Service Design

Getting over usability

Service Design

Consistency of service across partners

Service Design

Wear more black

Black has always been in style for the customer, so its great news companies are on board to. The thing is, I think they always knew, but it was all too hard. After all service design is all about rhythm and sequencing. It’s synchronising the front of house shown to customers with the back of house behind the scenes systems and processes.

As customers we are highly sensitive to the rhythm of service design. We feel the irritant of the lunchtime queues as staff go on their own lunch break; of nifty internet banking calendars which tell us when my visa is due but not the amount; of calling the 0800 number and having to tell each person I am passed onto my account number; of having to print out and remember my discount voucher even though it is sitting on my phone.

Check out the capitalized statement which upsets the rhythm on this brand spanking new homepage. Front end, all bright and smiley. Back end, business as usual. Am sure their mortgage customers wished they had worn more black.

The absolute good news is black is always in style. Ask any designer or architect.

Service Design

Not all services are designed equal

Every service experience you love or loathe has been designed – maybe in bits, sometimes as a whole. And that includes even the really, really bad ones. Lately we have been 'talking' Service Design with a few of our clients and 'doing' Service Design with others. What we have observed is that Service Design can be both a big, scary spectre and a liberating and transformative opportunity for businesses. People have described it as either small, iterative and manageable or all- encompassing and holistic – but, simply put, Service Design is the practice of delivering great on-brand customer experiences using optimised and efficient business systems and operations. 

The thing we've noticed is that many businesses look to improve customer experience, and many also look to streamline processes, improve their offers, migrate to the channels and Touchpoints their customers most use, cut costs and so on. Service Design is the practice of doing both in unison.

Service Design

Clever Government?

Service Design

Like changing airplanes in mid-flight

A client the other day used the analogy of changing airplanes in mid-flight to describe what service design is like for most businesses.

Imagine yourself flying along at 31,000 feet in a rather old aircraft that is getting a bit tatty around the edges – it smells a bit, rattles and shakes constantly, is not very fuel efficient and the food really sucks.

A brand new shiny, gleaming, fuel efficient and much more comfortable plane – representing what your business could and potentially should be – is flying right next to you. You really want to be on the that plane and not the one you are on.

It's easy to want to be on that other plane – the hard bit is transferring yourself and all your passenges (customers) while you are in mid-flight.

Through applying service design thinking it may be relatively easy to identify what needs to change with your business – the challenge still remains how you will make those changes especially when your business probably doesn't have the funding, resources, capability or time.

Service Design

Mean What You Say, Say What You Mean

Increasingly we are seeing clients purporting to be this, that, and the other; all entwined in highly crafted/litigated value and corporate mission statements. The reality of gaining consensus from the populous for such things means ending up with generic statements that can be applied the world over: like ‘People focussed…’ or ‘Trusted…’ or ‘Integrity…’. Excuse me, but aren’t these baseline requirements of doing business today? Worse still are those that are bandying around words like ‘innovative…’, ‘responsive…’ or ‘genuine…’. By golly, you start putting these up, you’d better be prepared to be that. So, the danger is in being too vanilla in one sense, or over-promising in another. Finding an organisation’s true character, one that is expressed uniquely with a healthy dose of reality is a much harder game. You can run all the group sessions you want, but you’ve got to dig deep for the golden grains; the nuggets of irrefutable truth. They generally won’t come from the mouth of the CEO (or his wife), but from someone who’s doing the hard yards, like the call centre operator doing the graveyard shift. Time to tune into a bit of old-fashioned, fine-tuned listening.