Service Design. Ben Reason
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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 decisions in an organization stem from people, and in some form or another, other people interact with them and are affected by them. We are more often aware of this with government policy decisions, but the human outcome is frequently overlooked when business discussions include terms such as “consumers” or “target groups,” or worse, simply focus on numbers on a spreadsheet.
This industrial mode is inefficient and ineffective for services. As soon as we forget that people—living, feeling, emotive human beings—are involved throughout the entire chain of events, not just at the moment of use by the customer, things go wrong. Organizations can end up being aggressive, manipulative, and aloof, and customers may feel that the only channel available to them for venting their frustration is an unfortunate, underpaid call center employee, who is also bound by rules and regulations and may have had a pretty bad day herself.
The successful businesses and public services of the future will foster a more equal and reciprocal relationship with their customers, one that recognizes the customer as a co-producer of the service.
One of the tools we cover in Chapter 8 simply asks, “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” while another measures the gaps between people’s expectations and experiences. It is noticeable here that the main things we are trying to measure are people’s relationships to the service and to each other, not efficiency metrics. Services usually involve staff to deliver them, but many are really platforms for creating interactions between other service users. Social networks are, of course, the most high-profile example of this, but some services, such as eBay, are a mix of the two. Issues such as trust, credibility, empathy, and tone of voice are important for many services to thrive. Understanding not just people as individuals but also the relationships they have to others is essential to understanding how a service might operate.
A good example of this relationship building is Zopa, a peer-to-peer lending service that has dramatically altered the customer relationship mode of a financial service. By giving people the ability to network, and by gaining insights into their needs, motivations, and feelings, Zopa is not just another lending and borrowing service. It is a social community with a sense of reciprocal responsibility, something that has certainly been long absent in the mainstream banking world (see Chapter 6 for more on Zopa).
To put people at the heart of services, we need to know who they are. We need to listen to them and obtain accurate information that helps us give them what they need, when they need it. We start by gathering insights.
Insights versus Numbers
Service design draws upon the user- and human-centered design traditions as well as the social sciences to form the basis of our work gathering insights into the experiences, desires, motivations, and needs of the people who use and provide services.
Although the business press makes a lot of noise about “putting customers first,” being “customer centered,” and having “a customer focus,” few organizations employ this form of knowledge with the same rigor that they employ accounting and law. The latter are usually legally mandated for organizations, of course, but developing and maintaining a deep understanding of the people for whom an organization exists to provide value is just as important for the ongoing relevance and survival of a business. Service design is not simply something to add on top of a business proposition after all the numbers have been crunched; it is fundamental to the entire organization and its offerings, and can create a paradigm shift in corporate culture and thinking to one of sustained value and innovation.
All types of organizations have the potential to personalize services and create huge benefits for themselves and their customers. From personalized learning in education to insurance quotes tailored to a policy holder’s driving style, personalization is a powerful concept. Shifting attention from the masses to the individual enables radical new opportunities, and because of this fact, service design places more emphasis on qualitative over quantitative research methods.
Service design involves research across all the stakeholders of a project—from the managing director to the end user, and from frontline staff to third-party suppliers. Of course, other disciplines focus on detailed knowledge of customers as a business advantage. The most notable is marketing, and indeed, “insight” is a term widely used in marketing. We are not suggesting that service design is an alternative to marketing, and we acknowledge that service design draws upon a number of disciplines for some of its methods and approaches, but we want to explore how the specific emphasis on design creates value in the experience of services, service propositions, and touchpoints.
Marketing excels in understanding markets and how to reach them through the classic four Ps: price, promotion, product, and place. We are focusing on the fifth P, people, and how we work with people to inform the design of a service.
Market research is typically quantitative and prefers large numbers of respondents. This research can yield some “truths” that are statistically significant and correct, such as the percentage of people who use a certain kind of service (Figure 3.1). This background information can be useful, but discovering through quantitative research that 70% of people do not ride a bicycle (to use a fictional statistic as an example) does not give us any hints about why they do not ride bicycles. Statistics are not very actionable for designers—we need to know the underlying reasons.
FIGURE 3.1 One is not better than the other, but for our purposes, qualitative research yields more useful insights that we can use as a basis for design than quantitative research’s “truths” do.
Qualitative research helps designers dive deeper to understand the chaos and emotions that make us human and behave in seemingly illogical ways. We are interested in people’s needs, behaviors, and motivations because these can form the basis of design problems that we try to tackle as designers.
Maybe the non-cyclists in our example prefer the car or bus, or maybe they do not cycle because their city has inadequate bike lanes and the risk of an accident