Where consumers see little difference between competitors on price and product quality, service drives the purchase decision and loyalty.
Design is about more than how things look. The purpose of Design (with a capital D) is simply to tangibly improve things, to imagine and help realize solutions to real-world problems. Designing and delivering great service is very much a team effort.
Design is a process, not just a product, and it’s a great process. In essence, the design process starts with insight and ideas and works towards solutions.
If you want to redesign your service and the experience your customers have, you often need to redesign the people who’ll design, implement and deliver those new solutions.
Customer service tends to relate only to the contact a customer has with a company’s people and is usually restricted to transactions or queries. Customer experience on the other hand, encompasses the holistic experience customer will have of a service.
The different ways that different functions of an organization interpret “the customer experience”, its relevance and their role in it can drive this sense of inconsistency and disjointedness that customers end up perceiving.
Your customer experience is the sum total of each and every element of your customer’s interaction with your business. Total customer experience pallet: Service performance, Service usability, Customer Service, Emotional Fulfilment, Brand Presence, Product Benefits.
Services are working systems of people and technologies designed to create value for businesses and their customers.
So why do people in organizations find it so hard to develop great services:
- They have the desire, but they lack envisioning.
- They have vision, but the change needed feels too big.
- They don’t have the skills and capabilities to create a service.
The right order in which to do things is to use customer insight to inform the service proposition, to design the customer experience from that, and finally to develop the capabilities needed to deliver it.
Seven design-led competencies are:
- Creating a compelling vision that led to a purposeful service design.
- Creating a beautiful service design that “just works”.
- Making a clear case for why it’s important so everyone can buy into it.
- Ensuring it’s ready to build.
- Creating the right conditions for it to be put into place quickly.
- Making sure the project is engaging and fun.
- Focusing on the quality throughout the process.
The only way of creating an ambitious vision of what your customers will want in the future, as well as today, is to take an “outside-in” approach.
The challenges
The challenge of outside-in
Without customer-centeredness companies miss out on its commercial benefits, and they also risk wasted time and effort. One important barrier to being customer-centered and working outside-in is the siloed structure of many organizations. The management challenge is to work horizontally (opening up the possibility of greater customer focus) and vertically (maintaining the core functions of the business and delivery) at the same time.
Organizations with many products and many teams often end up bombarding their customers with duplicated or conflicting sales messages.
Once companies reach a certain size and complexity they have to organize into departments of specialists. But by creating the right governance, establishing the right projects and cross-functional teams, you can make a temporary bridge without a wholesale restructure. The creation of a Customer Experience Network focuses the organization on skills rather than roles and responsibilities as supportive of the reality that service is the product of the whole organization and delivering a great total customer experience is the challenge for the whole organization.
When setting up customer-centricity framework, you can use groups like this:
- Strategic direction and commitment
- Culture and management
- Delivery enablement
- And understanding of your customers and their worlds
- Experience in design and development
- Delivery quality and assurance
Technology is part of the solution, but it’s also necessary to align and enable people, environment, processes and communications.
Spending time with your customers is the most fruitful way of discovering the reality of the journey, and their relationship with your business, through their eyes.
A disjointed view of your customers across your business makes it more challenging to serve the well. Without a single view, it’s much more challenging to serve them well. Without a single view it’s much harder to avoid unnecessary effort for the customer, confusion, duplication and missed opportunities to retain customers who are becoming dissatisfied.
The challenge of vision
Every great service starts with a vision. It might not be a conscious one.
Your vision is a depiction of the business or service you want to create, and your strategy is how you’re going to create it.
All organizations need to make clear, reasoned decisions about limited resources. A vision brings structure to resource planning, decision-making and investment. A vision helps set the scene and make your case for change, so it’s motivating and exciting enough for all departments to put in the effort. Once people can see the business in moving forward as a result, everyone wants to make it work.
Assuming your vision is sound, what could go wrong when translating it into reality?
- A lack of common understanding across the business about what a vision is.
- A lack of commitment to it because it’s just not compelling enough.
- A misplaced belief that the articulation of a vision is the whole job done.
- A lack of appropriate timescales; either too short-term to appear distinct from what is already in the plan or too long-term to feel relevant or achievable.
- A lack of clarity about how to translate the vision into tangible change.
- A lack of agreement about whose responsibility it is to manifest the vision.
Design thinking is excellent at pulling the future backwards into the present so we can see it as if it were already here.
Creating the vision is the spark that ignites change, but it has a limited life of its own. A vision is like yoghurt: it has a shelf-life.
Where a vision sits in time is important. It should take you far enough into the future to feel worthwhile pursuing, but not so far ahead that it is dismissed as too ambitious. Authors recommend a vision that’s three years out, with a 3- to 36- month rolling plan.
The challenge of fast and slow
When teams across a business have different views on how quickly their customer experience vision should be implemented, it becomes hard to determine what the new propositions and customer experience will be, and when they will be delivered.
How different organizational areas work at different speeds. This fast and slow disconnect comes down to three main causes:
- The cultural tension between those whose jobs roles require a view on the longer term, especially in parts of the operation that are harder to change, and those whose job roles don’t require this.
- The need to get quick results.
- The desire to change things too quickly while not taking account of the human scale of the change.
For a customer experience program, agile working needs to be integrated into a strategic plan – with a clear vision.
Experience portfolio – the idea of managing a portfolio is familiar in the world of change management, where projects and programs are orchestrated to deliver change.
Experience roadmap – is more like marketing campaign plan than a delivery program. It’s developed through a negotiation between the vision of the service and the developing capabilities of the business.
The challenge of emotion
Once the transactions are frictionless or even invisible to your customers, what is it that stops them leaving for one of your equally frictionless competitors?
“[1] When companies connect with customers’ emotions, they payoff can be huge.”
Why is it such a challenge for us to maintain that essential focus on emotion when we design out customer experience journey?
- Emotions is hard to quantify, measure and predict.
- Embedding emotions into the customer experience takes time.
- Many businesses have a cultural paradigm that has never included taking emotion seriously as a commercial driver.
What are the qualities of a great service that tend to give your customers a positive experience?
- Reliable
- Helpful
- Relational
- Distinct
- Timely
- Nurturing
- Collaborative
- Harmonious
- Thoughtful
- Elegant
- Beautiful
Most businesses are number-driven – they must be. And feelings, by their very nature, aren’t easily packaged up into numerical bundles. As a result, companies rarely track or measure their customers’ emotional reactions.
The problem for most grocery chains it they’ll never be the cheapest, so now they’re focusing more on the human value side of the equation as a point of difference. The challenge from them lies in redesigning their services to create a positive emotional response, at the same time as “retraining” their customers to value those soft benefits. It’s a tall order.
It’s worth looking at the contrast between the manufacturing and services sectors in terms of where emotion sits in the customer experience. A manufactured product is designed and created well before it’s experienced by the customer, with the emotional qualities having been embedded in the design at some previous point of time. A service, on the other hand, connects emotionally with its customers at the point of production.
The challenge of distinctiveness
We suggest that there is currently a power-play in many large organizations between the Brand Team and the Customer Experience Team for control of your customers’ perception of your business. Service proposition is distinct from brand proposition.
Your customer experience, rather than your brand, is the shortcut to how your customers evaluate what they think and feel about your business.
Expressing your brand personality through the design of your customer touchpoints is “distinctiveness level one”, while designing your service proposition in a way that engenders the right perceptions of your business in your customers’ minds is “distinctiveness level two”:
- Level one: translating your brand personality into service aesthetics and behaviors
- Level two: creating a service proposition that delivers your organization’s strategic objectives in a way that’s both desirable and useful for your customers.
We think the days of simply focusing on the communication of a brand message are gone. Your customers buy utility, reliability and the ability to do what they want with your service.
Four main challenges that businesses struggle with:
- It can be easy to confuse your brand proposition with your service proposition and hard to align them
- Linking your brand’s point of distinction to your business strengths
- You may be in an organizational bubble (inside out view)
- It’s natural to want to hang on to everything
What a brand says is marketing; what is does is its service proposition.
The challenge of change
There is always something more urgent to attend to. In work, as in life, prioritization is a continual activity and there are no easy solutions.
People don’t feel accountable for their part of the total experience.
Organizations don’t make it easy for their people to work as one. Objectives, the internal market for resources, different approaches to initiating and managing projects and so on can stand in the way.
It takes three years to move an organization from one that is inherently product-focused in its approaches to one that is customer-driven.
- What positive organizational change looks like
- New thinking and ideas can come from anybody in the organization
- Processes are designed to empower, not constrain
- Learning through doing, not just learning through data
- Stories about the future state of the business, not just historical performance
- Errors and exceptions are seen as a source of inspiration and learning
- Optimism and vision
Service transformation necessitates organizational change, not necessarily in a structural sense, but in terms of attitudes across your business.
The skills
Create a compelling vision
You need to surface one strong, exciting and motivating idea that everyone can own, and that you can achieve within the next three to five years: you need a compelling vision.
The business that solely focus on maximizing sales and minimizing costs can only get so far, because this alone is not motivating enough for its customers or for those working in it.
Often, what an organization calls its vision is in fact a set of corporate and commercial objectives.
Most change fails due to resistance from employees and a lack of support from managers, so the emotional connection a strong vision creates is essential.
You know you’ve got a motivating vision when:
- You have a strong, central idea that feels right, is simple, and captures the imagination.
- You’ve discovered enough customer insight and evidence to make your vision robust.
- Your vision embodies a story about your company, customers or the world you operate in that is easy to tell and re-tell.
Once you’ve identified the research elements that back up your vision, you can support your argument with tangible and intangible benefits to your business that can be realized through implementing your central idea.
There are six main areas to focus on when you’re creating a compelling vision:
- Doing your research and getting your facts straight
- Gaining a deep understanding of your customers
- Working from the future backwards
- Enabling your colleagues to feel they own vision
- Bringing your vision to life
- Creating a plan
Here are five questions to test the strength of your vision:
- A strong, central idea: do you have one?
- Insight and evidence: do you have any?
- Excitement: are your colleagues showing enthusiasm about your vision?
- Clear and communicable by others: is your vision spreading virally at a senior level?
- Momentum: is you vision unblocking concerns and gaining resource allocation?
Design your service beautifully
Beautiful design works not just because it looks beautiful, is easy to use, or solves your problem elegantly; it’s because it does all three at the same time. A superb piece of design makes you feel good when you’re using it.
An elegantly designed service is one that responds to both the needs of your customers and your business.
There are certain elements of beautiful service design:
- Emotional connection
- Originality
- Being of the moment
- Being about more than looks
- Detailed functionality
- Being designed for everyone
- Workability
Aspects of a service that create most emotional connections are:
- The place we buy it from
- Elements of exclusivity or reassurance
- The ability to personalize the experience
- Delivery in an entertaining way
- Speed and reliability of delivery
Customers today are more comfortable interacting with screens – in fact many prefer them.
Designers are experts in crafting elegant solutions, which work well within the constraints of the physical world. Great services are delightful because they’re easy and enjoyable to both use and deliver.
Design for humans, of which you are one, but not just for yourself.
Here are five questions to test the beauty and greatness of your service design:
- Distinctiveness and originality
- Clear expression of your brand
- Exceeding consumers’ expectations
- Clear value proposition
- Workability for everyone
Develop a clear value case
No-one feels motivated to make a decision about something when it’s presented in a way that leaves the idea and its value unclear.
There are two main reasons for taking the time and effort to create a strong and compelling case for your vision:
- It reassures decision-makers
- It means you can highlight the broadest benefits, not just the costs
By taking a design-led approach to developing your business case, you’re focusing your team on total value creation from the start.
There are many elements to a clear case:
- A strong imperative
- Quantifiable benefits
- A strong investment case
- The ability to show that there’s already a level of consensus that your proposals are worthwhile.
You should always ask yourself also a question: what would be the cost of not developing and enacting your vision?
It is important to link the components of your value case to specifics about when certain capabilities will need to be in place and when certain customer proposition and experiences will need to have made it out there.
Whatever it is that your business needs, the benefits need to be clear and agreed and then it must be possible for you to trace each tangible element of your proposal service design back to these benefits in as direct a way as possible. Here are some examples of how to build this value logic:
- Tangible things: We’re going to design and deploy these things…
- Changes in customers’ behaviors: This will mean our customers (and colleagues) can and will….
- Customers: We’ll know this is having a positive impact when we see…
- Benefits: Over time this will drive these metrics…
- Strategic story: Which will drive the business towards realizing this vision…
Prototyping starts much earlier, as it’s exploratory. Piloting involves testing a live version of your service in a specific location or with a group of customers or colleagues.
Here are five questions to check the clarity of your case:
- Evidence
- Able to implement
- Investment case – does it stack up
- Agreement
- Strong imperative
Make it ready to build
Your role as service designer at this point is to help translate the vision of your service and experience into detailed design with a clear description of the capabilities necessary for making it a reality. Everybody will need to be clear about which specific features and qualities will make your solution a success.
Your plans for your new service and customer experience need to be drawn up as a blueprint, or a set of detailed description of how your service will operate. This will contain enough definition and depth to guide your implementation tams to the right actions and will show at least a partial solution to the practical problems you’ve identified while developing your clear case.
The service blueprint is what turns your plans into a service design package, instead of a bunch of top-line ideas.
The Design Package is a collection of documentation and communications that describe the service and experience you’ve designed.
Services and experiences that are strongly digital in their focus and delivery will need technical documentation, use cases and user stories, and visualizations of key screens and flows to communicate key interactions or features of the service so that digital designers can understand the thinking that’s been done to define what the digital products need to be able to do.
Some common and useful assets that authors develop and use to help our clients make decisions and mobilize implementation and delivery teams as the phase of Conceptual Design transitions into Design and Build:
- Service Vision Wheel
- Concept of Experience
- To-be Customer Journey
- Service Blueprint
- Service Flatplan
Service Vision Wheel describes in words and images the essence or DNA of the service and experience we’re setting out to create:
- A central big idea that encapsulates the role you want your business to play in customers’ lives or the main benefits you want your customers to enjoy.
- A set of statements that substantiate and help qualify this central idea, written as though to you your customers.
- A set of distinct offerings, features and experiences that will be the proof points of the central idea.
What we call a “Concept of Experience” is a visual depiction of the future end-to-end customer journey, which draws attention to key areas that have been identified as areas of focus because of the impact that improving them can have.
Journey stages described in the Concept of Experience can include “from” and “to” statements, which describe the difference between the experience for customers today and how we want it to be for them.
A Customer Journey Map is a tabulated representation of the end-to-end customer experience from the customer’s point of view. Get this right, and the detail of implementation is developed later through blueprinting.
The Concept of Experience includes: stages (attract & welcome me,…), steps (awareness, purchase, join,…), customer story (from high to low emotions), from and to statements, target experience description.
Services Blueprint. Consistency and coordination are essential in delivering a great proposition and experience, especially when many channels and teams need to work together. The history of the Service Blueprint dates to the early 1980s (Shostack 1984).
A Service Blueprint helps implementation and delivery teams understand what needs to be changed or built. A Service Blueprint extends the description of the Target Customer Journey.
Service Flatplan. Drawing up a Service Fatplan will help your team understand the service design that’s being proposed by summarizing it on one page. A Service Flatplan is a diagram made up of several boxes grouped and arranged in rows. Typically, the group at the top of the diagram summarizes the key offers and touchpoints with the service. The next rows summarize the main components of the operating platform, these are the enablers, which may be separated into macro and micro. Lastly, the Flatplan identifies the organizational capabilities required in order to develop and operate the platform and the services to customers.
Capabilities refer to the strategic abilities an organization needs to consciously develop and mature over time in order to create and deliver value in a way that helps them realize their vision. Capabilities are built from a number of distinct enablers.
Enablers are tangible things that can be built, which make other things possible.
When you’re setting out a Flatplan it’s important to group change and build requirements.
Your Customer Experience Portfolio and Roadmap are proposition-led and define the experience and capabilities you’ll need to develop and by when.
The Design Package is the collection of documents that describe the service and experience you’ve designed, and can evolve over time. It can include: a Vision Wheel, a Concept of Experience, a Target Customer Journey, a Service Blueprint and a Service Flatplan.
Create the right conditions
With a complex project or portfolio of projects ahead of your, it’s important that you and everyone involved knows what it’s going to feel like to go through it, not just in terms of the steps you’ll be taking but the challenges ahead for people’s imaginations, risk profiles and mental energy.
There are various types of blockers that can bar your way as your progress your project. They can be people-based, budget-based, implementation-based or market-based.
John P. Kotter’s article from 2007 is talking about importance of creating a “guiding coalition” when you’re making significant change happen in your organization. Kotter’s view is that a group of five, growing to 20 or even 50 in sizeable organizations, would be about right. This coalition needs to be engaged in the vision, motivated to make the required effort and willing to influence their networks. You need your guiding coalition because, by definition, the service you’re setting out to create doesn’t yet exist.
Services are interwoven systems of people, technology, information and commercial models that produce things of value to businesses and their customers.
Co-creation is king. By taking your people and customers on the creative journey with you, you’ll create unstoppable momentum.
Here are five questions to check whether you’ve created the right conditions for your project:
- Right scope and ambition
- Right people
- Right communication
- Right level of flexibility
- Right support
Run engaging projects
When people start working in a different way with new tools, they gain new perspectives, and it always produces more exciting outcomes.
A design-led approach to service development thrives on collaboration both vertically and horizontally in your organization.
To create a brand, you’ll need a project proposition or problem statement. Capture the essence of what you’re setting out to achieve and for whom.
You need diversity in the early stage of a project, with a team that’s not dominated by seniority. Once it comes to moving from vision into planning, that’s when you need seniority and delivery expertise.
Here are five questions to check whether your project is the one that’s drawing people in:
- Excitement
- Early feedback
- Time
- New inputs
- Attraction
Think like a Designer
The truth is that people are attracted to well-design things, valuing them more than poorly designed ones.
Let’s get clear on the difference between an output and designing a service to realize an outcome. An output is a tangible element of your project process. An outcome on the other hand, is defined by the benefits you’ll achieve. The outcomes are what your project is really about. If you invest in the design and quality of your outputs, you’re more likely to achieve the outcomes you want.
Sometimes it’s easier to highlight issues than it is to imagine solutions.
Designers think visually. A large part of the design process involves “selling an idea” (or a problem) to others – what we often describe as “bridging the imagination gap”.
Traditionally, professionals are valued because of their specialism and deep expertise. Today, generalism has become a prized specialism.
Rarely are the best ideas the ones you come up with first time around. They’re the product of several iterations of an idea.
If something is well made, it’s incredibly hard to copy.
The solution you’ll develop and deploy might not be something you’ve imagined yet. If your business genuinely wants to create something new and sees the commercial value in doing it well, you’ll need to allow enough time.
Designers are trained in the “design process”. In simple terms, this is:
- Understanding the problem or need
- Knowing who you’re designing for
- Having a load of ideas
- Picking the best ones
- Prototyping them as much as you can
- Refining one design
- Detailing it
- Making it real
Insights help to define a problem statement or commercial opportunity or to inspire a solution. An insight is a realization about the world.
Here are five questions to check whether design is at the heart of your service:
- Persuasive
- Quality
- Branding
- Innovative
- Understanding
Technology has changed service delivery. Customer service is becoming digitized and personalized customer experience are being designed and produced in real time.
As technology makes doing business with any service easier, the need for organizations to signal why they are different becomes important again.
The emergence of customer experience as something businesses had to think about meant that the experience became the product and could be considered in the same way as businesses had previously thought about their products. The customer experience became something that could be designed.
[1] Magdis, Zorfas, Leemon in the book on page 51
