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1 Sawhney, Ravi. People Are the Puck.Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 01 Sept. 2011. Web. 25 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/people_are_the_puck.html>. 2 Ibid 3 Stickdorn, Mark, and Jakob Schneider.This Is Service Design Thinking: Basics - Tools - Cases.Amsterdam: BIS, 2012. Print.
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customers will interact with you across the entire company. Providing a consistent experience across all touch points is vital to building authenticity. The key is to act like you, and do what you say youll do at each point in the experience. That communicates authenticity. Fail to do that, and Pine says, Thats when youre perceived as fake, as a phony companyadvertising things that youre not.6 Service design, like any major business initiative, will require investment. Peter Merholz, president of Adaptive Path and an internationally recognized thought leader on user experience, emphasizes that point in his Harvard Business Review article titled Customer Experience Is an Investment, Not a Cost. He says: Typically, design is considered a costa necessary element of business, the expense of which should be managed to be as small as possible. But when you realize that successful design has an impact, driving heretofore unrealized value, you must think of it as an investment, akin to marketing or product development, where what matters is a return, and where spending less can actually be detrimental to your top- and bottom-lines.7 Merholz explains that the companies that understand this principle best are able to connect core business problems, customer behavior, and financial metrics.8 In other words, companies that invest in service design, aligning their organizations to improve the interaction between the organization and its customers, will start to realize untapped value from solving core business problems in ways that improve the customer experience. Merholz outlines a process for quickly identifying business opportunities and determining the potential financial impact of using service design to achieve the desired behavior change. He calls it the linking elephants, and it goes a little something like this:9 Business Opportunity What is the specific opportunity? Desired Behavior What exactly are you hoping your customer will do? Behavior MetricWhats your target metric for your desired behavior? What could it amount to in terms of units? Value Metric Whats the value in dollars of the desired behavior? Financial Outcome Your Behavior Metric multiplied by your Value Metric equals your financial outcome.
6 Ibid 7 Merholz, Peter. Customer Experience Is an Investment, Not a Cost.Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 19 May 2009. Web. 25 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/merholz/2009/05/customerexperience-is-an-investment-not-a-cost.html>. 8 Ibid 9 Ibid
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Heres Merholzs example, showing how you could quickly gauge the impact of investing in a suggested items area prior to check out on an e-commerce website:10 Business Opportunity Increase purchases per visit. Desired BehaviorCustomers purchase one additional item per visit. Behavior Metric 5% of visits lead to an additional sale. With 20,000 visits per week, that equates to 1000 additional items per week. Value Metric Average item price is $12.74. Financial Outcome $12,740 of additional revenue per week. The linking elephants is a simple tool you can use to quantify that untapped value that Merholz mentions. And will that investment yield a return? Put simply, the untapped value can be substantial. Oracle Corporations most recent Customer Experience Impact Report reveals that an astounding 86% of consumers would pay more for a better experience.11 Equally astounding, 89% of consumers give a competitor a try after a bad experience.12 The report goes on to quantify what those percentages mean in potential increased revenues for certain industries. Hold on to your hats according to the Oracle report, the U.S. airline industry could have made an additional $8.94 billion in 2010 by providing a better customer experience.13 Wireless carriers, an additional $14.65 billion each year.14 These are not small numbers. So the real question becomes, can you afford NOT to adopt service design? Can you afford to gamble with the commoditization of your products and services? Theres really only one reasonable answer to that question. Clearly, investing in service design could generate a significant return for your organization. But just like with any investment, you have to be clear about your goals, you have to make a plan for reaching those goals, you need to do some research and you need to be able to measure your progress so you can adjust along the way. Thats how you maximize your return, and its no different with service design.
10 Ibid 11 Oracle Corporation. 2011 Customer Experience Impact Report. Rep. Oracle Corporation, Jan. 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/cust-exp-impact-report-epss-1560493.pdf>. 12 Ibid 13 Oracle Corporation. 2011 Customer Experience Impact Report. Rep. Oracle Corporation, Jan. 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/cust-exp-impact-report-epss-1560493.pdf>. 14 Ibid
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15 Merholz, Peter. Its Not Who Your Customers Are, Its How They Behave.Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 11 Feb. 2009. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/merholz/2009/02/its-notwho-your-customers-are.html>.
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16 Manning, Harley. Customer Experience Should Be Part of Your Business. Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 29 Aug. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/customer_ experience_should_be.html>. 17 Ibid
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We mentioned Starbucks earlier as an example of an experience versus a good or service. Heres an example customer journey map developed by Little Springs Design documenting the customer experience at a Starbucks location, noting both positive and negative aspects of the visit:18
Heres another example from Lego mapping the experience for an executive visiting them in New York City:19
18 Starbucks Experience Map. 2010. Photograph. Littlespringsdesign.com.Little Springs Design. By Little Springs Design. Little Springs Design, 28 Mar. 2010. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://old.littlespringsdesign.com/wp-content/ themes/LSD%20theme/images/experiencemap1.pdf>. 19 Temkin, Bruce. LEGOs Building Block ForGoodExperiences.Customer Experience Matters. Temkin Group, 3 Mar. 2009. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/legos-building-block-forgood-experiences/>.
Manning points to a couple of examples of companies who have effectively utilized customer journey mapping to better understand their customers and how they can create better experiences for them: FedEx20 The shipping giant went so far as to create a Channel Strategy and Orchestration Team in 2008 that was organized outside of any of the existing company silo. The team utilized customer journey mapping to understand what customers experienced when they transitioned from one channel within the company to another, like from the website to a local FedEx location or a phone agent. The mapping process helped the team clearly identify opportunities for improvement in all areas of the company. Since the Channel Strategy and Orchestration Team doesnt exist in any siloed unit, its been able to more effectively coordinate the efforts for improvement across the company channels. FedExs focus on the customer experience is paying off, and the company was recently voted the industry leader in customer experience according to the 2013 Temkin Experience Ratings Survey, an annual survey of ten thousand U.S. consumers that ranks two hundred and forty-six companies in nineteen industries.21 Virgin Media22 Virgin Media, the largest Virgin company in the world, operates a mobile network, provides broadband service, and home phone and pay TV services. The challenge for Virgin Media was to create a consistent and valuable experience across multiple channels and product lines. The company embarked on an aggressive customer journey mapping project focused on six specific customer journeys within their company, including subscribing, paying, and customer support. Manning describes the everevolving customer journey map as, a giant sheet of brown butcher paper covered in red pieces of tape and multi-colored sticky notes. It links all six journeys together in a continuous flow that crosses five functional silos within the business.23
20 Manning, Harley. Customer Experience Should Be Part of Your Business. Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 29 Aug. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/customer_ experience_should_be.html>. 21 Temkin, Bruce. FedEx Leads Parcel Delivery Services in 2013 Temkin ExperienceRatings.FedEx Leads Parcel Delivery Services in 2013 Temkin Experience Ratings. Temkin Group, 21 Mar. 2013. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http:// experiencematters.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/fedex-leads-parcel-delivery-industry-in-2013-temkin-experienceratings/>. 22 Manning, Harley. Customer Experience Should Be Part of Your Business. Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 29 Aug. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/customer_ experience_should_be.html>. 23 Ibid
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Virgin Media uses customer journey mapping in conjunction with the Net Promoter Score system to track how their changes to the customer experience changes their customers opinion of the company. Since embarking on the initiative, Virgin Media has seen an eighteen-point increase in their net promoter score24, which represents a significant improvement in customer opinion. In addition, customer churn has been reduced by an impressive twenty percent.25 Mapping the customer journey gives you a holistic view of how your company treats customers, and will give you insight into what the overall experience of buying from your company is like. The key takeaway here is to focus on the customers experiences and not on your own internal organizational structure. Fix the problems that customers experience as they transition from one business channel to another to create a truly valuable customer experience.
Design personas
Now that youve got a map of your customers interactions with your company, a map that you can use to identify opportunities to improve their overall experience, its vital to define just exactly who your customers really are. A design persona is just that. Officially, its defined as: Models of key behaviors, attributes, motivations, and goals of a companys target customers. A persona is created from primary research with real customers and takes the form of a vivid narrative description of a single person who represents a behavioral segment. Organizations use personas to guide the design of products, channels, and messaging.26 One of the key aspects of that definition is the fact that personas are created from primary research. Design personas should be an embodiment of what your research tells you. Youre bringing your customers to life, but the trick is to do so in a way that accurately segments customers by behaviors. Steve Mulder, Director of User Experience & Analytics for NPR Digital Services, in his book The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web says this about design personas, Personas are expanding from a design tool you use to decide how to implement a strategy into a strategic tool you use to help define a strategy in the first place.27
24 Satmetrix Systems, Inc. Virgin Media: Embracing the Net Promoter Discipline at Virgin Media - Putting the Customer at the Heart of the Business. Satmetrix. Satmetrix Systems, Inc., 2010. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http:// www.satmetrix.com/documents/pdfs/VirginMedia-CaseStudy.pdf>. 25 Satmetrix Systems, Inc. Virgin Media: Embracing the Net Promoter Discipline at Virgin Media - Putting the Customer at the Heart of the Business. Satmetrix. Satmetrix Systems, Inc., 2010. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http:// www.satmetrix.com/documents/pdfs/VirginMedia-CaseStudy.pdf>. 26 Rapide. The Future of Customer Experience. The Future of Customer Experience. SlideShare Inc., 30 May 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.slideshare.net/rapideuk/the-future-of-customer-experience>. 27 Mulder, Steve, and Ziv Yaar. The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2007. Print.
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When developing a design persona, you want to make them as detailed as you can. Really flesh them out, and make them as real as possible. Include a picture thats representative of the group the persona represents. Give him or her a name, and detail their background. Where do they live? What do they do for a living? Whats their family like? What are their hobbies? Most importantly, what is their experience goal with your company? What are they hoping for from your brand? Again, the personas are there to help you develop your specific strategy in conjunction with the customer journey map. As Mulder puts it, Personas give you a valuable framework for creating and prioritizing business initiatives, and a way to enable more effective distribution and alignment of strategy throughout the organization.28 Youve framed your goals, and now you have your customer journey map and design personas to check your assumptions against. Set your final strategy based on the research presented by those two tools, and start designing a more valuable experience for your customers.
G. Lynn Shostack, senior vice president in charge of the Private Clients Group at Bankers Trust Company and former chair of the American Marketing Associations special task force on service marketing, makes the case for service blueprints in an article she authored for Harvard Business Review. In the article, she emphasizes the importance of taking the same disciplined approach to designing services as most companies do to designing products. She says, Better servicedesignprovides the key to market success, and more important, to growth.29 The service blueprint is designed to guide companies through exploring all of the issues related to creating and managing a service. In order to create a service blueprint, you need to:30 Identify processes What are the things that will constitute a service? Isolate fail points Where could things go wrong and what would happen if they did? Establish the time frame Whats the standard execution time for the service youre designing? You would use this for calculating the cost of performing the service. Analyze profitability What does your profitability look like under normal circumstances? How would delays affect your profitability? Graphically lay these elements out to create a literal blueprint of how the service would be performed. At the design stage, the key is to consider every interaction between your customers and your company. Things that are considered to be good personal service, like a great attitude and attentiveness, should be incorporated into the hiring, training and performance measurement practices of the company.31 The real advantage of the service blueprint is that it allows you to map out the entire service and its various customer interactions on paper and test your assumptions. Really walk through it thoroughly to find the bugs and rectify them before the service even makes it off the paper. This will save you time and money, and also protect your brand from delivering poor experiences to your customers. Consider testing the service as a prototype, and iterating quickly based on feedback.
29 Shostack, G. Lynn. Designing Services That Deliver.Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, Jan. 1984. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://hbr.org/1984/01/designing-services-that-deliver/ar/1>. 30 Ibid 31 Shostack, G. Lynn. Designing Services That Deliver.Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, Jan. 1984. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://hbr.org/1984/01/designing-services-that-deliver/ar/1>.
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the fall of 2007, the band decided to offer it online only with a pay-as-youlike model. For a limited time, consumers could download the album and pay whatever they thought it was worth, even if that price was free. The experiment created a lot of buzz for the album, and initial sales were up from previous Radiohead releases. The band realized they could create a better and more exciting experience for their customers by eliminating the price barrier to listening to their new music and turning the control of pricing over to their fans. The launch of Microsoft Kinect34 Leberecht highlights the case of Microsofts popular Kinect motion controller for its Xbox gaming system. When the device was initially released, it was quickly hacked. Microsofts first reaction was to fight the hacks and frantically publish software updates to combat them. But the software giant ended up changing course once it realized that allowing the hacks was actually creating a better experience for its customers. It supported the gaming community by allowing for more functionality, it created buzz for the product, and it helped create a sense of co-ownership between the company and its gaming customers. The hackability of the Kinect has spawned an entire ecosystem around the device, similar to Apples App Store. It seems clear, according to a recent New York Times article, that the openness of the Kinect contributed to it getting into the Guinness Book of World Records for fastest-selling consumer device ever.35 And its still rolling
34 Ibid 35 Walker, Rob. Freaks, Geeks and Microsoft: How Kinect Spawned a Commercial Ecosystem. The New York Times. The New York Times, 03 June 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/magazine/ how-kinect-spawned-a-commercial-ecosystem.html?pagewanted=all>. 36 Leberecht, Tim. Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_ usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>.
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Nextpedition37 The service from American Express designed for travel enthusiasts in their 20s and 30s creates an exciting vacation experience where the destination and itinerary are completely unknown until the journey begins. The itinerary is revealed daily via a smartphone app. The service creates a completely customized and unique experience by taking control completely away from the customer.38 The service has since racked up over two million likes on Facebook.39 Interflora40 The UK-based florist monitored Twitter looking for users who were having a bad day. When they found one, they sent them a free bouquet of flowers. A great experience where the customer had no control over the outcome, but it made them happier according to their joyous replies back to the company. The campaign led to thousands of social mentions which helped boost Interflora in search rankings as well.41 While its clear that control is a key part of successfully implementing service design, Leberecht concludes his presentation with the same point that Joseph Pine made at the end of his: When engaging customers, he emphasizes, At the end of the day, as hyper connectivity and transparency expose companies behavior in broad daylight, staying true to their true selves is the only sustainable value proposition.42 Authenticity matters, especially when you begin to give greater control over your brand to your customers. Service design requires openness in order to really transform products and services into experiences.
Conclusion
We started this Blue Paper talking about hockey, and the importance of being able to anticipate where the puck is GOING to be. In hockey, thats everything. In business, that same principle applies. The key is to know your customer to the
37 Leberecht, Tim. Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_ usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>. 38 McCracken, Grant. The Revolution Inside AmExs Nextpedition. Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 6 Feb. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/02/american_express_has_ launched.html>. 39 Schmid, Corinne. Enterprise Gamification. Enterprise Gamification by ItzCorinne. SlideShare Inc., 26 Sept. 2011. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.slideshare.net/itzCorinne/enterprise-gamification-by-itzcorinne>. 40 Leberecht, Tim. Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_ usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>. 41 Essex, Mike. Using Free Stuff to Leverage SEO and Online Brand Building.Koozaicom. Koozai Ltd., 5 Apr. 2011. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/using-free-stuff-to-leverage-seoand-online-brand-building-756/>. 42 Leberecht, Tim. Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_ usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>.
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point of understanding their behavior and motivations. If you can get there, you can anticipate where theyre headed and meet them there with an amazing experience that makes them happier about your brand. Service design is the application of that concept. As we discussed, today economic value is being created by experiences: Authentic, consistent experiences that make consumers happy. Service design provides a comprehensive approach to learning about customers, then using what you learn to systematically design a customized service that can be delivered consistently to create an exceptional customer experience. Tools like customer journey mapping, design personas and the service blueprint will help you understand your customers behaviors. You can use that understanding to create new customized services to meet the needs of your customers, improving the holistic experience of interacting with your company. Products and services are quickly commoditized today, and service design provides a means of differentiation through customized consumer experiences that drive unrealized value and increase ROI. Time to suit up and hit the ice. Just remember, make sure to skate to where the puck is going to be.
4imprint serves more than 100,000 businesses with innovative promotional items throughout the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland. Its product offerings include giveaways, business gifts, personalized gifts, embroidered apparel, promotional pens, travel mugs, tote bags, water bottles, Post-it Notes, custom calendars, and many other promotional items. For additional information, log on to www.4imprint.com.