The value of service design – before and between investment

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Julie McManus

A consideration of service design is important when it comes to getting the most out of a planned capital investment. It’s also important when the service needs improvement in the gaps between major investments of infrastructure investment. If you can’t move the walls or tear out the IT platform you can still redesign the service experience. Cue epic examples.

My local generic Express store was closed for the day on a Saturday. There were builders in to refit parts of the store – particularly the area around the till queue which has been bothering me for 2 years.

Previously you could only enter and leave the tills from one direction – meaning you had to wait while people left with their bags before getting to a vacant till, as cashiers loudly shout ‘next customer please’. Grumpy inner monologue says, I can see you’re available but I can’t get to you without pushing past the guy with his bags and me with my basket. I don’t want to have to push past him; I might break my eggs, or his.

If the till area had been considered previously, a whole day of business would not need to have been lost. How many stores around London, or the country, also had to lose a day of business?

Similarly, the floating Oyster card readers have finally removed the from the platforms at London Bridge station – friends from out of town always try to tap out at them until they’re hustled along to the card readers at the barriers so they don’t get charged twice.

Surely the cost of installing the initial Oyster readers in the wrong place could have been avoided – at how many stations around London did this happen, how many excess signs were produced? How many hours of installation time charged?

These examples are nuggets of daily wisdoms in seeing how much initial design of services, spaces and wayfinding matter in terms of getting it right.

There are opportunities here to be recognised around investment in a service experience, both before and after capital is invested in infrastructure or physical touchpoints. The key point is value: the value of using existing spaces to the best effect and the value of enabling a new investment to be the most efficient.

We’ve had some experience in this game – both working around existing infrastructure to craft an experience that is more responsive and suitable to the needs of users, such as our long term engagement with the Portuguese Airport Authority. However, we have also worked alongside architects and environments design to both build the experience into the physical space and design the physical space around the users’ journey. See our work with Virgin Atlantic Airways at Heathrow’s terminal 3.

What we’ve realised is that people’s needs change over time and that the places and spaces they’re using need to be able to adapt to and reflect these needs.

To a provider who wants to do this, there are two choices: you can spend a lot of money making an amazing piece of infrastructure that is beautiful and functional. If you’re going to invest a large amount in this, you might as well spend a bit more to ensure that the thing is optimised for users and will not need updating any time soon.

If this is not an option, and for many it is not, a considerably reduced investment can generate significant change in a space, refreshing and improving the experience for staff and customers.

Both these options represent thinking ahead. It’s the difference between that and the bill received for the updates to your space or service that is only a few years old and the dissatisfaction of your customers being charged twice for a journey or waiting furiously to pay.

 

 

Posted in Customer experience, Design-led change, Retail, Services, Transformation | Leave a comment

Training in Service Design and Innovation

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Julie McManus

Looking through previous posts on this blog, you’ll be aware of how service design has become the business friendly face of design. Engine are world-recognised specialists in the discipline.

We take a highly collaborative, creative and customer centred approach that looks across the people, products, processes and places involved in the delivery of a good service. The process enables teams to join up their thinking between business goals and customer needs and bring this to life with a clear customer experience strategy.

In response to growing demand, Engine has launched a comprehensive offer to support the training and development of service design and innovation in the worlds of business, government, design and academia.

These seminars, and in house training programmes are lead by senior and experienced service designers from our world leading practice. Training is inclusive, teaches you skills of real relevance to your role and opens you up to the possibilities that service design brings, grounded in real life project examples.

We have several offers, and much more detail about what skills you can learn. As well as developing bespoke programmes to develop internal capacity for private and public sector organisations, we also can also deliver training seminars in service design to broad audiences.

To find our more about this exciting new offer and the value service design can bring to your organisation look at our seminars page or contact Engine to discuss your requirements at seminars@enginegroup.co.uk

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From industrial product to service design

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Joe Heapy

Although manufacturing still contributes significantly to GDP (gross domestic product) in all developed economies; service and services play an increasing role in economic development.

Even in companies that remain strong in manufacturing, service and services are used to support business growth through, for example, driving customer retention, allowing manufactures to diversify their portfolio of business models, opening up new revenue and helping to shift the focus from ‘unit sales’ to ‘customer lifetime value’.

In addition, many companies with core competencies in manufacturing and sales through third-party distribution channels, have realised the power of services in establishing a distinct ‘personality’ in the minds of consumers and supporting direct revenue relationships over time. In this way, every business is a services business.

Manufacturing businesses are looking to add value through services and experiences beyond the physical product. (eg. Samsung Smart TVs).

Web services including ‘pure data’ businesses are making their services tangible through physical products. (eg. Amazon Kindle).

Utilities and ‘pure services’ businesses (eg. financial services, telecoms, media and ISPs) are productising commodities to make them clearer and more saleable as well as looking to manufactured goods to ‘lock-in’ their customers in high churn markets where barriers to switching are low (eg. Vodafone in Germany selling branded TVs and set-top boxes).

Definitions of service

It’s important to understand that different industries and business types see ‘service’ in different ways.

  • Customer service. Distribution. Product sales and support.
  • Software applications. Apps. ‘Digital products’ that provide access to data and ‘services’.
  • Software as a service. Usually considered to be ‘cloud-based’ software solutions sold to businesses on a per use, per user or subscription basis. Software as a services is now a highly accessible consumer proposition through ‘apps’ on mobile devices.
  • Services. Broader systems that facilitate exchange between people and people and organisations.
  • Product/service systems or product-centred services. Ecologies of physical products linked through software and services.

The practices of Service Design can be used to design and innovate in each of these areas.

Posted in Service design practice, Services, Transformation | 1 Comment

I’m a Servorg

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Joe Heapy

We are almost totally reliant on services of all types to live our lives. In the same way that spectacles, hearing aids, trainers and a huge range of other products allow us to operate beyond the limitations of our physical selves, the services that we use allow us to substantially increase what we are able to achieve in life: in our relationships with others, in building our careers, expanding our minds, creating wealth and orchestrating and even extending our lives.

In the same way that Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline tried to capture the idea of human-machine systems that could operate in outer space[1], we’re all wrestling with being human-service systems, ‘servorgs’, operating in consumer space. This idea extends beyond augmentation to hybridisation, to the point where without a mobile phone, a credit card and an internet connection we are rendered inoperable.

Not only do services provide the foreground and the substrate of modern living but they also contribute to the modern definition of social exclusion. The UK government, like others, has plans to ensure every community in the UK will gain access to super-fast broadband by 2015 (countries like South Korea are already there). Poverty of access to the internet increasingly means poverty of access to education. Those who are without access to public services, such as healthcare and public transport, or consumer services, like banking, the internet and healthy food, are considered excluded from the mainstream; vulnerable and in need of support.

However, it’s not only about the technology. Services are also about people. Most of the services that people use everyday are what are called ‘multichannel’: the users and the providers of the service interact not only through web pages but also in stores, over the phone, in the user’s home and so on. In this way services are also about human relationships – the interface and interactions between two people. Service design is as much about the design of these interactions in their fine detail as it is about the developing the features and designing the operating model.

We interact with human beings so often through the services we use everyday that it’s surprising how frequently these interactions seem to lack empathy. The cliché of the human operator robbed of empathy and autonomy by ‘the system’ they are required to use, remains relevant. Interactions with services are not always designed for empathy. It’s as hard for the agents of the service to engage with the diversity and complexity of customers’ lives as it is for customers to accept the limitations of the complex system that these agents have to work within. Yet we’re all becoming more savvy, more attuned to what the design of the service can do to a conversation between two normal people. Organisations are getting better at acknowledging that they are not just processing a transaction when a customer calls or walks into a store. They are realising that value is created in each of these moments and customers are won or lost. So, it’s not just what a service does, it’s how a service makes people feel that counts.

At Engine, we believe that the services people use everyday define their relationships with organisations and with other people and ultimately shape quality of life. It’s well worth designing them well.

 

[1] ”Cyborgs and Space,” in Astronautics (September 1960), by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline.

Posted in Services | 1 Comment

The case for toolkits

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Joe Heapy

Engine has developed a number of Service Design toolkits for a range of organisations. We also spend time reflecting on and recording our own ways of working and packaging tools and methods for reuse in our work.

Through experience we’ve learned some useful things about Service Design toolkits and how to use and apply them.

One important misunderstanding is that simply having a toolkit will change the way teams and organisations work. In some organisations toolkits are rejected on principle because people have been asked to adopt them without a clear reason for doing so, and without the support required to make new ways of working understandable and relevant.

Toolkits are often foisted upon people and as a result, unsurprisingly, perhaps remain on a shelf or in a drawer. A methodology toolkit is means to an end, not an end in itself.

Despite this reservation and if developed in the right way, toolkits are valuable in a number of ways:

  • They represent a point in time and once established can be added to and refined
  • The activity of developing a toolkit – of understanding, representing and refining a practice – engages people in considering how they work, what they do, what works, what doesn’t and how things need to change
  • Any encoding and formalisation of ways of working such as a process diagram, checklist, decision or a complete toolkit tree gives people confidence that an approach has been properly considered
  • Toolkits help new members of a team to quickly integrate themselves into current project work and to learn how things are done
  • Toolkits provide a marketing tool for a new practice and offer to the wider business
  • Areas of the business beyond the originating team can more easily adopt useful and usable methods in the form of well-defined tools. This helps to drive acceptance of service design practices and eases multidisciplinary working, which is increasingly important in achieving joined-up, substantive and customer-centred solutions.

Engine has developed Service Design toolkits for a number of organisations as part of work to develop the capabilities of our clients.

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Success is in the details

Posted on December 1, 2011 by James Samperi

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Bill Taylor, The Values Proposition: Do Small Things with Great Love really resonated with me. When designing and developing a new service or improving an existing one, success will often be in ensuring a service delivers through the smaller details.

It’s often this attention to detail that is critical to making a ‘so-so’ service a great one. It’s also these details that humanise a service and elevates it above the competition. These are rarely the large category-changing concepts of a service – new business models or service models – but can often be embedded within the detail of how a service behaves or what is feels like when you’re spending some time in its company. After all, if companies claim to put the interest of their customers first, they need to deliver this through their actions and interactions with the people who use it.

Throughout the process of designing a service, you often find yourself talking about the qualities of good service as things that mimic strong human relationships such as being thoughtful, doing me a favour or remembering what I like. Through the design of a service this needs to manifest across all facets of a service, including the front and back of house.

UK homeware retailer John Lewis‘ returns policy demonstrates this, as they substantiate their ‘never knowingly undersold’ message with action: by refunding the difference. Zappos, the online retailer is different too, as it recognises that buying clothes online is tricky when you can’t compare and contrast items: so they allow you to order as many as you like and give you up to 12 months to return the ones you don’t want. Mobile phone operator Orange’s Best Plan is different as it automatically changes you onto the best plan for you from month to month based on how you’re using your phone. Finally, the Hotel Metro chain has a digital fireplace (on the TV home screen) that greets you automatically as you enter your room for the first time. It’s different and brilliant – it says ‘I know travelling can be stressful, but you’re here now. Relax’.

By identifying these examples of back of house processes, brilliantly different experiences are enabled. A lovely recent experience was in a local gastro pub where a small thing = a big difference. With one special dietary requirement and unassigned waiting staff, the waiter taking the order crossed the knife and fork of the person with the special request, so when the food came out our conversation wasn’t interrupted and everyone got the right order.

An example of where this approach needs to be used effectively is in the world of energy. We often hear about energy companies trying to help customers save energy and money, but when you look at the cost of each kw/h (kilowatt per hour) it rewards you with a more favourable price the more energy you use: not great.

For the design team, then, a key role is to champion these details and maintain the customer perspective throughout, whilst also demonstrating the value and practicalities around delivering them to market. This may sound simple, but the process of turning service ideas into reality can be a brutal one, where the desire to be innovative and customer-centred can often clash with the commercial realities of making something quick, easy and passable. Why would an organisation invest in something if they don’t understand its value?

An example of the designer’s role in these cases is our involvement in developing an end-to-end service for a car company’s after-sales experience. We had helped develop the first-ever online service where customers book in their car and monitor its progress whilst in the shop, aiming for an honest and easy to use approach.

The idea was a good one, built on customer needs: innovative and differentiating for the company. However, as the customers log in, the login details were intended to be the chassis number of the customer’s car – obscure, confusing and irrelevant to the customer. This detail could have killed the idea if there hadn’t been a member of the design team involved.

For me, this is much of what designers bring to services development. They bring a sense of optimism and simplicity to complex problems, down to the smallest details. It’s this nuanced understanding of what makes something delightful and useful across the full spectrum of the design of a service that would make me champion the involvement of a designer from beginning to end.

This is not an approach unique to service design and development – as a key tenet of product designer extraordinaire Dieter Rams, this is an example of service design’s continuation of the new relationship between products and services, explored in more detail here.

Posted in Design-led change, Retail, Services | 1 Comment

A routemap in uncharted territory

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Joe Heapy

The activity of designing services, especially those that address difficult challenges in new ways, requires creative leaps – not incremental tweaks to existing products or systems.

These leaps are often imagined to be the preserve of ‘creatives’: eureka moments that can’t be manufactured. Therefore, ‘creativity’ and ‘process’ can seem in tension.

The word process is often met with fear or glazed looks, particularly from people working in corporate environments, for which a new process means yet another training course. So why is it so important to have a process?

Broadly, there are two kinds of design process and one tends to follow the other. The most familiar begins with a clear opportunity to create a solution. In these situations the opportunity and, to an extent, the solution is describable at the start. These are implementation processes.

The second type, which is less well understood and less widely practiced as a formal process (except in industries with well established research and development practices) are exploratory processes. Both can be described linearly, yet exploratory design processes are far from linear. There is often no concrete solution or clear set of requirements implicit in the questions asked at the start.

Due to their size, large organisations need to operate well-managed processes investing heavily in training and accreditation: seeing process and conformance quite rightly as a business asset. They tend to be better at implementation processes and their size is evidence of their ability to optimise such product-to-market approaches.

It is also these organisations that typically find it harder to adopt exploratory processes. The service design process as we define it at Engine, is an end-to-end process that spans exploration and implementation. It supports and can be aligned to gated, product-to-market processes up to the point of detailed specification and handover to specialist teams.

What’s exciting about the process is that collaboration at all stages is implicit. The process defines projects that create the conditions for teams to make creative leaps upfront and to discover completely unpredicted ideas and directions.

These leaps can be completely intuitive, yet when challenges are complex and the dimensions of the problem and its solutions are not clear, the structure and reliability of a process – even the loosest of processes – becomes important. In most cases the nature of the solution isn’t known when you begin, so you can’t start there. A planned journey is needed to get you from what you know to something truly new.

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Fixing the London cycle hire scheme

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Gavin Maguire

Making the most of existing technology

Everyone knows why Boris Bikes are good (if you don’t, please see the bottom of the blog post).

But there are some large, much-discussed problems. The alternating tides of commuters leave many stations either completely full or completely empty at critical parts of the day.

I live in fear of arriving at work with my free half hour almost used up, to find the docking station full. I’d have to check my smartphone for the nearest station with empty slots, and hope that by the time I got there the slots were still empty.  Then I’d arrive at work half an hour or so late, and have the pleasure of attempting to reclaim the fee for going over my time limit through no fault of my own.

Unlike others, I’m lucky that that fear hasn’t yet become a reality.

With my service design hat on under my helmet, I’m tempted to feel that a better customer experience can be squeezed out of the existing physical and electronic infrastructure.

Here’s the key to my suggestion: people need to log their destinations as they take out a bike.

Here’s how this could work to help both the people on bikes, and the people waiting for them:

  • When grabbing a bike, people select their destination on their smartphone (or on the terminal).
  • Based on average cycle times, anyone waiting for a bike at an empty docking station can check their smartphone (or the terminal) to see when the next arrival is expected. No more ‘should I wait here or not‘ dilemmas.
  • If the bays at the destination are all full, an alarm goes off on the cyclist’s London Cycle Hire app as they ride past the last docking station with available bays. This gives the cyclist the option of jettisoning the bike gracefully and on time, rather than getting stuck with an expensive and time-consuming problem.

The destination-logging behaviour need not be mandatory, but could be encouraged through discounts. (The more people that do it, the more effective it is.)

Even without destination-logging, other information derived from existing data could improve the experience. If docking stations displayed the average (or longest expected) length of time between people grabbing or returning bikes ‘at this station, at this time of day‘, people facing empty or full docking stations would be greatly assisted in their decision-making.

The hardware is already hooked up to the software; we just need some more thoughtful programming to help push the scheme from good to great. Boris, developers, get on it!

The bottom of the blog post
The bikes’ gearing is so low you can pop a wheely in first, without pulling up on the handlebars. Pedalling frantically in third (the top gear), the most asthmatic-looking commuters on their own bikes will still breeze effortlessly past. The bikes are too heavy to lift and so solid that pulling them apart just doesn’t look like an alcohol-fuelled mischief’s idea of fun.

But when people ask me what ‘Boris Bikes’ are like, I try to refrain from giving the answers above. They’re answering the wrong question. Car enthusiasts don’t go around discussing the performance qualities of taxis. The london cycle hire scheme is a different way of travelling to private bikes, with its own clear advantages and disadvantages.

I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone who uses them twice daily.  After a 25-minute walk with my daughter to school, I stick the plastic jobbie into the docking station, grab a Boris Bike, and ride to work.  After work, I take one home.  My relatively pleasant three-point, multi-modal transport ritual is made possible by Boris Bikes.

Not to mention the incredible cheapness of it all – £45 per year barely gets someone to look over your bike and tighten a few bolts – let alone paying for a bike. For my £45 I have unlimited half-hour rides on a bike with bells, lights, and a luggage rack.

Posted in Customer experience, Design-led change, Services | 3 Comments

The glamorous side to service metrics

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Joe Heapy

Although metrics, measurement and target-setting may seem linked more to service management than to design; metrics have an important role to play in achieving the vision of a service. Service metrics define how a service will be built and how it will work. Designed metrics are needed to operationalise a new service.

Much of the discussion and effort around service measurement is linked to the fine-tuning of an existing operating model. The more glamorous strategic role for service metrics is not often considered.

The strategic side is when start-ups and organisations with established business metrics will at some point articulate a vision or set a strategic direction. Visions and strategies can be communicated in broad terms with bold statements about the future of the service, organisation or indeed the planet. However, making a vision a reality needs specifics.

A helpful test of whether a statement of vision or strategy is specific enough to be made real is whether the output or outcomes it implies are themselves measurable. For example, if a company wishes to become the “most loved [insert service or industry type] brand in the world”, then the next step is to break down into very clear statements what it will actually mean in concrete terms to be “most loved”.

A description of the aspiration needs to be translated into aspects of the service or business that can be measured.

This discussion leads us to a good example of ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’, for as organisations routinely reframe their vision and corporate strategy, they often continue to measure the things they have always measured.

A new vision or strategy implies that certain aspects of what an organisation does are now more important than they were – or that something completely new has now become more important.

Similarly, aspects of the operating model and service may no longer be important enough to continue measuring – data from these metrics may simply be a distraction.

Operationalising a new strategy, or indeed a new service, should trigger organisations to question what they are or are not measuring, and why it’s important.

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The relationship between products and services

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Julie McManus

The new shape of the relationship between products and service is not that one is replacing the other; instead, we are looking at a more symbiotic relationship where one does not exist without the other.

Many products now in daily use work as platforms or enablers for a service or an experience – creating a service-product ecology.

When we begin to look at the relationships between products and services in these terms, we can see a spectrum of product-service ecologies (explored by Laurie Young in From Products to Services) ranging from a product with a warranty to a service organisation with products associated with it.

How we talk about services and products depends on where we are looking at the spectrum.

A mid-level ecology in this spectrum may be a Smartphone or tablet with the associated apps, access and functions. This is a great example for demonstrating the different factors of a product-service ecology, such as the level of technology required and the support of constant wifi or 3G.

When this is enabled, the relationship between the two should be seamless. The apps, features and experiences of a Smartphone are indistinguishable from the technology that enables them.

This goes even further, however, in the response of services to the technology provided. The influx and range of accompanying apps has proliferated, opening up all kinds of weird and wonderful experiences to those that want them. And it is that choice that is key – the options now provided to the user are unlimited.

It also comes with personalisation, a big selling point in reaction to the mass-market of identical products. In theory any person’s Smartphone or tablet, despite being the same product, are completely unique based on how it is used and what services are subscribed to.

The approach to designing and marketing services:

The ramifications of product-service ecologies, usability, individuality and sustainability are necessarily reflected in the design process. Again, it is not about service designers replacing product designers: a moot point based on the problem-solving nature of the design process. Instead, it is about aligning the approach to meet rising needs.

The demands of customers reacting against mass productisation are and will be met by designers who help them realise what they want before they even know it.

In this sense, product design and service design are moving closer together, a point fundamentally reflected in research approaches across products and services.

A product-service ecology opens more doors for long-term relationships with users, with greater focus on loyalty and retention, enabled by a conjoined strategy between product generations and service development and evolution.

For this to be sustained, key insights into users’ needs and desires are imperative. Research is moving from quantitative to qualitative, open source and feedback-orientated.

It is no longer about what people need now, but also about how their needs will change and how the same organisation, company, product or service will be there to meet those needs.

It seems inevitable that such a shift in focus will bring with it a new way of selling, marketing and branding for both products and services. Indeed, it already has. The instant and effortless nature of web access, social networking and similar forums – enabled by our product-service ecologies – means that if someone is not happy with a service or product, you will hear about it. Loudly.

This is just as well, for the cutthroat marketing and sales synonymous with mass-consumerism is also being replaced by people who listen to what you want and act on it.

The ramifications of this serve to reinforce the importance of usability, user experience and customer satisfaction in the design of products, services and the organisations that provide them.

The service organisation:

The only way that service design may be seen to be replacing product design is in the structure and approach of organisations. Our interest in helping organisations to become great service providers is married to helping them become great service organisations.

The distinction here is about approach and culture. It is within these that the key to great service provision lays. Just as commercialism is a thing of the past, so are the company structures that proliferated with it. A shift from top-down, silo-saturated and product-approach mentality is the next step in the union between product and service.

The reason that these approaches are no longer viable reaches back to the earlier point about longevity and relationship development. The focus is no longer about an outcome, an output, the end product, the finished article – it is about a journey, an evolution.

Posted in Services, Transformation | 1 Comment