Thanks to Jeff Howard of Design For Service who has used the Google translation engine to convert this good little read from Dutch to English. I managed to convert some copy yesterday but not the whole document, so congrats to Jeff and thank you for sharing.
You can go get Jeff’s translated version here
Below is the latest blog i just received from Seth Godin. He (as he does most days) makes an important point especially for Service based companies and provides additional reasons why Service Design can be such a potent weapon for progressive companies.
It’s not JUST the steak or the phone call or the insurance cover that your customers are buying when they look to buy something from you. Its not JUST the all the elements that make up the customer journey and everything within it. The touch-points that deliver it, the spaces where engagement with customers occurs through channels such as in-store, call centre, postal mail, or online. The ‘moment’ within each touch-point where there is an interaction and your staff or systems engage with your customers.
These are all crucially important and without it, your business will not thrive and grow new and recurring revenue streams. But how do you handle situations when the unexpected happens. When there is no script, no exact procedure?
We have been working with a large Australian based firm recently who is acknowledged as a great Service Innovator and relative to their peers, they are head and shoulders above in terms of customer experience and growth. However they also know that their competitors are quickly imitating them in marketing, minimising the perceived gap. It’s time to leap ahead again with a sustainable differentiator.
Having developed deep insight through design research methods we have developed innovative human centered Customer Journey Maps, an Experience Strategy and undertaken Intention Engineering.
However you cant stop there. On top of that we have developed the mortar that holds all those bricks together. It’s a set of Service Principles that allow their team to take the right decisions each and every day when there is no touchpoint, no planned interaction. It provides an important guide, a set or principles on how to act to remain customer focused even when no-one is looking and no one is listening. It fills in all those ‘in between moments’ that all add up to the delivery of an exceptional customer experience and transformed loyalty and profitability for companies.
As is quite often the case, the ideas are the relatively easy part, the real expertise comes in how you hang it all together and make it work in a repeatable, sustainable manner making it work within your clients organisational systems and infrastructure. That is our singular goal here at Proto Partners and should also be for each and every Service Design firm.
Seth’s blog entry is below
Scott McCloud’s classic book on comics explains a lot more than comics.
A key part of his thesis is that comic books work because the action takes place between the frames. Our imagination fills in the gaps between what happened in that frame and this frame, which means that we’re as much involved as the illustrator and author are in telling the story.
Marketing, it turns out, works precisely the same way.
Marketing is what happens in between the overt acts of the marketer. Yes you made a package and yes you designed a uniform and yes you ran an ad… but the consumer’s take on what you did is driven by what happened out of the corner of her eye, in the dead spaces, in the moments when you let your guard down.
Marketing is what happens when you’re not trying, when you’re being transparent and when there’s no script in place.
It’s not marketing when everything goes right on the flight to Chicago. It’s marketing when your people don’t respond after losing the guitar that got checked.
It’s not marketing when I use your product as intended. It’s marketing when my friend and I are talking about how the thing we bought from you changed us.
It’s not marketing when the smiling waitress appears with the soup. It’s marketing when we hear two waiters muttering to each other behind the serving station.
Consumers are too smart for the frames. It’s the in-between frame stuff that matters. And yet marketers spend 103% of our time on the frames.
I really thought this was perfect sense and showed a good understanding of human behaviour or in this case challenges. Simple, elegant and effective - all things that good Service Design should be.
Check the railings that the man is holding onto and resting his foot on. It’s located on a little Copenhagen traffic island where cyclists often wait, reports Copenhagenize.com.
The City of Copenhagen has implemented this double railing simply as a convenience for the cyclists who stop here. A high railing to grasp with your hand and a foot railing for putting your foot up, if that’s what you fancy doing. Either way you can also use the railing to push off when the light changes.
The foot rest reads: “Hi, cyclist! Rest your foot here… and thank you for cycling in the city.”
It certainly is a fine example of the City understanding human behaviour and basic anthropology.
Last night we held our second Service Design Thinks and Drinks in Sydney at Trinity Bar Surry Hills. I presented a Service Design case study undertaken by Proto Partners for Contours Fitness Studio, a women only gym that has over 200 studios across Australia.
Ellie Nichol from BT Financial Group who attended the SDN Conference in Madeira last year provided some great insight into some of the hot topics from the conference and demonstrated how BT have already successfully employed these methods in their work here in Australia.
Following the presentations we had a great discussion about Service Designs’ role in Business in Australia and some ideas on communicating its increasing relevance to the Australian Service sector.
It’s always important to drink your own Coolade so following the presentation of the Contours Case Study where we showcased the insights derived from using NPS for Contours, we are over the next few days going to unxertake some user research and undertake Net Promoter Score on the Australian Servicedesigning Drinks/2 to garner feedback and suggestions to make this a better Service experience.
An idea we have had, sparked by Ellie’s presentation where she discussed “Customers engaging with Customers” is a suggestion that at the next SD/3 we co-create the Sydney Service Design Drinks customer journey and touchpoint experience. It might be a fun way to get everyone involved in a real Service Design project and improve our own event. Love your feedback on this idea at Servicedesigning.com.au
Sydney Service Design Drinks /3 will be held at 505 Crown Street, Trinity Bar at 6.30pm on March 16th, so pop it into your diary and bring along a friend.
Service Design Drinks 2 is coming up quick!
6.30pm, Tuesday 19 January 2010
Trinity Bar, Surry Hills (Google map for Trinity Bar).
We’ve got two awesome presentations lined up. A great service design case study of Contours ladies gyms from Damian Kernahan (Proto Partners) and some wise words of experience from Ellie Nichol (BT Financial Group). Followed by a quick round-up of what’s been happening in service design around the world from Suze Ingram (Service Design Hub).
This is only our second meeting. The first was a hit – so don’t miss this one.
Let us know if you are coming by sending a quick “I’ll be there” email to servicedesigningau@gmail.com.
Sydney Service Design Drinks is on 17 November at Trinity Bar, Surry Hills
The first Service Design Drinks for Sydney is set and ready to go.
The details are:
6.30pm, Tuesday 17 November
at the Trinity Bar in Surry Hills
There’ll be a quick Service Design Drinks introduction from me, Damian Kernahan (Proto Partners) and an equally quick talk from Suze Ingram (Service Design Hub) to get us thinking and chatting. It’s our first meeting – so be an early adopter and come along.
Please let us know if you are coming by sending a quick RSVP to servicedesigningau@gmail.com.
I read two interesting articles about two months apart, one from livework, a leading Service Design firm in the UK who were arguing with great insight I thought how Data was the new Oil.
Both Ben Reason and Jeremy Walker from livework argue that:
“Data, whilst valuable, is a commodity, and an easily replicated one at that. Therefore as it becomes more widely available its value will drop. Businesses with data products often prop up the price with additional fields of information but this is simply another type of devaluation as the customer is getting more for the same price. We have helped our clients achieve the opposite – more revenue for less data – by developing services around the information. These services provide additional value to customers by understanding how the data fits their business.
This is where the process of refinement comes in. We need to refine the data into services. And these services need to meet the needs and issues of the businesses that information providers hope to sell to. The issue is that, whilst the geek in all of us gets very excited about raw data, business customers are more interested in the immediate challenges that they face. These challenges will be things like effective marketing campaigns, back office productivity or asset management etc.”
The other article was from Forrester Research and Dave Frankland. He also agreed with the livework team:
“According to Amazon’s former Chief Scientist, individuals will generate more data in 2009 than in the combined history of mankind. Think about the implications for your marketing and overall business. On the one hand, it is possible to know more about every prospect and customer, and to improve their customer experience based on what you know about them. On the other hand, it’s very easy to drown in the exponentially growing stream of data. Customer Intelligence (CI) professionals sit at the nexus of this data explosion, while also dealing with tectonic shifts in customer behavior, and an increased demand for marketing accountability.”
Dave goes onto say that given the strategic value of the CMO role, he believed that the next generation CMO’s will come from the Customer Intelligence discipline. That’s not to say CMO’s won’t continue to care deeply about the brand, and the emotional connection that they create with their customers. But, as they struggle to engage with empowered, connected customers who have limited tolerance for marketing, firms will elevate CI within their organizations to influence mission critical business decisions with data-driven insights. These CMOs will help their organizations to focus on customer value, and use it as the connective tissue that causes all marketers and business units to pull in the same direction.“
And that’s where we tie the knot and arrive back at how Service Design can and should play a key part in this process. Its the ability to focus on customer value first and then use this data to develop new and better services that create value for both company and customer. Have a read of both articles which I have linked to above.
The Service Design Network has just released its second Service Design Journal. A great issue which landed in my inbox last week. To get the full content you will need to sign up for the Service Design Network which is well worthwhile.
The second issue of Touchpoint, the sdn’s Service Design Journal, is out now! Entitled “Health and Service Design”, this brand-new issue features articles from Service Design and/or healthcare experts such as Julia Schaeper, Lynne Maher and Helen Baxter (NHS), Lavrans Løvlie (live|work), Ben Reason (live|work), Mark Mugglestone (NHS) and John-Arne Røttingen (Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services), Tine Park (Designit) and Christine Janae-Leoniak (Mayo Clinic) as well as interviews with representatives from these areas.
SDN Touchpoint
This issue of Touchpoint will explore the individual, social and economic relevance of health systems and the potential for of Service Design to redesign and reinvent service offerings, service processes and service interactions. If you would like more information on SDN Journal please click here
I thought this was a nice and short presentation on some of the useful techniques and processes in use at Proto Partners and other Service Design firms.
Suze Ingram and I met up today for the first time and agreed a date for the first Service Design Drinks for Australia.
I have already reserved www.servicedesigning.com.au which we will activate over the next week. Suze will design some graphics and away we go. If you would like more details, please email me damian.kernahan@protopartners.com.au or contact Suze at suze.ingram@gmail.com.
More details once we book a venue.
Stay in touch via the blog or learn more about Service Design at Proto Partners website.
