Image © Jose & MidJourney
The first time I really understood what service design was about was more than 20 years ago when Ben Reason / Livework walked us about a day in the life of a pensioner going for a doctor’s appointment, how she would spend the whole day going through a gruesome experience for a 30m, at best, face to face appointment with a doctor. As an industrial designer I understood then that the quality of the car she was transported in, the furniture she had to sit while waiting, the stethoscope the doctor used on her, nothing I would be typically focused on, would ameliorate significantly her experience on that day.
I remember the story of the dinner that was going so well, until the waiter invertedly poured hot coffee on the customer’s lap, and how he only remembered this from the entire experience.
I was in Portland, at the hotel Valeria was so kind and professional, I engaged with her first night I arrived weary of a long flight, engaged with her again the following night and asked for a good restaurant nearby, she told me about the LeCHON. I went, the food was very good, the “make your own” Old Fashion produced a great alternative. But above all, I spent two hours marveled by what I have seen a few times in restaurants, a well-oiled machine in terms of service. A lot of personnel, but everyone was on a mission, attention to the customer. Not too exaggerated, just enough questions, enough eye contact, nothing flashy, just good service. No bumping into each other, a few of them singing to themselves while working, smooth, an example of flow. I know enough about the way a restaurant/ bar works to know that this requires a lot of design turned into training, rehearsing, and that underneath this cool no-wrinkle appearance, there was stress and even some perspiration, but for the customer the whole orchestration sounded like music.
After all these years, I still don’t understand why corporations don’t invest more in service design. While there isn’t a single company that doesn’t put the customer at the center of their strategy, it’s baffling how this is so many times nothing more than well-meaning aspiration. The reality I have witnessed is that this so-called core strategic focus is borderline empty promise, access to customers is substituted by well-intentioned proxies, the so called “voice of the customer” is a collection of ad-hoc unstructured interactions that produce generic, banal feedback instead of high quality insights, those that have customer access protect their access as currency for their job security, any and all feedback is filtered, aggregated, packaged in such a way that design and development are led to solutions that so many times do not fulfil sales and growth expectations, let alone innovation and market leadership. And then companies do customer surveys to justify an NPS score, which becomes the source of so many harsh conversations, but as always, it is the customer verbatim that really points to the problem, or opportunity, it’s the service stupid!
At the core of this mismanagement is a misunderstanding of the ecosystem that leads to decision making, adoption, love and retention, and the lack of understanding that, the quality of the furniture does not substitute the doctor’s listening skills, the quality of the steak does not substitute the burnt feeling on the customer’s groin, Valeria’s personalized suggestion tops the quality of the bed and pillows (and even makes me forget the lack of it!), the Old Fashion taste is not as sweet as the on-time, on-gracious and on-sensory customer service. The more commoditized products are, the more important services becomes, the more crucial it becomes to understand what makes customers tick, what creates great memories, what makes them talk and write about it.