Service Innovation

The web is a perfect way to get customers to provide feedback and suggestions for improvements. We have mentioned before that customers are bursting with comments, criticisms and ideas, and just waiting for an opportunity to share them. Creating a dialogue between a service provider and customers in this way is a sure way to build trust and loyalty, (and incidentally, a way to reveal your true brand colours – good or bad).  

Its not surprising then, that a good number of start-ups have been developing platforms to help companies organise, structure and understand this input. Two competing companies in this field are UserVoice (link) and Get satisfaction (link). At first, they seem similar, but scratch under the surface and two very different business models appear. User voice offer a platform for companies to incorporate into their  own site (or to create a new one) and charge a subscription for this, even offering  a free version. Get satisfaction have a centralised solution, offering a one-stop shop for customer support, and charging companies to participate in the dialogue that they initiate and host.

This seems, on the face of it to be fine. Two different models, with two different revenue streams. However, it seems that Get satisfaction have been a little too keen to create a presence on the web, and have created a site that might be taken to be official and sanctioned by the service provider (which often is not the case). This has created a row on the blogosphere between 37 signals, who outed this borderline activity of Get Satisfaction. The hot debate can be read here and was followed up here. 

There are lots of interesting aspects to discuss about this. Firstly, its just fantastic that such sites exist, and that companies are seriously creating a dialogue with their customers. Secondly, its interesting how a similar offering can be perceived differently, based upon the business model that lies behind it. Lets face it, customer input (good or bad) is an emotive area, particularly when it is aired in public. It is therefore important that sites that facilitate dialogue be perceived as being authentic, more so because we are talking emotions, trust and loyalty. This was clearly shown in the number of comments to the 37 signals blog post, and their voracity. Finally, I think that dialogue through different touch-points (such as User Voice) will gradually infuse into organisations, and become a standardised part of their offering. The quicker companies see that this is a quick way to innovation and embrace this the better.

Final point – User Voice will be presenting at this Autumns Service Design Conference that we are hosting (link) in November. Looking forward to that!

Tags: Authenticity, Customer, User, User-needs

John Thackara (link) introduced me recently to Hello Health (link), a thoroughly modern primary  health service in New York. They have done something that seems obvious and simple – made the doctor personal again – through using the technology many of us have (Iphones, video-phones, email etc).  There is something compelling about this, even though you might think that using these technologies will distance yourself from the doctor. What sells me on the idea, is that they imply that this frees up time for them to visit you if you are sick and cant make it in to the surgery. 

We did a project with our students several years ago looking at primary health care, and one of the findings was the distance that ICT has created between doctors and patients. Most notably, the doctor using the PC screen as a barrier between them and the patient.  My doctor used to do this, coupled together with his one fingered typing, whilst talking aloud – T-H-E– P-A-T-I-E-N-T–C-O-M-P-L-A-I-N-S etc. Hello health seem to cut through this and link community services with net communities, IM, SMS, email etc. In fact, the touch-points that should be used to create the relationship that health care is all about.

Take a look at this you-tube video. It might sell you on the idea too!

Tags: concept, Customer, Experience, Offering, Touch-point, User experience, Web 2.0

The chancellor of the exchequer Alistair Darling has highlighted the importance of Service Design in the public sector, and urges local government to improve services by using design. 

Those clever people down at the British Design Council seem to have been reading my mind. I have been discussing with Berte Helgestad from Norsk Tipping (link) about scenarios and forecasting and the role of design in this. I think Design has a lot to offer to both, in terms of Design Thinking, but also visualising results. 

 

Well, the Design Council has not only created Public Services by Design (link), (a new programme from the Design Council to inspire and enable public service innovation through design) but is organising an event to explore several different possible futures for Britain and the role of design in each. Its very soon though, so get your name in fast.

 

This is what they say about it:

 

2009 will be remembered as a year of global economic downturn, but what could this mean for the future of the economy, society and government?

Will the downturn compel us to turn inwards, to become a nation of close knit families driven by individual needs? Or will it force unprecedented collaboration, creating a Britain that is focused upon the common good?

Dr Alex King, project leader at the governments Horizon Scanning Centre, will be presenting Economy and Society 2030 – a series of potential scenarios illustrating different versions of the future for Britain. Join the debate about role of the designer in these different futures for Britain and explore their position in helping shape the future of how government can deliver public services during global economic and societal change.

It will be held at the Design Council, Thursday the 23rd of April from 18.00-20.30. More info, and registration here (link)

If you are curious about the area of scenarios and forecasting, here are some interesting links:

 

Design Led Futures

Tags: Design Thinking, Foresight, Scenario

We have just started a series of workshops together with actress Birgit Nordby to explore different ways to specify a service experience and define a brand personality. The background for this work is that service experiences are difficult to describe and specify.There are several reasons for this:

• we don’t have a terminology to describe experiences
• we don’t have a methodology to specify experiences
• an experience has to be experienced to be understood

Our aim is to enable project teams to be able to specify the customer experience early in the service design phase, so that the project team can reverse engineer the actors, touch-points, offering to enable this experience.  Whether or not we will get there, I don’t know, but the goal of experience-pull for services is a good one.

Hans Christian, Birgit  and I, chose to use his diploma project (link) on trust in insurance services as a case study. To kick off the process, we decided to work together with Birgit to help refine the call-centre customer experience. We have a list of experience words that we have generated over time that we use for our experience workshops, so we based ourselves upon these. These words come from some desirability work carried out at Microsoft some time back, and from work by Aaker on brand personality.  Birgit helped us express these words, by enacting different roles based upon these words ( words such as empathic, close, friendly, relevant, respectful, flexible etc). Using the enactments, we have been able to differentiate between the experience that is given, and it has helped us to refine and define the terms that we wish to use for the service. 

We really didn’t know how this would go, but after the first workshop we found some interesting things. Firstly, that the approach has promise – its not a waste of time. Its very possible to refine the personality of a service and to experience the consequence of this personality in real time.  Secondly, that tone of voice is not enough to differentiate, when it comes to words that are fairly close to each other (eg. the words relevant and respectful). To differentiate at this level, you need to combine tone of voice, formulation of text and behaviour.  Thirdly, that an iterative workshop works well to help refine and define both personality and experience. Finally, we think that video can be used to document this successfully for use in a project team. In fact, what I think we might be moving towards, is the creation of a kind of persona for the service itself, that becomes part of the specification and service blueprint. I am now beginning to think that service blueprints should comprise of text, evidencing and also video as an effective means of specifying a service.

 

We will be running several other workshops during the spring, to take this explorative start further, and I hope  we can post a video of the results. We will hopefully present the work at the Nordic Service Design Conference in November (link). So far, our experiments are based in Norwegian, but I hope we can move over to English later.

Tags: Brand, Emotion, Experience, Personality, User experience

Thanks to Maziar Raein for this link to ColaLife (link), an idea that combines service design with socially responsive design in a good way. 

The idea is simple, use the fantastic distribution network that Coca Cola has, to distribute essential extra items that can be life savers in developing countries. As an example, distributing rehydration salts can save a huge number of childrens lives, children who die from dehydration due to diarrhea. 

The reason that I like this idea is not only its humanitarian logic, creative thinking and great observation. I think it brings home the potential that lies in thinking services (distribution+product)  rather than focussing upon the product itself. I strongly believe that there is a lot to be gained from using service thinking and applying it to areas in which we traditionally think products. If you are curious about what service thinking is, then LiveWork have just put up a short article explaining it (here).  Another thing that I like about the idea is that it shows the potential that can be gained through Actor collaboration. 

So, in the future, drinking a cold coke when on holiday in Africa, could just be saving lives…

In a recent report, Forrester research present data that correlates a positive customer experience to customer loyalty (link). They surveyed 4700 people and received data on about 1000 companies, regarding the link between loyalty and experience.

As they say themselves:

Our analysis shows that good customer experience correlates to consumers’ willingness to repurchase, reluctance to switch, and likelihood to recommend firms… 

This fits well with subjective experience and earlier studies. I remember reading some years back about consumer behaviour related to customer experience on e-commerce sites. Although 90% of online customers were concerned about use of their personal data, one third were willing to give personal data to retailers they have built some kind of relationship with, regardless of whether they were buying or not. This was in the dot.com days, and I remember the headline “trust is currency in e-commerce”. 

It was true then, and its true now. Customers build up their understanding of an online service from the experience it gives them, both visually and through use. This understanding is essentially the perceived offering (the O letter in AT-ONE), and is key to customer judgements about trust and ultimately loyalty. With todays rates of churn and high  acquisition costs, its definitely a worthwhile investment to focus more upon the customer experience.

Tags: Experience, Loyalty, Trust

The project has taken initiative to establish a Nordic Service Design conference, which I hope we can run every second year, in a different, and lovely Nordic destination. 

First off is Oslo, and in collaboration with the Norwegian Design Council, the conference will run from the 24th to the 26th of November 2009 at DogA, the Design and Architecture centre in Oslo (a very nice building).

(image from Flickr)

We have divided the three days into one day of hard-core business, one day of crossover and one hard-core research day. We hope to break with the traditional conference style, and are looking for ideas as to how to make all three days work really well. If you have an idea, or want to contribute, please get in touch.

More info here (link).

Tags: Conference

Over at clickz, (link) Jack Aaronsen claims that in these downturn times its even more important to focus upon the quality and consistency of the customer experience, particularly customer service. The article focuses particularly upon the importance of touch-point co-ordination for customer service, noting that customers expect to be able to use whichever touch-point they feel convenient to interact with your company. Not only this, todays multi-channel world creates expectations that your touch-points are not only coordinated, they should work in parallel real-time. As an example of this, he suggests that when chatting, it should be possible to add a channel, eg. telephone, so that text and audio can be combined to solve the customer problem. 

 

He gives some useful tips for touch-point co-ordination:

1. Make Your Contact Information Easy to Find

2. Operate a Multichannel Customer Service Center

3. Operate Live Chat When Customers Are on Your Site

4. If You Are Multichannel, Be Multichannel

5. Use Your Use Cases for Customer Service

 

The last point is worth noting. When developing services, you should use personas, and service-journeys to create scenarios of use, so that the customer experience is thought out beforehand, and accross touch-points. A good description of your customers, and multiple scenarios for how they interact with your customer service will take you a long way.

Tags: Touch-point, User experience, User-needs

Judith was recently interviewed by the research council for their magazine “verdiskaping”, which is the Norwegian way of saying value-creation. 

 

The article (in Norwegian) describes her earlier work with the airport express train service, which is now ranked #1 in Norway in terms of customer satisfaction. It then describes Service Design, AT-ONE and a little about service innovation and design leadership. 

 

Link to article

Tags: Design leadership, Experience, Strategic Design