service to an orchestra or a rock band, we can think of quality of performance in terms of how well all the musicians came together to deliver the music. Music is an interesting metaphor in this regard, because in a band or an orchestra, each musician must play to the best of his or her abilities, yet at the same time play in harmony and keep time with the others. Things can quickly go awry if each musician simultaneously tries to play as a soloist.
We can go a step further to include the qualities that the venue or the support staff brought to the experience. Was the lighting good, and was the sound engineering supporting the experience? This kind of performance is where a service can have its own style—think of an airline such as Virgin, which have gone to great lengths to make the experience of a very rigid flight process different from their competitors by styling the manner, dress, and actions of their inflight team, their digital and print communication, and a host of other touchpoints.
This “experience” aspect of performance is the delivery of the service to the service user on the “front stage.” The idea of a music ensemble, harmonious across all aspects of the performance, is critical to services and a concept we will return to when we start examining how to align the complexity of touchpoints that make up service experiences.
Performance as Value
The other meaning of the word “performance,” equally useful to service design, is service performance as a measure of value. How well is the service performing? This measure is both outward and inward facing. Outward-facing value measurement asks how well the service is achieving the results promised to the service users. For example, how often does a hip operation result in a 100% recovery? Inward-facing value measurement examines how well the service is performing for the organization. For example, how cost effectively is it delivering hip operations?
This kind of performance is how businesses usually see their activities. Hence, services that we design and they provide will be evaluated in hard performance metrics. Service designers need to design for this aspect of a service as much as for the customer experience.
This value aspect of performance is the “backstage” measure of the service by the business—all the things that happen behind the scenes that help create or run the service experience for customers but that they don’t see. This provides a challenge for service designers. We need to be able to measure the cold, hard metrics of the business as well as make the case for measuring the soft and fuzzy aspects of people’s experiences. This challenge is discussed in Chapter 8.
Unite the Experience
We doubt we have to preach the value of design to readers of this book, but we all have to make the business case to clients. In our experience, the design approaches described here can be quick, inexpensive, and effective ways to create service experiences that delight customers. Most services involve implementing a complex and usually expensive infrastructure, and our ability to develop quick, cheap prototypes of both products and services early in their development can save organizations enormous amounts of money in sunk investment that may later turn out not to work. Service design aims to unite the experience.
Now, let’s look at how.
Summary
Economies in developed countries have shifted from industrial manufacture to services. The problem is that many companies offering services still think about them with an industrial mindset and try to manage and market services like products.
A common management approach is to divide an organization into departments, or silos. This may lead to each part of the service being well designed, but the real problem is that the entire service has not been designed as a coherent whole. The customer who experiences the whole also experiences the gaps between the touchpoints.
Many organizations are organized in ways that actually prevent them from delivering good service experiences. The challenge is to redesign both the service and also the culture of the organization.
CHAPTER 3
Understanding People and Relationships
People Are the Heart of Services
People Are the Heart of Services
Despite the ability of new technologies to automate and augment people’s daily lives, people remain at the heart of services. As we mentioned in Chapter 2, a service has no or little intrinsic value until the moment of its use or consumption—services or experiences cannot be stored in a warehouse. But “use” and “consume” are product mindset words and we need to use different language for services. People don’t “use” a healthcare professional or a lawyer, and they don’t consume a train journey or a stay at a hotel. Instead, people enter into a relationship with professionals and service providers, and their interactions are an act of co-producing the service experience. Thus, we need to think in terms of designing for relationships and experiences that evolve and change over time, rather than just in terms of short moments of consumption or usage.
In the age of self-service Web booking and mobile applications, interpersonal experiences would seem to be on the way out, but services comprise interactions among people, technology, and processes. When these are industrialized and institutionalized, as often happens when organizations grow, they need rehumanization to work properly and connect back to people’s human experience of the service. Even human-to-human interactions need this kind of design attention when they are mediated by technology, such as call center interactions or even forms.1
It is essential to understand that services are, at the very least, relationships between providers and customers, and more generally, that they are highly complicated networks of relationships between people inside and outside the service organization. The staff who interact with customers are also users and providers of internal services. Most people have tales to tell of how inflexible their IT departments are or how other company policies curb their ability to innovate or provide the service they know their customers want. IT staff respond with stories of how other staff—their “customers”—sap their time with questions and problems that are blindingly obvious (to them). When frontline staff are let down by internal systems and procedures, they become disempowered and inflexible. This is passed down the line and leads to poor customer experiences and service failures.
Industrialization did not just lead to industrial product thinking. We argue that the industrial mode has also led to the stereotypical “faceless corporations” that are often the subject of frustration and poor experiences for service users, because the industrial mindset is usually all about efficiencies and economies of scale rather than effectiveness of the delivered service. Some customer–provider relationships can end up being toxic and combative, and as the history of human warfare shows us, people tend to dehumanize the enemy.
All
