papers from the conference are (here). Videos from the first day will also be available here very soon.

We have received several requests for information about the Touch-point cards that the AT-ONE project gave away for the conference. Unfortunately we don’t have any more left, but we will soon be putting them up on this site as a download so you can make your own. Qin Han has asked me to write some more information for her design generalist blog (link) so that should turn up soon.

So that brings us in to 2010. A new decade, more digital than ever (yesterday was 100110), but yet another decade that doesn’t have a good name. I hope that all of you have a great year, and that Service Design continues with its rapid growth (there are signs that this is the case).

Recently, there has been a flurry of activity around some new terms, Design thinking and Design leadership. I think they are interesting terms, and describe some new directions for design. Design thinking, suggests to me, that designers have a different way of thinking – visual, abductive etc, which means that they have relevance outside of the product sphere (meaning also services). Design leadership means two things to me. One is to achieve a leading position in the market through the strategic use of design (Apple comes to mind here… again). The second is to use design thinking in your role as a leader – that is – using design qualities in your leadership role. These are both exciting terms and a useful development from the design management term that has been around for quite some time.

A couple of things have got me to write about this. Firstly, that energetic design thinker, Monica Hestad from Plan (link)  sent me a link to a short review of books about design thinking, titled “A Design Thinker’s Reading List” (link). This just shows, how much people have been thinking about, well, design thinking.

The second thing is  a series of discussions with my good friend and bright colleague, Judith Gloppen at AHO (link). She has introduced the term Service Design Leadership as part of her PhD in the AT-ONE project.  She is researching these  relatively new terms, and trying to untangle their definitions, histories and trajectories. But, more importantly, she is looking to see if these terms should have slightly (or very) different content when used within the world of services. We recognise that services are different from products, so then, is Service-design thinking different to design thinking? Is Service Design leadership different to Design leadership. Judith has some nice thoughts about this, which she will be sharing with us at the First Nordic Service Design Conference at AHO in November (link). At the conference, we have put together a session that highlights these terms, and one other relatively new one – service-dominant logic. To me, a discussion of terms like these makes the conference really valuable. Not because I’m a pedantic academic (ok, maybe I am one of those too) but because I really think we are beginning to uncover some of the central elements that makes design different, and valuable in todays innovation landscape. And thats exciting.

Tags: Design leadership, Design Management, Design Thinking

Alice Andreoli at AHO has just started her student diploma project to improve the student accommodation service in Oslo, and I like her approach. She has moved into one of the least attractive student houses, and is both observing and intervening at the same time. She hopes that she can make sustainable changes to the accommodation while she is there and will take a Service Design approach. Hopefully, the results will be applicable to all student accommodation, and will be implemented by the service provider.

Her first stage is to obtain input and to observe how things work, and she is documenting her work really well on her blog (link). I think her approach is fresh  and exciting, and I love the amount of transparency she has in her documentation. Interventions like these are not without methodological problems, but I think this hands-on approach to designing will outweigh them. This is one to follow!

We are all sick of IVR phone menus – the ones that when you call offer you option after option of voice menus to direct you to the right place. Way back, I re-designed a few of them to make them easier to use, but they still are a poor substitute for a person on the other end, even though they are much much cheaper. Earlier, there were lists on the web that gave you direct numbers or tips about how to go directly to a person, but now a service has arrived that makes it all that much easier. Named on the Time best 50 websites of 2009 (link), fonolo (link) lets you deep link to a person and call them.

It does this my mapping out the structure of an IVR system, and then lets you go directly there. Sounds like one of those small innovations that you want to tell others about.

Tags: Emotion, Experience, innovation, Touch-point

After a long Summer pause, and lots of work starting up the new Service-Design course we are running together with the Oslo Business School this fall, I thought I just had to point you to this news item at the BBC (link).

Whole Foods, is a company that has 270 stores in North America and the UK, sells organic vegetables and I would guess has a high proportion of Obama supporters. The Chief Executive, John Mackey, has managed to create a huge storm, by strongly opposing Obamas suggested health care reform and likening it to a form for socialism that uses up everybody elses money until there is none left (a Margaret Thatcher quote).

This seems a very  unfortunate thing to do, and predictably, it  was like waving a red rag to a bull. Not only are people travelling long distances to picket the Whole Foods Market, the angry customers are also using social networks to spread the message. The forum on the whole foods website related to the issue now has 17074 posts, a long distance from next place ‘cooking tips and advice’ with 303 posts.

I think this is interesting from two perspectives. Firstly, it reminds me that behaviours are a major touch-point for a service brand. The behaviours of everyone in the organisation, from the daily contact with people in the shop, to the behaviour of the chief executive. I have been discussing touch-points with Birgitta Cappelen at AHO a lot recently. We have been comparing the touch-point approach that Service Design takes to the Visual Identity approach that many branding consultants use. The brand and touch-point wheel that is commonly used (originally described by Dunn and Davis), does not include behaviours (or networks), and to our minds, this is a major omission.

The brand touchpoint wheel takes a product rather than service view (this image fromVoss + Zomerdijk 07)Â

The second thing relates to basic branding, or in the AT-ONE case, the Offering. Whole Foods use a large dose of emotional branding in their offering, appealing to peoples desires to care for the planet, care for others and care for their future. In the hierarchy of branding, appealing to idealistic beliefs, such that customers feel an alignment, is the strongest type of branding that one can use. This gives strong loyalty and a high willingness to visibly support the brand. However, its a two-edged sword, since violating this trust can turn people strongly against a brand, due to feelings of betrayal.

Two major things, that could have been foreseen. I think that John Mackey has a lot of explaining to do, and that the damage that he has done to the Whole Foods brand will be major. Understanding customers and customer behaviour in relation to idealistic brands has to be paramount.

Tags: Authenticity, Brand, Emotion, Touch-point

My, its a while since I posted here. I have been all caught up in finishing the AT-ONE workshops for our partners and arranging the conference for November (which is looking very good by the way). Since its Summer and real news is thin on the ground, I thought I would post something in the summer vein.

I saw this news item on the BBC, about a zoo using elephants as a car wash (link),and it got me thinking of a few things. Firstly, I was in Innsbruck teaching service design to students at the business school there, and our case example was the Alpine Zoo in Innsbruck. This made me understand something about what gives a special experience at a zoo – closeness to the animals – and how many zoos have lost and refound that simple fact.

Then, I was inspired to plan a trip to see the Northern Lights in Norway. I have lived here for ages, and have seen them a couple of times down here in the south, but have always wanted to go up north to see them in their full glory. I went onto the Norwegian tourism site, which wrote poetically about them, only to disappoint me terribly with two things:

1. It stated that to enjoy the Northern Lights you should plan a two week trip! Now, who wants to go to Northern Norway in the middle of the darkest darkest cold winter for two weeks

2. It was really difficult to find a package for viewing them. The site left me with a map showing some hotels in the city of Tromsø and left me on my own – no information about how to go about finding the Northern Lights once there, or even if Tromsø was the right city. Kinda figure it out yourself.

Image from visitnorway.com

Altogether these things put me off, after calculating the cost of taking two weeks off work, flights and two weeks at Norwegian hotel prices and probably some car hire too. And that is a real shame, because I’m sure that I might be missing out on something really good. And brought me back to  the brilliant  idea that the Zoo had, using elephants to wash the car. Its probably a terrible car wash, but the experience of it is something that will remain in all kids minds (and parents too). How can northern Norway do the same? Well, you cant expect people to travel up for two weeks with the expectation that they might experience something, and might not. And you have to give them something to remember, even if the weather is bad and the lights don’t show themselves. How about dog-sled rides to a viewing site from the hotel? The experience of that  would be enough, even if the lights didn’t appear.  A Northern Lights centre, that can almost give you the same experience. In fact a whole package of Winter Norway, bundled into a long weekend. Each single item might not match up to the standard of an elephant washing the car, but the trip would certainly be something to remember.

At the conference, Kjell Reenskaug from Making Waves (link), one of Norways best  design and interaction design companies, will be presenting how they used service design principles to redesign the fateful tourist site I mentioned (visitnorway.com). This is interesting, because they moved from a traditional “interactive” role, to a service-design role encouraging actor collaboration to tailor customer experiences, which then could be communicated through the web site. I like that approach, so will log on to the new site and try again next winter to get my Northern Lights experience.

For those of you interested in comparisons of methods to gain user insights, Brianna Sylver has compiled a nice comparison over at Core 77. It can be found here. Most of it is known stuff, but I like the way she relates the different methods to the different phases of the design process. However, its obvious that this is from the USA, (where everything is bigger) since her resource requirements are a factor of 10 away from what I am used to (3.5 months for ethnographic studies – yes please). 

 

 

We are working on our own set of tools to facilitate user insights as part of the AT-ONE process. This will be similar to Briannas, but will have more depth, and link the customer input to idea generation techniques, to enable people to move from insights to innovations.

Tags: Customer, Method, User, User-needs