Tag Archives: Service Design

Use the ‘Customer Loyalty Formula’ to keep customers coming back

I found this article by Kevin Stirtz which I thought was a pretty good insight into the increasing demands of customers in a tighter economic environment. It is a reminder that although we may have a set of loyal customers, keeping them is not a static equation, it is constantly evolving  and challenging process that requires a new toolset and skillset to solve these service challenges. It is not by using old creativity tools developed for and used by manufacturing organisations.

That’s why using Service Design is so important  in helping Service based organisations that represent 70%+  of First World economies GDP. Over to Kevin…

According to a recent study, many big consumer brands are losing their loyal customers. It revealed that 52% of highly loyal consumers either reduced their loyalty or defected completely from the brands in the study. Further, only 4 out 10 brands in the study retained 50% or more of their highly loyal customers from year to year.

A big reason for this, according to the study is the recession. The economic downturn has caused customers to re-evaluate what they’re getting for their money. Our priorities have changed so what we look for in products has changed too. Many customers are looking for more value in the products they buy. And if the big brands have not changed, at least in the eyes of their customers, then customers will defect. They’ll try other brands that appear offer more value.

A way to look at this is by using what I call the Customer Loyalty Formula. Here’s how it works:

Customer Loyalty = Connection * Value  * Experience

(Or CL=C*V*E for short.)

In this formula, Connection means, as a customer, how connected you are with the brand? Can you easily and conveniently communicate with people who represent the brand?  Value means your perception of what the brand offers you in the context of what you want and expect. Are you getting what you want or more? Do you feel the brand offers you the best combination of features and benefits for the price?

Finally, Experience here means how have you experienced this brand? Have you been treated well by the people involved? Do you have a positive emotional feeling associated with the brand?

This formula tells us where many big brands have failed in this recession.  They have failed to redefine their value. For a brand to keep our loyalty it has to change with us. It needs to show us it offers more value than before.

If you would like to see the whole article, please click here

Jennifer Bove on Service Design – speaking lots of sense …yet again

If it is possible to be in love with a Service Designer for what they say and what they contribute to the profession of Service Design, then I have to say I am pretty keen on Jennifer Bove(pronounced Bo-vey, which makes it all the better), a Principal at Kicker Studio in San Franciso.

I don’t know how old she is, but packed in however many years she has been on the planet is a rocket brain and a bucket of insight.For someone who said during her presentation(see link at end of the article) she didn’t have many answers, just lots of questions, she makes a lot of sense. Imagine what she is like when she provides some answers!!

Here is her article reprodcued from creativity-online.com. As always, she makes plenty of sense. If you are listening Jennifer, please keep it coming!!

Service Design

Service design, while often talked about in academia, is getting more and more attention from design companies and service providers, as the impact of experience design has been proven to increase customer satisfaction and brand perception.

By: Jennifer Bove Published: Jun 25, 2009

Jennifer Bove, Kicker Studio.
Jennifer Bove, Kicker Studio.

Last week I had the honor of participating in the final lecture night of the Dot Dot Dot series put on by the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts. The series has been a big hit among the design crowd in NYC, each week featuring a different design topic and four short presentations from various related fields. Highlights have included themes such as “The Curators,” “The Influencers” and “The Interviewers, which can be found on the program’s Vimeo stream. The final evening’s theme was “The Service designers.”

Service design, while often talked about in academia, is getting more and more attention from design companies and service providers, as the impact of experience design has been proven to increase customer satisfaction and brand perception. This isn’t to say that service design is only about the customer’s experience; while that’s a big part of it, service designers also look at the delivery of the service, its operational efficiency, and its scalability from a design point of view. They focus on designing both the overall service, an intangible exchange like using a bank account or renting a car, and each of the touch points within the service, which may be tangible products like a bank statement, website or or rental car. Service designers map the way that a service is experienced over time and each of the interactions within the experience.

My co speakers at the event were Chenda Fruchter, who talked about designing NYC’s 311 service, ReD Associates’ Jun Lee, who recounted their research with Lego, and Silvia Harris, presenting her work redesigning the wayfinding services at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

I decided not to focus on a specific case study, but rather present a series of issues to keep in mind when thinking about the services we design. My talk, titled “Is there an app for that?” was about the challenge of designing services in today’s data-rich web-enabled world, and how our experiences online have changed our expectations of the way things work offline.

I focused on five topics. Here’s a brief summary of them:

Immediacy
The fact that I can get the answers to just about anything with a quick Google search or a lazy tweet has changed my appetite for instant gratification. I’m used to having access to everything in my smart phone now, and near real-time response in most of my communication. This can’t help but affect my expectations of offline services–I have have less patience for delays, and my perception of acceptable time lines and information access is skewed. Service designers need to think about what happens when things don’t go as planned, account for high levels of scrutiny around timeliness in a world where so much of our online experience is near real-time and 24/7.

Co-creation
Online services are all about participation. Many of our favorites, such as Wikipedia and YouTube, are crowd-sourced or co-created. They rely on users to create the content that others will consume. For these services to work, users have to participate. This co-creation model presents an opportunity for service designers as well. By involving users in the creation and implementation of a service, we can engender a sense of ownership and accountability that motivates them to participate, and makes them more likely to succeed.

Voice
Along with users’ participation comes their point of view. Websites such as Digg, Theadless and others capitalize on the opinions of the masses, giving users a place to express their preferences and see the impact of their opinions on what’s featured on the site. Many offline services have started using the web to a similar effect. Some use Get Satisfaction, an online service geared toward giving customers a neutral platform for communicating with companies, and many have started using Twitter as an official forum for customer service. Users now have new ways of expressing their opinions, an the public nature of this online expression can often lead to groundswell. These channels, aren’t going away, and can be incorporated into service delivery and quality assurance in new and interesting ways.

Expertise
Thanks to the internet, I’m a lot smarter than I used to be. I now have access to myriad experts, and quickly learn all I need to prepare myself for engaging with a service, and I can often find answers to my questions without ever dealing with an expert directly. The availability of expert information online changes my expectations of the the service providers I interact with–it’s easy to forget that people are not computers, nor have they memorized the contents therein. However knowledgeable a service provider may be, their differentiator is no longer exclusive access to information. But the opportunity lies in how they use the information and the human quality of their expertise. There’s a reason we still consult doctors instead of relying on WebMD.

Customization
One of the advantages of online services is that they can track user behavior and provide opportunities for customization. People have become accustomed to their own versions of iGoogle, and saving things like their online grocery lists from one week to the next. How does an offline service reflect the ongoing nature of a service relationship? How does it learn from a user’s behavior? Does it respond differently at different points in the service experience?

There are many, many more issues that I could add to this list, but the talk was only 10 minutes long. Exploring this topic left me wondering whether or not there “should” be an app for everything under the sun. What are the qualities that we want to preserve in a world were everything is data? How can we design better services that address a new set of expectations from our users?

You can see a video of the talk on the UX network, and I’ve posted the slides on slideshare as well.

***

Jennifer Bove is a founder and principal at Kicker Studio in San Francisco and on the faculty of the School of Visual Art’s Interaction Design MFA department in New York. She travels, a lot.

Using Service Design to Create Service Capital

I have been working on developing my thinking on Service Capital and just today thought I would publish on Slideshare a brief few slides on what it is, how companies generate and maintain it.

I am half way through a fuller white paper on Service Capital , but thought I would starting putting it out there as a means to drive me to work harder on it. The reason I have been working on it, is that I believe Service Design in my opinion would benefit from more accountability, transparency and publishable) results driven culture.

You can see the Slideshare presentation here

Let me know what you think.

Selling the value of Service Design – How Barbara Minto of The Pyramid Principle might approach it

Every movement needs  two things, an enemy and a burning desire to change the status quo of something you see needs changing. Here is how I think Barbara Minto who wrote the hideously expensive but still great value book The Pyramid Principle, would approach how to sell the value of Service Design. It is designed to short.

The structure is as follows:

  • Situation
  • Complication
  • Question
  • Answer

You should nod with agreement with the core fact of each page, if not, lets call this a Prototype and build to learn as they say. I welcome your thoughts.

SD SCQA.001

click  here to see the presentation on Slideshare.net or cut and past the link below.

http://www.slideshare.net/damiankernahan/selling-the-value-of-service-design

What does Service Design do for companies that no one else can?

I realised today that for Service Design to be successful, Service Design firms need to convince potential clients that they can change something or solve something that up until now hasn’t been able to be resolved.

That is, companies have been using product development and design tool-kits to solve service problems issues/opportunities. Only the Service Design methodology offers a tool-set and skill-set that is specifically designed and developed to solve and improve service based issues.

At the same time, it allows companies and customers to mutually benefit, to mutually access value without the exclusion of the other.

Maybe it is time to become more overt in communicating what has been lacking up until now, in order to clearly and confidently communicate to organisations, the significant benefits from using Service Design to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

I am working on a Pyramid Principle(Barbara Minto) approach to trying to explain in 4 slides why Service Design solves Service based organisations problems unlike any company before them. And given this is the most expensive book i have ever bought,( USD$75 ten years ago) hopefully it will be convincing!!

More later

A Service Design manifesto for Transformation

I have decided after listening to Seth Godin that Service Design needs a movement. It’s not enough to think that what you sell is so good that it is enough to convert your potential customers. Potential clients buy passion, energy and commitment as much as they buy what you are selling.

To that end I have designed my own corporate manifesto. I believe in what I am doing and as i read and believed a long time ago, communication is not just saying something, it is the recipient successfully comprehending your intended message.

So here is my manifesto, the reason that I believe Service Design has the power to help companies transform their service experience for companies and their bottom line through increased customer loyalty and increased revenues.

Proto Partners Manifesto
Working to dramatically transform the way service is delivered, the way corporations default to productivity without the balancing need for quality, and the ambivalence of great customer service expectations in our society.

Proto Partners Aim
Our aim is to overhaul the existing service experience and create a major shift in the way service is not only delivered but experienced in the new millennium.

Qualifying Questions for potential Service Design clients

I have been reminded recently about the famous Wayne Gretzky quote that “a good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” It made me think that it can be adapted to Service Design as it applies to potential clients.

As an emerging discipline, Service Design is not for everyone and for every service company, not because they don’t need it or wont benefit from it, more so because they are not all ready for it.

So, in this environment where it is tough to get companies to invest any money unless they can clearly see a return, I have a sense that it is a more efficient and effective use of time for Service Design firms to “skate where the puck is going”, ie with those companies that believe that creating outstanding customer experiences is a way to increase their profitability in an environment that is generally struggling to grow through traditional methods.

So here are some qualifying questions I thought might help all parties ensure they are aligned from the outset.

1. Is your company committed to customer service as a growth driver of the business?
2. Do you believe that the company has the capability to systematically shape the customer experience?
3. Do you believe that you could improve your customer’s experience with some focus on it?
4. Do you believe that improving customer satisfaction will increase revenue and profitability?
5. Are yo open to a relatively new approach that can improve customer experience and profitability?

Given we are all pressed for time and results in this climate, it might be valuable to ensure that we determine very early on whether their is a potential marriage in the offing, or we should just leave it coffee.

I would be interested in your thoughts.