service infrastructure that is required to provide them. It is because many services are almost invisible that nobody takes care to design them. This is not a conversation we would have if we were talking about a car or a smartphone because the design of these products is quite literally close to the surface and makes up a large proportion of the decision to buy or use them.
As a result, service designers frequently need to make the invisible visible by showing customers what has gone on behind the scenes, showing staff what is happening in the lives of customers, and showing everyone the resource usage that is hidden away. Many of these aspects become part of the business and marketing case for the service (the service proposition).
The Performance of Service
The three core service value categories—care, access, and response—define types of value that services provide to people. Seen in a purely task-fulfilling way, the actual outcome of many services is the same. Renting a car is a good example. Customers can get a car from any car rental company (they hope). Companies may compete on price, and that price may raise or lower expectations of what car and service we might get, but generally prices are similar across the board. The point of difference for any specific service is how it is delivered. We think of this as the performance of the service.
“Performance” is a helpful word, because it means two things: performance as experience and performance as value.
Performance as Experience
Performance, as we understand the word from music or theater, means the style or the way in which the service is delivered. This performance makes up the immediate experiences that service users have, and it is what people often refer to when they describe the service as “good.” What they mean is that they liked the way they were treated or the way the service provider performed their tasks. Generally, this is in reference to service staff, such as the front-desk clerk in a hotel or a call center employee.
It is useful to take this concept of performance and expand it from the individual to the overall performance of the entire service organization. If we use a musical metaphor to compare the 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,