Many service companies think they are selling products. The finance sector is a classic example of this mindset, but insurance policies and bank accounts are services with multiple touchpoints of interaction, not products. When something goes wrong, policy holders want the financial compensation, of course, but the difference in value is whether they have an understanding person on the other end of the phone seamlessly guiding them through the claims process versus being sent an unintelligible 20-page form and then having to wait weeks for their money. Many organizations are starting to examine their customer service offering and the value it can bring. This provides great opportunities for service designers.
Services Created in Silos Are Experienced in Bits
The challenge for many service providers is that they are organized in ways that actually prevent them from delivering good service experiences. Often, each bit of the service is well designed, but the service itself hasn’t been designed. The problem is that customers don’t just care about individual touchpoints. They experience services in totality and base their judgment on how well everything works together to provide them with value (Figure 2.3).
Another complicating factor is that quality can vary dramatically from one service touchpoint to another. If the people who develop online banking don’t harmonize quality and coordinate routines with the people who manage the bank’s call center, customers are bound to experience disappointment.
The industrial legacy of treating services like products means that services often underperform and disappoint because they cannot be fixed in the same way as problems with products. Services are about interactions between people, and their motivations and behaviors. Marketers and designers often talk of products having personalities, but an iPhone or a Volkswagen doesn’t wake up with a hangover, worry about paying the rent, or care who is using them. People do, which is why understanding people is at the heart of service design.
FIGURE 2.3 The service experience is made up of the customer’s interactions with many touchpoints, and service quality can be defined by how well the touchpoints work together for the customer.
Services Are Co-produced by People
A fundamental characteristic of services is that they create value only when we use them. A bus service can’t get people from point A to point B unless they know where to get on and off. Online banking only provides value when customers virtually enter the bank’s machine room through an online banking interface and conduct their own transactions. An empty seat on the train has no value once it has left the station. Even at the dentist’s office, nothing will happen unless the patient opens her mouth and tells the dentist where it hurts.
Product-oriented organizations often fail to see the potential of using their customers to make a service more effective. If customers are well informed about bus routes and schedules, they are more likely to get more efficiently from A to B and more inclined to use the bus, reducing their carbon footprint and easing congested roads. If an online bank is well designed, customers don’t need to spend time and money in a bank building. Services are co-produced between the provider and users. (We should note that this is not the same as co-design, which has customers or users take part in the design process before or after the launch of a product or service.)
On one end of the service spectrum we see network services, such as Face-book, Twitter, and YouTube, that would be useless if people didn’t commit millions of hours to produce the content and activity that give these social networks their value. On the other end of the scale, services such as healthcare are most sustainable if fewer people use them. The best way to ensure that hospitals are efficient is for people to “co-produce” their health by keeping themselves in good shape and so they don’t need treatment. The biggest missed opportunity in development is that organizations don’t think about their customers as valuable, productive assets in the delivery of a service, but as anonymous consumers of products.
A New Technological Landscape: The Network
It is no coincidence that service design has been born as a field of design practice during the last decade. Twenty years ago, the design of services tended to be about hotels and hamburgers. Today, digital platforms are critical to running a business, large or small. The digital landscape of the information age has created radical enablers for new types of service delivery.
Modern service delivery is entirely dependent on digital platforms. Hospitals and banks can’t run without immediate electronic access to detailed records, airlines can’t sell cheap tickets without algorithms that constantly balance supply and demand, and most people can’t do much without the Internet or cell phones. Twenty years ago, cell phones were futuristic gadgets reserved for Wall Street traders and generals; today many people can’t even imagine meeting up in a city without a cell phone.
The combination of enterprise systems that store and link vast amounts of data with mass-consumer access to data through the Web and mobile telephony is transforming the way people live their daily lives. At the same time, the quality of service often suffers due to the complexity of linking these systems together in a way that makes sense to customers. This combination of opportunities and problems is the reason why service design has emerged as a specific design approach.
Streetcar—Enabling Co-production
One example of a service that builds on the active participation of its customers to make the service work better is the car-sharing club, which can be found in cities around the world. Car-sharing pioneer Streetcar launched in 2004, but the customer experience needed to be radically improved if Streetcar was to realize its full potential. To persuade people to switch to this new way of using a car, the customer experience had to be better than buying and owning a car. We suggested to Streetcar that the service experience should feel as satisfying as the click of a Volkswagen door—a consistent, solid, and pleasant experience that gives assurance the whole thing is carefully designed (Figure 2.4). This idea may sound trivial, but it is something that the Volkswagen product designers and engineers understand and spend a significant amount of time, money, and effort on.
FIGURE 2.4 Streetcar’s multiple touchpoints were designed as a holistic, satisfying experience.
We set about creating a customer experience that would enable Streetcar to overcome their key barriers to growth—lack of comprehension, access, and usability. These were systematically resolved by analyzing the customer journey from first awareness of the brand to regular usage (Figure 2.5).
We were able to identify where customers dropped out of the sign-up process or needed expensive customer support. The service is now clearly communicated as a four-step process: (1) book, (2) unlock, (3) enter PIN, and (4) drive (Figure 2.6). Customers find joining easy with a quick call to Streetcar and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, and the online booking engine was rebuilt to make it simple to use.
In essence, Streetcar builds on collaboration among the provider, the city, and the customer to make it work. Streetcar provides technology that enables people to rent cars for as little as half an hour. The City of London provides convenient parking spots to make the cars more accessible. Customers refuel the cars, keep them clean, and park them where other customers can find them.
Many organizations struggle to utilize the excellent resource that their customers provide. Most customers