There has been a timely coming together of service businesses measuring, analysing and monitoring the experiences of their customers, using Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and Service Designers helping organisations to improve and develop services to exceed customers’ expectations.

While NPS provides the foundations of measuring experience and customer satisfaction, Service Design becomes the means by which an organisation can make sustained improvements to their services, beyond just fixing the basics. Through our work we have explored the progression of organisations moving from measurement to design-led change.

The process starts when a company adopts NPS as a means of improving their services. This begins to spread the accountability for the quality of customer experiences and the performance of a service across the whole organisation. Through this process, companies develop an end-to-end view of the service that helps them to have discussions on the effectiveness of touchpoints and channels.

Improving the overall NPS score or adjusting an individual touchpoint for the better is then used as a way to measure, incentivise and reward staff. This allows them to make changes and identify tactics to improve what is being done now.

The next level of progression sees customer satisfaction data, the bedrock of NPS, allowing an organisation to employ more agile methods, to fix what’s broken, and to try out different solutions and monitor the results. For example, if a company wanted to test the satisfaction levels of a fifteen pound gift voucher over a ten pound one, they may isolate a set of customers to try the higher voucher and measure the difference with others who received a ten pound one. The results can be surprising and can allow organisations to get the right balance of cost and value to the customer.

However, it is often at this point that organisations can hit a ceiling. They openly admit that, despite in-depth analysis and prolonged reporting of the performance of the customer journey, they find it very difficult to translate this information into bigger ideas. It’s hard to get beyond the quick fixes of rewards and communications, which have limited sustained impact on the longer-term experiences of the customer. If only used in this way, NPS becomes a damage limitation exercise rather than a means for genuinely developing services that are valuable and differentiated.

It is here that Engine use our Service Design approach to fill this ‘translation gap’: helping companies move from analytics to making real step changes that can exceed what customers expect and elevates the experience above others in the same sector. We use a systematic and creative approach; informed by NPS and complimented by our own qualitative understanding of what makes a great service and customer experience.

Engine are beginning to see the long-term results of our work across the utilities and transport sectors. The services and experiences we have helped to design show significant uplift in performance of the services at a touchpoint level, and sizeable increases in the overall satisfaction of customers with the services as a whole.

As Service Design becomes more widely practiced, bought and developed, it is clear to see how NPS capability coupled with a Service Design approach can help transition an organisation from just measurement to longer-term improvement that is more valuable for them and, ultimately, for their customers.

Sean Risebrow, Director of Customer Experience at Virgin Media, will explore this further when he speaks about customer experience, advocacy and business growth at the Forrester Customer Experience Forum 6^th-7^th November in London.

The importance of delivering amazing customer experiences has moved firmly into the mainstream.

In Forrester Research’s new book by Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning: Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Centre of Your Business, the competitive advantage of customer experience, the disciplines surrounding it and how it transforms companies is explored (including some of Engine’s own work).

For Engine Service Design, our role is to enable businesses to put customers at their centre. To deliver great services, you have to be a great service organisation: not just outside in, but inside and out. Here are some tips to get there.

1. Have a clear ethos and principles: Having an ethos and principles aligned across the leaders works as a checklist for cohesion in delivery and brand identity and impact.

Implementations to encourage clear ethos and principles in a service organisation:

• As a leadership team, work through the range of desires and tenets to be embodied. Boil them down into simple principles and a brand identity that all agree on
• Ensure that the principles become the tenets of the organisation and that current practice is aligned to them
• For future initiatives and development, utilise as a checklist to ensure that they are representative of the organisation.

2. Have a customer-centric vision and strategy: Having a customer-centric vision for the organisation as a whole and a strategy to achieve it will direct thinking to the higher aims and the long-term targets. Implementations to encourage a clear vision and strategy in a service organisation:

• Establish a customer-centric vision based on your principles and your targets – think big!
• Develop a strategy and timeline to plan and direct work and involvement
• Get a variety of departments on board – a clearly defined strategy can include their inputs without getting lost in internal politics.

3. Be democratic: When establishing a customer-centric vision, work up and down the ranks and across silos and departments. Implementations to encourage a democratic service organisation:

• Aim to manage the tension between commercial objectives and customer experience in the organisation – be honest and manage expectations
• Co-create and involve strategies with a variety of departments – get input from all as all form a part of the customer’s experience of the organisation
• Take the opinions and experiences of frontline staff seriously and use them as insights to good effect.

4. Invest in research: Research is the best way to gain understanding and insights into your existing and potential customers, thereby maintaining and increasing loyalty and revenue. Implementations to encourage a research savvy service organisation:

• Qualitative rather than quantitative research provides richer insight into people and behaviours. It’s also a chance to engage in dialogue with your customers
• Use customer stories as a key business asset from which to improve or design services around
• Remember that research is not just around gaining customers; it’s about retaining them. Insights into needs change because needs change – keep the research rolling.

5. Focus on the service: The key purpose and differentiator of a service organisation is the efficient and satisfactory journey that a customer takes with you. Implementations to encourage a service-orientated service organisation:

• Have a core, solid and proven end-to-end service. From this, general satisfaction can be ensured and specific needs can be met through deviations and adaptations of the core journey
• To achieve an effective service journey, implement user and operational metrics and measure frequently to understand reception, profitability and improvement and impact
• Emphasis the service value chain – that all members of staff and the team contribute to the end customer experience

6. Be innovative: Keep an open mind to suggestions and approaches and invest time in developing new ideas. Implementations to encourage an innovative service organisation:

• No idea is a bad idea and everyone is qualified to have a good idea. Allow space to work them through and see if they are viable
• Be open to new ways of working and key tools – such as co-creation, prototyping, workshops, etc. Embed these in practice at all levels of the organisation and use frequently
• Be innovative in the culture of the organisation by supporting a strong, creative and progressive working environment.

7. Be forward-thinking: Be aware of potential mishaps or changes and look out for potential positives. Implementations to encourage a forward-thinking service organisation:

• Have firms plans in place for service recovery and brief staff accordingly
• Keep an eye on trends; technology and new ways of working that may benefit the organisation or deliver extra to customers
• Keep up with your customers and their desires – try to provide a solution before they realise they have a problem.

8. Make it easy: With a consistent approach and clear touchpoints, a service organisation should be as easy to navigate internally as the service journey should be for the customer. Implementations to encourage an easy service organisation:

• Make navigation intuitive and content easy to find for staff as well as customers
• Ensure touchpoints are clear and define likely points of contact and likely paths for staff to follow, based on the customer journey
• Ensure consistent information and messaging is delivered regularly across channels.

9. Train and support your staff: They are the people that deliver your vision – enable them to do it well and provide space to grow with a sense of ownership and community. Implementations to encourage a supportive service organisation:

• Empower staff with their roles and responsibilities – frustration often comes from feeling powerless
• Give staff credit and rewards for their contribution and loyalty – help instil pride and a sense of ownership
• Look for potential in individuals and act to help expand it
• Help teamwork be the watchword – working together to achieve, rather than against each other.

10. Share: Sharing knowledge, information and experiences will help strengthen the organisation as a whole, not just individuals. Implementations to encourage a sharing service organisation:

• Integrate functions for staff to comment, rate, review and discuss issues internally
• Make time to share information on the organisation with staff – how it works, how its going, long-term plans, etc. This will help ownership and increase understanding of their role in the organisation
• Ensure that at all levels there is an understanding of the mechanisms by which services are delivered and how to manage them.

This post originally published on the Guardian Media Network, Technology in Retail Hub, Aug 2012

As technology leaps forward, we find it integrating in every aspect of our lives. New behaviours form and become insidious to the point where service providers need to run to catch up with the changing expectations of their customers.

The influx of technological access to services, and retail in particular, has opened many doors: channels for convenient purchasing, direct contact with a range of customers through social media, and directed advertising. However, we cannot forget the importance of the classic jaunt of shopping on the high street – it is social, advisory and at a point where we need it more than ever.

What is the appeal that still remains for physically shopping on the high street? Economics aside, there is still real demand for competing against the delayed gratification of online retail – it’s there, in your hand and in your elegant bag; it’s advised by attractive people who know their stuff and is augmented by spaces and places: large and illuminated.

A key differentiator of this experience – and it is experiential by nature – is customer service; face-to-face interactions, advice and support in a branded environment that customers identify with. Tech is sexy, intuitive, and distinct, but it’s also there to augment the customer’s experience, not to eclipse it.

For Engine Service Design, work that we traditionally do in the retail sector is service re-design: improving the customer experience. Driven by need, it meets the needs of retailers to keep up with customers and their expectations and the need of customers for their services to react to how they’re behaving.

Once needs are identified they can be met, and this often includes designing concepts supported by tech. The key point here though, is the difference between displaying a technological asset and providing a technological solution. The challenge is to avoid just having an asset that looks good and masks an average service or experience. To develop a strong service system needs a customer-centric approach. It is then that technology solutions can be used most effectively for the experience as a whole: fully integrated and not outdating quickly.

Engine were lucky to be involved with such a project – a juicy piece of business modelling and vision creation with an established but forward-thinking organisation. Philips Lighting had spotted the product to service shift, and established a new ventures team, Philips Retail Solutions (PRS), to explore options of service provision in retail. For Philips, their motivation was both the needs of customers and the capability of their technology products. They had developed the innovative hardware and software to create multi-sensorial and interactive in-store experiences and identified a market opportunity in the retail industry to create distinctive, branded experiences. Acting as a consultancy to retail clients, their aim was to provide solutions for clients who provided solutions for customers.

Engine’s involvement was to support Philips to define the new service: including the business model, value propositions, concepts and the platform to manage the service. We undertook research with interaction and retail designers, store, sales and retail managers, drawing out insights from the industry – the sector’s evolutionary nature and the value of delivering multi-channel experiences. Similarly, we explored some of the barriers to change and the necessity of small pilots to demonstrate results.

When designing the business offer, we used customer insights, brand values and business goals to create principles that define the user experience across all channels. These principles also make up the distinct offer of PRS and what needs they help their clients to meet – simplifying in-store management, aligning business targets and managing their resources; learning from them and evolving experiences. One of the key selling points of the offer was its measurability and built-in analysis tools – multi-sensorial is one thing but measuring the reactions of your customers to it is one step more; providing data on reactions and purchase behaviour for individual items, ranges, seasons and stores as a whole.

As part of the delivery of the project, we developed the story of a PRS pilot project for a mobile operator as part of a range of communications to support the new venture. T-Mobile saw the benefit of attracting customers to their products through customer interaction that resonated with the products themselves: interactive and explorable. PRS created a set of interactive window displays called ‘digits’, which reacted to the movements of customers passing by and invited further engagement and exploration with individual digits serving as product displays in-store.

It is examples like this, and the work that PRS has gone on to do, that demonstrate the success of a user-centred process that happily meets the client and customer needs and also provides a stage for the exciting capabilities that technology can provide to deliver powerful and distinct experiences.

Our work at Engine over ten years has taught us that great services need great organisations. So it often results that by designing a service, we address an organisational challenge. Today we apply design thinking and design methods to business challenges at many levels, from touchpoint and experience design, to developing teams and their skills to design collaboratively in response to customer need. The subject for design has extended beyond the service product, to the people, processes, purpose and culture of organisations.

We believe that there are two key areas that must be addressed to support organisational change: modeling and making tangible new ways of working, and the development of a ‘design platform’ – a core structure and its components that support teams to work in new ways. The objective is always to allow people to learn through doing and to create the conditions that will allow new tools and ways of working to spread beyond a single team.

These two areas must be developed in tandem so that new practices can be freely modeled and adapted as needs arise. We have put together some key lessons on the implementation of design-led practices within an organisation:

1. New practices are linked to a clear service vision

A service vision has to be supported from the top and relevant at every level. This means the vision is aspirational, but clearly actionable for those looking to implement it. The actionable elements of the vision should describe how the organisation behaves and importantly the role to adopt in the lives of customers. The process of creating a vision is critical, it needs high levels of collaboration and a structure that means it can evolve over time.

2. The reasons for adoption of new practices are advocated from the top

When reasons to adopt new ways of working are advocated from the top and linked directly to commercial objectives, the process of change is more likely to gain traction and succeed. If leaders can articulate the need to change the way people work, others can go on to engage and take ownership of specific working practices. Changes in working practices can be aligned with significant reorganisations, rebrands and changes in legalisation or new policy ideas.

3. New practices are most recognisable alongside existing practice

New design tools and process should be visibly aligned with current design and development processes. It must be clear how any new service design process augments or informs existing ones. As design practice has a role in the facilitation of multidisciplinary working, design-like processes should borrow aspects of development processes from elsewhere in the organisation. An obvious route would be to create a service design process that marries existing marketing practice (strategy and implementation) with services management.

4. New practices shouldn’t add complexity

Due to the cross-organisational nature of services, service design processes, if given the remit, will extend to overlap and encompass many functions and processes within an organisation. Therefore, those who own the existing processes need to be involved and can provide understanding for the purpose of each particular function or process of the organisation.

5. Immediate practical value

New ways of working should be introduced on live projects with real objectives. There are always skeptics. Skeptics are not always a negative force; they simply require evidence where others proceed in good faith. It’s important to introduce new ways of working on real projects, as soon as possible, to demonstrate real impact.

6. Prototype and iterate new tools and processes before launching them on the organisation

New design approaches should be prototyped on a small scale and, initially, away from the scrutiny of the wider organisation, so that the generic tools of service design can absorb the language and culture of the organisation. Starting small through ‘demonstration projects’ will generate evidence of success and allow early teams to gain confidence and act as advocates to others. Once there is greater fidelity and confidence, then the approach can be ‘pressure tested’ by applying it to more complex problems with new participants.

7. Analyse, but don’t rush to adopt best practice from elsewhere

Reference to best practice across sectors is hugely valuable but the core client team needs to go through a design process for themselves and to model new practices in their image. Best practice provides ideas and stimulus, but it’s rarely possible to successfully adopt an approach from another organisation in its entirety, or from an aggregation of best practices from elsewhere.

8. Local adaptation

Business units and teams should, within the constraints of shared principles and platform elements, be supported to tailor the common approach to their local requirements, skills and team dynamic. The design of the over-arching process therefore needs to have this scalability in mind when it is conceived. It is rare in a dynamic organisation that there is one rigid ‘product to market’ process. Instead, a skeleton structure can be adapted to accommodate different teams, business requirements and a level of organisational maturity is more effective.

The important achievement is that there is some level of commonality of language and approach to enable multidisciplinary working. Piloting the process against different challenges produces options for how a core design process is adapted. For example, whether a team has three weeks or three months to develop a solution.

9. New ways of working backed-up by new measures of success

Remits for new processes need to be clearly given and clearly supported by changes to performance measurement. These measures need to reflect the changing nature of the internal practice by measuring outputs, but also including a perspective on behaviour change and impact within the organisation; such as the effectiveness of a person’s work in building awareness of new techniques among others. In a programme rolling out new ways of working, staggered review points and a roadmap for measurement, which correlates with the evolution and maturity of new practices, can be implemented. This requires having a realistic view on what success looks like in terms of outputs and impact at the service and organisational levels and overtime.

10. Make customers’ stories into valuable business assets

These serve as insights, key differentiators and provide high value in a service organisation. Bringing them to life can increase the ease with which multidisciplinary teams can be formed around a challenge. By making customer research and customers highly visible in an organisation, a single point of focus is presented. It’s much harder to deny what everyone is there to do when customers and their stories are embedded in conversations. Having useful and usable information and rich pictures of customers freely available to teams, and ensuring that its use is routine within processes, increases the likelihood of reaching valuable and sustainable solutions for customers.

Our Drivers of Change report, looking to the future of service- and non service-organisations, is now available to download from our website.

Now we need YOU to let us know what you think.

Do some of the Drivers ring true within your organisation or sector?

Are there others you have found that we haven’t identified?

The Drivers of Change: Get behind the wheel.

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.

Advocacy is key to driving business in industries with a limited number of physical touchpoints.

A service and service brand relies on and needs to pursue such vocal loyalty from their users.

Advocacy is often synonymous with customer referral, but is this a too simplistic way of viewing it? We’ve put together some thoughts and examples around identity, storytelling and incentives to support the view that advocacy isn’t just a transaction: it is also emotional currency.

1. IDENTITY

• Customers are loyal to brands with values and beliefs in line with their own that they can identify with.
• They aspirationally select brands that present the image of who they wish to be: that fit with their perceived ‘personal brand’.
• This brand ethos should be an emotional, passionate belief that resonates emotionally with customers.
• A brand that clearly stands for something and importantly demonstrates this through their actions is easier for customers to build a personal relationship with.
• A clear message is easier for a customer to internalise and retell to their network.
• Loyal customers will defend the honour of a brand that they have emotionally invested in.

For example:
+ (RED): Established to help eliminate AIDS in Africa, (red) partners with global brands to create unique (red) versions of their products (ipods, t-shirts, trainers, credit cards etc) which are coloured red and distinctively branded. When a consumer purchases one of these products a share of the profit goes into the global fund: and they visibly demonstrate their commitment to the cause.

+ JOHN LEWIS: Celebrated and admired for their co-operative ethos, they publicise their business model, which makes all their staff partners and co-owners. They have detailed employee feedback systems to integrate observations into their systems and processes. As such, they excel in customer service and have a reputation for going the extra mile for customers because for their co-owners, what is good for customers is good for them.

2. STORYTELLING

• Customers advocate brands through the stories that they tell each other: anecdotes and titbits.
• Often, to cut through the overwhelming range of choices, people turn to the stories that circulate in their personal networks, either formally or informally, as a starting point when making decisions.
• Customers are loyal to brands that provide rich, unique and engaging experiences that they are motivated to share with others.
• Designing snippets of positive stories that are simple enough to share, and ‘sticky’, increases the chances of these positive stories going viral.
• Often, bad stories are the most engaging and entertaining to share. So it is extra important to create opportunities for positive storytelling, by planting them across the customer experience, such as through excellent service recovery.

For example:
+ OCADO: An award-winning online supermarket who recognise the value in the small touches. The experience is peppered with delightful and useful touches, ready to be shared as ‘sticky’ stories with your friends: from colour-coded shopping bags so you know which to unpack into the freezer first, to itemised receipts that list your deliver in order of the use-by-date.

+ NIKE ID: When this new service that allowed customers to customise their trainers was launched, Nike initially launched it with just a select group of ‘mavens’: trendsetters and key influencers in fashion, film and music. With the association of the hippest people in the business to spread the word, and the service that allowed you to design your own, unique trainer it didn’t take long for word to spread.

3. INCENTIVES

• People share information and advocate for social gain, not just financial reward: advocacy is a social act.
• Advocacy is a selfish behaviour: both financially and socially, customers wish to gain by doing so.
• The stakes are high when you recommend a service to a peer: there is the potential for glory, but if something goes badly your credibility might suffer.
• Customers appreciate brands that reward them generously for taking this risk – or equally provide opportunities to gain social kudos for passing on information.

For example:
+ SPOTIFY: When first launched, this online music streaming service allowed early adopters a limited number of free invites to join that they could share with their friends: the more they loyally used the service the more invites they would be sent. Trading on exclusivity, these invites became a lucrative social currency and scarceness promoted some people to trade them on auction sites.

+ ORANGE ROCKCORPS: Orange’s innovative volunteering initiative motivates people to give something back to their local community. They produce some of the most coveted gigs in the music calendar: but you can’t buy a ticket, you have to earn it by giving four hours of your time to volunteer in your community. Orange motivate people to participate in this scheme socially: spreading the word amongst their friends so that they can all volunteer together, as well as experiencing the gig as a group.

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

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.

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 cliche 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.