Touchpoint Vol. 8 No. 1 - Service Design and CX: Friends or foes?

vol 8 no 1 | may 2016 | 18 €

Service Design and CX: Friends or foes?

16 Bridging the Gap by Lynn Stott 46 Breaking the Blueprint by Chris Ferguson, Chad Story 58 Customer Journey Measures by Asbjørn Følstad, Knut Kvale

the journal of service design

Touchpoint Volume 8 No. 1 May 2016 The Journal of Service Design ISSN 1868-6052

Pictures Unless otherwise stated, the copyrights of all images used for illustration lie with the author(s) of the respective article

Published by Service Design Network

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Publisher Birgit Mager

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Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes

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Editorial Board Jamin Hegeman Mauricio Manhaes Stefan Moritz Jesse Grimes Birgit Mager Project Management Cristine Lanzoni Art Direction Miriam Becker Jeannette Weber Cover Picture Jeannette Weber

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f ro m t h e e d i t o r s

Service Design and CX: Friends or foes?

The wide umbrella of Design encompasses many disciplines: From longestablished practices such as industrial and graphic design, to the relative newcomers of information architecture (IA), user experience design (UX) and service design. One thing that has become clear is that the new kids on the block are facing more challenges to their identity. And for service design specifically, one acronym has triggered more consternation than others: CX. Unlike UX and interaction design - which co-exist beneath that umbrella - CX is not a design discipline at all. But because it shares a focus on customers, it uses some common terms, activities and even sometimes deliverables as service design.

In this issue, we take a look at the overlap and contrasts between service design and CX and ask the question: “Are they friends or foes?”.

In “Bridging the Gap” (page 17), Lynn Stott characterises one challenge to CX: “From a ‘big picture’ view, CX as a function spends too much time measuring and not enough time designing”.

While on the other hand, the heavily analytical and results-driven approach of CX may well complement and inspire service design, addressing a weakness found all too often in our engagements. Moreover, the prominence of CX within the business world - and especially in North America and the UK - may indeed be a boon for service design, getting our practice noticed within different and higher echelons of organisations. Flip ahead to our theme section for more fascinating insights on this topic.

And lastly, preparations are in full-swing for the 9th Service Design Global Conference, to be held in late October in Amsterdam. Whether it would be your first time, or you’re a regular attendee, we look forward to seeing you there!

Jesse Grimes for the editorial board

Jamin Hegeman is Head of Design for Financial Services at Capital One. He directs Adaptive Path's Service Experience Conference, contributed to This Is Service Design Thinking, and is a principal of the Service Design Network.

Mauricio Manhaes works as Professor of Service Design at SCAD and Associate Design Researcher at Livework.

His PhD research focused on the impact of prejudice on innovative efforts.

Stefan Moritz is an entrepreneur, corporate change-maker and customer experience champion.

Leading a unit of researchers, designers, digital experts and strategists he works with global service companies, governments and public sector organisations.

He is Vice President Customer Experience at Veryday, one of the world’s top-ranking design and innovation consultancies.

Jesse Grimes, Editor-inChief for Touchpoint, has fourteen years experience as an interaction designer and consultant, specialising in service design. He has worked in London, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf and Sydney and is now based in Amsterdam with Dutch agency Informaat.

Birgit Mager, publisher of Touchpoint, is professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany.

She is founder and director of sedes research at KISD and is co-founder and president of the Service Design Network.

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42 34 10 2

imprint

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from the editors

6

news

8

kerry ’ s take

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Customer Experience & Service Design: Let’s Be BFFs Kerry Bodine

10 cross - discipline 10 The Needle Stick:

Re-Designing for Distraction Natalie W. Nixon, Paul Rosen

14 service design and cx :

friends or foes ?

16 Bridging the Gap

Lynn Stott 22 Service Design and CX:

Distinctions without Figure 1 Differences?

Toby Bottorf, Zach Hyman

Isn’t Enough

12 Giving Disruptive

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global conference

42 Service Design and

Transmedia Storytelling: A Convergence of Practices Sandjar Kozubaev

28 Why Customer Experience

Erik Flowers, Megan Miller Innovations a Chance Marie de Vos, Klaas Jan Wierda

40 2015 service design

34 Great Customer Experiences

Don’t Happen by Accident James Samperi

46 Breaking the Blueprint

Chris Ferguson, Chad Story 50 Transition-oriented

Service Design Cameron Tonkinwise

c ontents

82 68 68 education and research 70 Assessing the Perception

64

of Service Design Maria De La Vega, Jagriti Kumar, Chelsea Lyle and Rebecca Ngola 74 Giving Brands the Human

56 tools and methods 58 Customer Journey Measures

Asbjørn Følstad, Knut Kvale 64 Design Toolkits for Customer­

centred Transformation Gianluca Brugnoli, Roberta Tassi

Touch – and Gaining Customer Commitment Stefan Baumann, Europa Bendig

82 inside sdn

78 profiles

82 A New Era at SDN

78 Interview with

84 Service Design National

Richard Ekelman

Conference in Japan Touchpoint 8-1

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#SERVICEDESIGNDAY: SHAKE UP THE WORLD ON 1 JUNE 2016!

SERVICE DESIGN AWARD: CALL FOR ENTRIES ENDS ON 6 JUNE 2016

The Service design community celebrates Christmas, New Year … and … June 1st! Every year, from this year on, the 1st of June will be International Service Design Day, presented by the Service Design Network. This day will promote the power of service design, celebrate its achievements, create awareness and bring people together across nations and multidisciplinary backgrounds. It's fun, easy, flexible and interactive!

Be the reference of service design at a global level. The Service Design Award recognises outstanding work in the field of service design in commercial, non-profit/public sector and methodology categories.

It is open to any organisation, service design consultancy or individual from all over the world, and the work it is judged by a jury of internationally recognised professionals. All entries must be submitted through the online registration system at www.service-design-award.com

Shortlisted projects will be an­ nounced in July and showcased in an online exhibition, as well as in a live exhibition in Amsterdam.

Winners will be announced and will take the stage at the 9th Service Design Global Conference on 27 October 2016.

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register now: Service Design Network UK conference on 30 June 2016

We invite everybody to gather on this day and to unite our voices in our common interests. Let's enjoy the sense of belonging, celebrate the art of service design and share our spirit and activities with the world!

take place at The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London and will bring together professionals from all areas to share experiences and demonstrate successful service design ideas and to show how they have been used as a catalyst for change.

Stimulating and provocative talks and panel discussions will explore how service design has created impact in the real world and participants will be delving into how service design is set to evolve in the future.

Buy your ticket now at www. service-design-conference.com/

SDN is hosting an exciting oneday conference on Thursday 30th June for the active and wellestablished service design industry in the UK. The conference will

london and keep up to date

with speaker and programme announcements on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Join in on the conversation at #SDNUK16

ne ws

SDGC16: Business as Unusual

Service Design Network is bringing the 9th Service Design Global Conference to the beautiful city of Amsterdam. SDN is looking forward to welcoming more than 600 participants from all over the world, coming together to exchange experiences, ideas and different perspectives.

Become a part of this annual get-together of thinkers, doers and leaders. Join SDN in Amsterdam’s Westergasfabriek for two buzzing and vibrant days with inspiring talks and intense breakout sessions under the title ‘Business as Unusual’ on 27th and 28th of October 2016, and don’t forget the exclusive pre-events for SDN members on October 26th!

Public Sector in the spotlight: Co-creation of a Service Design Impact Report

Service Design Network convokes its outstanding international community to co-create the content of a report on the impact of service design in the public sector.

To be published in October 2016

by Service Design Network, the report will provide an overview on how service design is contributing to public services and will draw conclusions for the future impact of service design in this domain.

The publication will feature outstanding case studies, articles

and interviews with the thought leaders of the area.It will serve the service design community – both agency and client side – as well as public sector decision makers who may be unaware of the potential impact of service design approaches.

To be informed and involved in this publication, please connect with us on our LinkedIn Group ‘Public Services | SDN Special Interest Group’ at ww.linkedin.com/groups/8174251

Get your ticket and more information at www.service-design-conference.com

Service design community grows across continents

Service Design Network is happy to announce the building phase of three new SDN Chapters: ­Saskatchenwan, Nigeria and Shanghai. SDN encourages the foundation of Chapters in order to develop a structure that is closely connected to the global development of service design knowledge and practice but responsive to national needs and interests. In this sense, SDN Chapters are

l­ ocal representations of the ­Service ­Design Network and serve as bridges between the international organisation and local communities.

Make sure to connect with your local chapter to create and exchange knowledge with your community at a local level. If there is no SDN Chapter in your area, get active and build a chapter in your city or country to help grow the service design community with SDN. More information at www.service-design-network.org/ chapters

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Customer Experience & Service Design: Let’s Be BFFs

For the better part of a decade, I’ve had ringside seats to the evolution of two interrelated disciplines: customer experience and service design. From my vantage point as a both a designer and industry analyst, I’ve seen the potential for these fields to complement, learn and benefit from each other.

A natural partnership The two fields’ respective objectives are, in my mind, the cornerstone of this seemingly natural partnership.

Customer experience professionals must design improved interactions for their customers and, as part of this work, change the processes, policies and culture of the organi­ sations that drive those interactions.

Similarly, one of the top aims of service design is to create effective, easy and enjoyable experiences for customers, citizens, students or whomever a particular service is designed for. So far, so good.

Or maybe not …

Unfortunately, the union of these two fields has been bumpy and less than expeditious. Customer experience professionals are partly to blame.

The word ‘design’ strikes fear into the hearts of many business people 8

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indoctrinated in traditional business practices, and who think they need to be artists in order to be designers.

But I’ve also watched service designers focus on the differences between these fields, rather than looking for common ground. They’ve been particularly keen to point out the differences between themselves and one other related discipline: marketing. This is problematic for the field of customer experience, as it gained much of its start from marketers who realised it was more efficient to retain existing customers than to attract new ones.

Let me point out here that I’m not a fan of traditional marketing, and I hold its close cousin advertising in even lower esteem. I worked at a traditional advertising agency for a year and day – yes, I counted – and saw first hand its antiquated attitudes and approaches. It was painful for me

both personally and professionally to work in an organisation with values antithetical to the tenets of service design. But while traditional marketing and advertising aren’t dying off as quickly as I’d like, they shouldn’t be the platform on which service designers justify their “otherness” from the fields of marketing and customer experience.

Why not?

Marketing is not the enemy First, many of today’s marketers no longer hail from or hold on to the field’s traditional past. Sure, they care about Net Promoter Score and other marketing-based metrics, but they’re no longer pushing out empty promises. They’ve drunk the customer experience Kool-Aid. They actually care about their customers.

And they’re seeking new ways to interact with them. Second, the field of customer experience has evolved into a discipline that stretches far beyond the marketing department.

One of my largest clients, a tech giant based in the Silicon Valley, has positioned its customer experience group in its quality organisation.

So now the same group that aims to minimise hardware defects and software bugs is looking beyond

k e rr y ' s ta k e

its core products and services to improve the quality of all customer interactions.

The leaders at another client of mine want to put the customer at centre of all internal and external process improvement initiatives, and so they initially rooted the company’s customer experience efforts in a process improvement group, part of operations. Now, after a recent foray into journey mapping, customer experience is quickly spreading to IT and human resources.

In fact, it’s hard for me to say at this point what a typical customer experience professional looks like from a pedigree perspective.

Certainly, there still remains a strong contingent with marketing backgrounds. But, as customer experience has gained strategic importance across industries and more bodies have been needed to manage these initiatives, more and more employees have been pulled into customer experience land from far-flung corners of their organisations. They share innate customer centricity and an ability to activate those around them.

But some of them have ‘customer experience’ in their titles despite not fully understanding what that really means or what exactly they need to do in their new roles.

(Hence the growing number of customer experience conferences and consultancies!)

Let’s not forget the same thing was once true about the field of service

design. Several decades ago, there were no ‘service designers’. There were no academic classes – let alone degrees – in service design. The field of service design pulled like-minded practitioners from industrial design, interaction design, and even graphic design. It paired those designers with systems thinkers with a deep understanding of – and a passion for improving – how organisations work.

They didn’t have established titles or job descriptions, but they worked together to create services that people needed, that people loved. They created services that were meaningful for the organisations that delivered them and for their communities.

That’s exactly what customer experience professionals are trying to do.

But wait, there’s more!

There’s one other way in which customer experience and service design are similar. Despite having an estimated market size of nearly USD $11 Billon by 2020, the discipline of customer experience still struggles to have a serious and permanent seat at the executive table.1 Customer experience initiatives are often the first to get cut when budgets get tight.

And that makes customer experience positions – and entire corporate CX initiatives – vulnerable. Sound familiar?

1 http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ PressReleases/customer-experiencemanagement.asp

It’s time for us to put our diffe­ rences aside. End the debates. Stop creating Venn diagrams. Customer experience professionals and service designers can only gain from partner­ships that champion and achieve our shared objectives.

Kerry Bodine is a customer experience expert and the co-author of Outside In. Her research, analysis and opinions appear frequently on sites such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company.

Follow Kerry on Twitter at @kerrybodine.

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The Needle Stick: Re-Designing for Distraction Methods to reduce fear, anxiety and pain in the pediatric patient experience Patient-centred user experience design is gaining momentum in the healthcare sector. In this interview, Paul Rosen, MD shares with Natalie Nixon, PhD, design researcher, an example of redesigning a simple, common, yet fear-inducing, procedure for children: the needle stick.

Natalie W. Nixon, PhD is the editor of Strategic Design Thinking: Innovation in Products, Services, Experiences and Beyond and is Director of the Strategic Design MBA program at Philadelphia University. Her research and consulting (Figure 8 Thinking, LLC) interests focus on optimising creativity in leadership and organisations.

In paediatrics, there is great opportunity to experiment with designing medical experiences to limit the fear and anxiety that is associated with the medical setting.

Hospitals focus on safety and minimising risk thus making it a challenging environment for innovation to thrive. Additionally, clinicians are trained to be evidenced based. Yet, coming up with 'the novel idea’ may mean the absence of evidence.

There is an opportunity for clinicians to think more like designers and embrace failure as part of the iterative process.

Natalie Nixon: How did you come up with the idea of introducing pets to soothe

Paul Rosen, MD was named 'One of the First 100 Innovators' by the U.S Federal Government Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Dr. Rosen is a paediatric rheumatologist at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children.

He serves as the Clinical Director of Service and Operational Excellence for Nemours.

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and this led to inviting pet therapy teams.

Patients shifted from being nervous, to relaxed because they had just spent the last ten minutes petting an English sheepdog. We even saw a shift in clinic volume because families requested to have their appointments on a 'dog day’. In pediatrics, we know that getting a needle stick is one of the most anxiety-inducing experiences for children, so it seemed like a natural fit to try pet therapy in the outpatient lab.

From there, it spread to the MRI suite, surgery waiting area, emergency department and rehabilitation gym. The pets serve as a key design intervention: distraction from the onset of anxiety and pain.

kids having injections?

Please explain the 'cycle of anxiety’.

Paul Rosen: It came from work earlier in my career, where our team created a whole dog themed experience: dog photos, dog magazines, dog stamps, exam rooms decorated with different dog breeds, and even ‘puppy passports’ where the children would win prizes for coming to the doctor. We had an amazing response

Our old lab was designed so that patients would exit through the waiting room.

Children waiting for blood work would witness other children leaving the lab in tears. That experience builds anxiety.

Our leadership redesigned the space to address the design issues. Once pet

c ro s s - d i s c i p l i n e

therapy was added, the dog could walk with the child into the lab, stay with the child during the procedure and exit the lab with the child. The reduction in anxiety carries through from the pre blood draw, to the blood draw and the post-blood-draw experience.

How has this pet therapy affected workflow?

Before pet therapy, there was a lot more coaxing and negotiating for staff to get the child into the lab.

Parents also struggled with anxiety. The pet therapy team has enabled the shifting of the emphasis from the needle to the dog and helps facilitate the procedure being done in a way that helps all stakeholders.

The families told us it was the first time they did not have to hold their child down for blood work. The staff also recognised that having less-anxious chil­ dren enhanced their efficiency and they appreciated working with families who were less anxious.

How do you ensure that this service design intervention will be incorporated continuously?

It takes collective incorporation. Walking the halls of the hospital, you now see pet therapy teams everywhere! That was the vision we pursued: pet therapy teams, smiles and stress reduction throughout the experience. We got a lot of support from our partners in departments such as child life, volunteer services, physiotherapy, phlebotomy, ­radiology, and nursing. We also learned that the doctors, nurses and clinical staff can benefit as much as patients. It is care for the caregivers.

What did you learn from children in the process of designing this?

We interviewed children of various ages. You observe them relaxing, smiling, engaging and getting dis­ tracted from the medical issue. Parents tell us how it is another service that demonstrates how much our hospital cares about the comfort of their children.

Pet therapy during needle intake

What have been some of the unexpected consequences in designing pain prevention for children?

There is a huge opportunity to transfer our leanings to treatment for adults. We know that at least ten percent of adults have needle phobia developed in childhood and these adults avoid medical care.

So there is no reason not to treat pain and anxiety just as aggressively in the adult setting.

What does this tell us about the role of design in pain management? Working in pain is kind of like looking at the ocean. Where do you start?

The hospital experience can be very distressing for anyone, especially for a child and for the family supporting that child. Pain management is a huge opportunity to think about how we can use design thinking to change the emotional experience of the encounter. We demonstrated with the example of needle sticks (both blood draw and IV placement) of how our multi-disciplinary teams came together to redesign the experience from the child’s per­ spec­tive. We have the technology, commitment and the expertise to mitigate pain and suffering for children. We just need to unleash design principles and be open to the question: ‘why not redesign?’

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Giving Disruptive Innovations a Chance Using design skills to bridge the implementation gap Have you ever found it difficult to turn innovative ideas into practice? In this article, we present a simple model to explain how disruptive innovation works in larger organisations and how you can support the implementation using design skills.

Marie de Vos is a Design Researcher at STBY and is one of the co-founders of the Dutch Chapter of the Service Design Network.

Klaas Jan Wierda is an Innovation Lead for OcéTechnologies R&D and is one of the co-founders of the Dutch Chapter of the Service Design Network.

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The skills that designers use to ideate and create new solutions often do not seem to reach beyond the concepting phase and great ideas and concepts end-up on the shelf. After analysing several of our cases, we argue one reason for this failed implementation is the incorrect perception that lives around disruptive innovation. The process, as it is perceived by many, is visualised aside (Figure 1): an idea from the research phase is introduced to the mainstream organisation and generates substantial results shortly after introduction.

However, in reality, a new concept requires a lot of validation before maturing into a sizeable result.

A dedicated group needs to build a business with the idea. This will cost the current organisation, because resources need to be applied to an unproven idea. The roll-out of the new concept in the organisation in question hopefully generates additional results, but this may take substantially longer than expected, since (part of) the organisation needs to be re-formed.

We find that this simple, ‘designed’ representation of innovation processes is recognised quickly and makes existing processes clear. The model has been a helpful tool for better explaining and understanding innovation processes and, as such, it allows for an honest discussion and for managing expectations.

The discussions that were enabled by this model led us to identify what activities designers could carry out to support the implementation process.

Three core activities were identified, and we elaborate them here.

Research success parameters Typically, in the early exploratory phase, designers research the behaviours and motivations of end users to come to a formulation of their main needs. This broader exploration is not only helpful in the initial phases of a project, but can also be beneficial in the implementation phase as the identified needs can be seen as parameters to measure if the developed concept really taps into those needs. By having designers

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collaborate with marketing teams to measure the effect of a new concept on consumers’ behaviour or satisfaction, these new parameters can be taken into account. By doing so, concepts are not only judged on the company’s existing values (where they might fail to show significant results) but can also be measured against new parameters and demonstrated to be worth the investment of another round of iteration.

Communicate about the project and empower others to do so In order to create support for a new concept, communicating about it and its development is crucial.

Concepts developed by a small project team that are suddenly rolled out, rarely are accepted at face value.

Other people and departments need to know about the concept and to be given the opportunity to become enthusiastic about it. This co-creative mindset is one of the big contributions designers are nowadays making

time

Fig 1. roll-out additional revenue

Research choose a concept

time

to corporations. Visualising outcomes, processes and concepts help to create shared language to communicate across silos and disciplines. However, it is not just a matter of making a nice visual, prototype or video that explains the concept. Properly communicating the value for both the company and the customer and adjusting this message to the different stakeholders within the business and their needs is key.

Network building to get the right people involved at the right time As the concept develops iteratively, new stakeholders will need to get involved. In order to get the right people involved at the right time, their interest and goals need to be taken into account. In this complex process, design skills can be applied in finding the right (internal and external) stakeholders and understanding their core values and interests. Researching values and interests is already largely being done in the initial phases of service design projects. It is important to keep on doing this as the project evolves and new stakeholders (need to) get involved.

These activities do not take place one after the other: instead, they are all part of iterations leading towards the implementation. For this to happen however, a change in perspective on two sides is needed. On the one hand, organisations have to allow and nurture design skills to take a role in these processes. But, at least as important, it demands a change in perspective from the side of designers. Design skills can be applied on a more strategic level and you should look for opportunities to do so, or enable others to use design skills do so. By acknowledging the value you can add, you can take more responsibility in this implementation process.

additional revenue

Research

Fig 1. Disruptive Spin-out Build business Choose a concept

Decide where to roll-out

Roll-out

innovation: the perception Fig 2. Disruptive innovation: reality Touchpoint 8-1 13

f e at u re

Service Design and CX: Friends or foes?

Bridging the Gap Service Design is the Means to Customer Experience Success

The knowledge that collaboration and synergy fuel success is a cornerstone of service design. As practitioners, we have developed or applied many methods to break down silos and encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration. We do this in service to the organisation, to keep everyone’s eyes on understanding Lynn Stott, Ph.D., is a customer experience design consultant who champions service design as an essential methodology for improvement and change.

Her insights are born of a background in anthropology and education coupled with 15 years conducting design projects and developing in-house programs for UX, CX, & service design. She has experience in education, energy, finance and the NGO sector. She lives in California and works wherever she can make a difference.

the customer and their needs.

It is ironic that the field of Customer Experience (CX), whose success depends on deep understanding of customers, has not been one of our closest partners, at least not until now.

CX is a strategic business value proposition. Improving the customer experience promises an increase in customer loyalty, brand reputation and revenues in the business of selling products and services. Improving experiences increases engagement, participation, behaviour change and compliance in education, healthcare or social services.

However, in many organizations and sectors, CX as a discipline and strategy falls short on some of its promises. From a ‘big picture’ view, CX as a function spends too much time measuring and not enough time designing. In this article, I suggest that the data gathering

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and analysis that forms the bulk of CX practices cannot deliver on necessary changes in customer experience without significant help from service design.

Service design’s human-centred approaches to problem definition, target state blueprinting, contextual data analysis, rapid prototyping and more will close the gap between CX’s data analytics and the quality experiences that will make a real difference, both to customers and to the bottom line. Service design is the means by which to deliver on the value of customer experience.

A short review of history: Changes in retail and service operations of the last 30–40 years led to the need for customer experience strategy.

Technology and the opening of world labour markets led to a shift to h ­ ighvolume production of goods. Customer turnover in some industries increased

s e r v i c e d e s i g n a n d c x : f ri e n d s o r f o e s ?

but, as long as the sales funnel stayed full, business stayed happy.

Customers, on the other hand, found themselves dealing with inferior or inconvenient products and services. They got lost in long, automated tele­ phone queues. They suffered feelings of increasing anonymity in service encounters. The Internet boom of the early 2000’s increased customer frus­trations as the interfaces between humans and technology became more numerous and more complex.

Entrepreneurial online businesses and the develop­ ment of enterprise and cloud technologies that followed increased competition in every industry. Using social media, customers started talking. And with more choice, customers started walking. Business began to worry.

CX as a strategy stepped into the spotlight.

Service design has developed during the last 15 years or so in response to the same increase in interfaces between humans and technology. Service design is a mindset and set of tools comprising a methodology for solving problems where the goals of people, tech­ nology, process and behaviour come together. The core value of service design is putting humans – their voices, their needs, deep empathy with their realities, and insights into their behaviours – into the design of services, products, organisations, interactions and, yes, experiences.

Customer experience and the gap: CX as a discipline and strategic approach gained both visibility and practitioners over the last 15 years, with faster movement over the past eight-to-ten years. CX is now visible in the C-suite of many large companies and a ‘commitment’ to improving customer experiences (and patient experiences, and student experiences, etc.) appears in many mission and strategy statements.

CX is a strategic perspective and value proposition that seeks to deliver customer retention and brand

differentiation. Unfortunately, CX currently struggles with an identity crisis and a failure to fully deliver on its promise. As we will explore below, the penchant of customer experience leaders to focus­on numbers and measurements without framing to actually design the necessary changes has created a gap that service design is ready to fill.

While CX leaders across industries agree on the goal of their efforts, i.e. ‘We need to improve customer experience in order to improve loyalty and revenue,’ there seems to be no agreement on crucial points to secure progress and success. Basic questions abound: how do we define ‘customer experience'?; who owns customer experience?; and just how do we actually improve it?

Disparities of definition exist across industries, within individual organisations and across the professional practice of CX itself. If business leaders and service designers are confused about exactly what CX is, it’s due to the fact that, within the discipline itself, there is very little that is unified or consistent.

CX as customer service For some organisations, CX walked through the door as a process improvement approach (or sometimes merely a new name) for customer service: the part of an organisation that customers encounter as they learn to use its products or when something goes wrong.

This continues to be a very common approach as even more companies begin their CX journeys. Many CX jobs posted on LinkedIn in the US are actually customer service jobs with a new label. For example, Comcast's 2015 announcement that it was hiring 5000 CX specialists didn't mean hiring 5000 analysts, designers or ethnographers, but rather more service agents, call centre agents and installers who would now be called customer experience agents.

Historically, early customer experience efforts focused on improving customer service because, in many in­dus­ tries, it is the most visible interface with the company.

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It's not a bad place to start, but a number of companies stop there, and customer service is far from a finishing point.

Measuring: Net Promoter Score Before many organisations are willing to establish an internal program for CX, they want to make sure they have measurements in place to determine the effectiveness of their efforts. The approaches to finding the right measure(s) have been many and varied.

Fred Reicheld’s work regarding customer loyalty led to the concept of the Net Promoter Score (NPS): a measure of customers' likelihood to recommend the company or its products and services to friends and family members.

The value proposition behind the NPS is its promise to be the highest correlative indicator of customer loyalty and word-of-mouth recommendation.1 In theory, improvements in NPS will improve customer retention and net revenues. In practice, NPS strategy and implementation have been, for many companies, a confusing breakdown point. Where does NPS fit in the company? What does it actually mean?

How does one use it to make actual improvements?

Every business has a different response to each question, and most combinations leave CX programs that are struggling to demonstrate their promise.

Measuring: Voice of the Customer A number of organisations approach CX as primarily a ‘listening’ post activity and equate it with Voice of the Customer (VOC). That is why, in many companies, marketing and VOC programs were the first to champion a concept of CX, seeing it as another way to measure customer satisfaction.

For these companies, the introduction of CX and NPS happened in relation to market evaluation

and analysis. For some, this was as far as they got.

The good news is that CX leaders are beginning to recognize the shortcomings of these current systems.

Journey-mapping & process design Frustrated CX leaders are looking for other approaches to link data insights to customer insights in order to execute on real innovation. Many CX programs have begun to use one particular service design technique: the journey map. It is the tool of choice for clarifying and examining pain points, and often leads to first attempts at co-design efforts (though most CX leaders don't choose the word ‘design’).

Too many times, journey mapping and first efforts at co-design don't get very far. A core reason for this shortfall is the tendency of business to work from the inside out: accepting perceived limitations and internal

Service Design Tool Kit includes: 1. Customer journey map 2. Service blueprint 3. Fieldwork: ethnography, interviews 4. Personas 5. Empathy mapping 6. Contextual data analysis 7. Cross-functional co-design workshops 8. Rapid prototypes 9. Storyboarding 10. Mental maps, mental models and more ...

1 Reicheld, Fred, The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. Harvard Business School Press, 2006.

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The Service Design tool kit (selected items)

s e r v i c e d e s i g n a n d c x : f ri e n d s o r f o e s ?

untouchable traditions as the starting point (rather than questioning them and re-evaluating reality). We also see resistance to new methods of problem-solving.

Making real differences to the products, services and systems that create the customer experience requires intentional change. Despite protests to the contrary, few organisations really like change.

Service design to the rescue!

CX has made a few steps, but the gap to actually delivering improved experiences is still large. Service design offers the way to build on CX’s data insights with an expansive toolkit anchored in human-centred design principles. The result is a holistic approach with people-centred insights at the heart of solutions that leads to authentic innovation and improved expe­ riences. This ultimately provides increased retention and revenues. Service design allows companies to ‘do the right thing’ both for their customers, for their employees and for their business.

Service design is a mindset, a methodology and a tool kit, but it is not an end in and of itself. Flexible and shapeshifting, it provides the pathway to improved design and greater longevity for organisations, products, services, interactions, and experiences.

Interactions Products

Services

Rapid prototyping Robust cross-functional co-creation

Service De sign

We are reaching a tipping point: CX leaders now see the gap between their measurements and the goals that they have set for themselves. Customer experience leaders grow more willing to consider alternatives.2

Customer Experience

Human-centered Design Blueprinting: products, services, experiences Employee Journey Mapping Fieldwork & ethnography Holistic perspectives Backstage / On stage Co-creation Process Improvement Customer Journey Mapping

Voice of the Customer Data: Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction, etc.

Service Design provides the necessary building blocks for creating an improved Customer Experience

CX practitioners have data and analysis and, sometimes, great statistical insights, but they struggle to identify actionable insights and then design products and services based upon those insights. As service design practitioners know, service design provides the framework for identifying insights, framing the design of solutions and leading collaborative design that delivers.

2 This point of realization has spurred the reach to customer journey mapping and fledgling efforts at co-design.

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Joining forces One particular challenge for service design practitioners is that most CX leaders are unaware of the discipline of service design. As we've seen, they catch a glimpse of some of service design's tools in efforts at journey mapping or touchpoint mapping. But they have very little exposure to the overall practice and its promise.3 There is also the problem with the word ‘design’. The misunderstanding I've encountered most when trying to introduce aspects of human-centred design to problem definition or solutions design has been the assertion that design has no respect for business outcomes or revenues.

Design is viewed as fluffy, and bringing in customers to participate in co-creation introduces too many wild cards to the process. Business doesn't like to lose control.4 Service design's first big opportunity to help is probably at the level of operationalisation. Bruce Temkin identifies six stages in an organisation's maturity of CX change.

While many organisations are, as we have seen, in the early stages (still measuring, measuring), the tipping point for service design occurs at the phases in which CX teams are asked to work with operations to produce results. This is the starting point (sometimes beginning with phase 3, but definitely with phase 4). More delightful, wicked design opportunities occur in the alignment and enculturation phases (phases 5 & 6).

Journey mapping could be a great entry point for service design practices into the customer experience framework, allowing service design practitioners to

3 Notable exceptions are champions like Kerry Bodine who fluently speaks both languages and Bruce Temkin who, though he doesn't use the vocabulary of service design, talks of methods that parallel those of service design in his appeal that CX adopt 'people-centred design'.

4 For helpful insights on educating business and CX partners, read the excellent articles in Touchpoint Vol. 7 No. 3 – Selling Service Design, January 2016.

20 Touchpoint 8-1

Customer Experience Maturity Phases: 1. Ignore: CX is not part of value proposition.

2. Explore: Executives appoint a temporary team to examine the value of CX. 3. Mobilize: Organization appoints a full-time executive to build team & roadmap activity.

4. Operationalize: Begin redesigning cross-functional processes, products, and interfaces.

5. Align: CX metrics integrated with other business & HR metrics.

6. Embed: CX is integral part of company culture.

Adapted from: Temkin Group Q1 2015 CX Management Survey Report.

Customer Experience Maturity Phases

build trust and then share other tools and opportu­ni­­ ties with CX teams.

Service design and its secret sauce: Customer experience is based in interactions layered upon other interactions – including business mission, technology and manufacturing, delivery, on-boarding, implementation, customer service and engagement.

Delivering branded, integrated customer experiences means finding solutions to many complex problems and orchestrating how those solutions work together.

s e r v i c e d e s i g n a n d c x : f ri e n d s o r f o e s ?

Service design’s raison-d’être is to provide frame­ works and tools to design solutions to complex prob­ lems. Service design maps the ideal state of interactions, cuts across silos and forces an integrated, humancentred, collaborative approach to solutions design.

This approach will always provide the best possible solutions for customer experiences: solutions that the service design’s methodology itself aids in testing, evaluating and ranking.

Minimum table stakes5 for business and technology get higher every year. Customer experience will be the way companies continue to grow and flex with changing markets. Service design can help business build the necessary ecosystems and frameworks to keep a lively engagement with customers and their needs at the centre of strategy, operations and culture.

And so …

Customer experience is the value proposition. Service design is the approach and structural framework for success.

The service design toolkit is diverse, well-honed and looking for difficult problems to solve. Customer experience, as we have seen, has a wide gap between where it is (measurement and analysis) and where it needs to be (practical, results-producing change).

I have been on a journey with both customer experience and service design for the past 15 years.

I have puzzled at the paucity of crossover, all the while, in my own practice, integrating service design as the methodology for delivering on custo­ mer experience. I urge you to do the same.

Long experience shows that service design is the discipline that bridges the data gathering and analysis of customer experience to design a holistic system that delivers true improvement to the customer experience.

Service design is not only a player and a partner, it is essential to the success of customer experience.

Customer Experience

Service Design

Data Strategy Service Design is HOW we deliver Customer Experience

5 In poker and other gambling games, 'table stakes’ are a limit on the amount a player can win or lose in the play of a single hand.

(Wikipedia)

Touchpoint 8-1 21

Service Design and CX: ­Distinctions without Differences?

A Comparison of Contexts, Cultures, and Customers Service designers and Customer Experience (CX) designers both work to improve the experiences people have when they interact with an organisation. We are all experience designers. We share the same tools for understanding and mapping behaviour, and the same approaches to designing the touchpoints and underlying Toby Bottorf joined Continuum to establish a digital design capability and is now a VP in service design, leading teams to design solutions for complex human and technical systems. His work builds on a career in UX and interface design, focusing on integrating UX initiatives into broader CX and operational strategies.

Zach Hyman is a Design Strategist at Continuum who has previously worked on teams developing products and services for healthcare, transportation, agriculture, mobile and education across nine countries. He received a Fulbright scholarship to study innovation in China and recently published Yangonomics, a book about Myanmar’s informal economy.

22 Touchpoint 8-1

systems that deliver a better experience. Why do we use different names for what seems to be the same work? The main differences we see are between more data-driven approaches to CX and more qualitative approaches to service design. These arise from differences in goals and determine how success is measured.

Qualitative and Quantitative Measures While CX and service design share a common language of experience design, it is often the dominant perspective of the implementing organisation – competitive- versus collectively-minded – that determines how this work is scoped, directed, and measured. Additionally, how this work is framed depends on who owns the initiative. CX is primarily the domain of marketing leadership, while service design initiatives may be owned by IT, operations or a more cross-disciplinary governing body. These are fundamentally different contexts for the same goal of designing compelling human experiences.

Where did CX originate as a discipline?

CX was born in the competitive American corporate context, where it arose from marketing departments’ expansion of responsibilities to include the relation with existing customers, beyond the traditional role of acquiring customers.

This expansion requires managing both operational aspects of the organisation, and technologically mediated channels (software and UX).

As B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore were writing a book entitled The Experience Economy in 1999, digital technologies had been ascending from an accessory of traditional advertising to

s e r v i c e d e s i g n a n d c x : f ri e n d s o r f o e s ?

People are...

Internal clients are...

For Customer Experience

Customers (either prospective, current, or former). They behave rationally and predictably. Their behaviour tends to map closely to the metrics collected about them and their answers to surveys.

Those who provide an ‘experience’ to a customer across ‘channels’ and who think of operational changes to experiences in terms of the resultant changes to their metrics for assessment.

For Service Design

Actors (either front stage, back of house, or moving between the two). Some aspects of their behavior cannot be easily captured by metrics, and often diverges in fact from both their intent and the ways they report their own behaviour.

Those who provide offerings that span across a period of time and touchpoints (digital, physical, etc), which must suit a range of actors with complex and differentiated needs, and whose outcomes may not always be measurable or tangible.

Additional distinctions in perspective between CX and SD

Touchpoint 8-1 23

a competitor for its budget.1 Describing notions already familiar to those in the hospitality industry, the authors stressed the necessity of moving from thinking about physical commodities to instead selling the experience surrounding a product. Over the following years, webbased advertising and digital channels continued to flourish and marketers gained new insights into the efficacy of their activities by scrutinising new, deep, and incredibly precise data. More analogue measures like Net Promoter Scores (the measurement of a customer’s willingness to recommend the goods or services offered by a company) were complemented with usage metrics, and likes, mentions, tweets and pins, on the social media sites Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest respectively.

The widespread deployment of this toolkit, which some might label the beginning of CX, led to marketing’s expansion of influence within the corporation to include more fundamental, operational aspects and to the emergence of roles like ‘marketing technologist’. Gartner predicts that, by 2017 “…a company’s chief marketing officer [will] be spending more on technology than its chief information officer.” 2

Due to the metric-centred view that companies use to evaluate their offerings, CX projects usually focus on the improvement of a company’s existing offerings to generate higher customer satisfaction metrics.

1 Pine, J. and Gilmore, J. (1999) The Experience Economy, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1999.

2 https://hbr.org/2014/07/the-rise-of-the-chief-marketingtechnologist

24 Touchpoint 8-1

How are CX engagements evaluated?

A victory in the competitively-minded field of CX is evaluated through metrics-measuring concepts like 'engagement'. Customer engagement metrics range from low engagement behaviours, such as bookmarking or ‘liking' a company’s page or post, to high engagement activities like customers generating their own content on behalf of a brand. While much of the analysed data is 'digital exhaust', generated passively by people, surveys are a notable exception to this, including surveys rating customers’ interactions with touchpoints like an online chat with a customer service representative.

Due to the metric-centred view that companies use to evaluate their offerings, CX projects usually focus on the improvement of a company’s existing offerings to generate higher customer satisfaction metrics. Funding and initial hypotheses are often directed at known tactical challenges. However, when we get into doing the work in a human-centred way, understanding people deeply, we often see the potential for greater impact.

Many CX initiatives grow naturally into more holistic service design projects.

At Continuum, we have first-hand experience of this.

We were recently engaged by a health insurance company to improve patients’ experiences interacting with their call centre. For this project, the driving measure of success was customer satisfaction. While we achieved this objective, our redesign yielded additional positive results: lower total call time, as well as greater job satisfaction reported by staff. We saw broad system impact, even though our initial directive was to optimise only one party’s experience.

One could take issue with the ability to optimise an experience – something that is, by its very definition, subjective – yet there are plenty of articles instructing CX managers in how to ostensibly do this.3 Ultimately, a successful customer experience leads to higher sales and drives the total lifetime value of a customer. A focus on metrics often drives CX engagements toward

s e r v i c e d e s i g n a n d c x : f ri e n d s o r f o e s ?

CX practitioners most often set out to diagnose and fix the most broken parts of a customer’s experience, while service designers typically set out to identify users’ previously unmet needs.

refinement and evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) advancement of the most precisely measurable interactions, prioritising the optimisation of existing channels over the creation of entirely new offerings or channels. Of course, that which is easiest to measure is not necessarily that which is most important.

Where did service design originate as a discipline?

Similar to CX, one perspective on the origin of service design suggests it arose out of a human-centred approach to bringing together marketing and operations. At least, that can be said of one of the key tools of service design, the service blueprint (as shared by Lynn Shostack in her seminal article in the Harvard Business Review). 4 By depicting how a customer and service provider engage with each other across a span of time, and introducing the 'line of visibility’ to the process to create what service designers today often call the 'backstage', this marked the beginning of trying to better design intangible, time-based interaction. As it evolved as a discipline, the toolkits of design and ethnography joined the duo of marketing and operations.

Today, our firm Continuum and many others aim to help grow service design as a discipline in the United States for companies, both for- and non-profit alike.

We believe in the ability of the service design process to deliver meaningful impact globally to companies

3 http://blog.usabilla.com/which-metrics-are-most-important-foroptimizing-cx/ 4 Shostack, L. G. (1984). 'Designing Services that Deliver'. Harvard Business Review (84115): 133-139.

seeking to change things that may be felt by customers and employees, but not necessarily easily measured.

How are service design engagements evaluated?

Just as user requirements and design constraints vary across each service design engagement, so too do the terms of success vary by client. CX practitioners most often set out to diagnose and fix the most broken parts of a customer’s experience, while service designers typically set out to identify users’ previously unmet needs. As a result, the outcome of a service design project is more likely to be the creation of a new customer-facing offering rather than CX’s reconfiguration of an existing one to drive performance against key metrics. This is due to service design’s more open and holistic context and how that frames learning goals. Sometimes, an entirely new experience is the stated intent. In our experience, those projects are more likely to be framed as service design engagements than CX. Take Continuum’s work with Audi AG, for example. In designing a car-on-demand service, one of Audi’s goals was to translate engineering-based brand attributes into a native language of service. We sought to capitalise on the 'experience economy’ by giving people access instead of ownership. This project investigated the right role of people and software, automated and personal communications and even physical spaces, job responsibilities and uniforms. We designed the ideal customer experience indirectly, by designing the ways the service operates and supports that experience. This was, in many ways, a start-up operation. Our early prototypes looked true and real: we had a call centre number, a web-app on customers’ phones, uniforms, and loose interaction scripts. We built it in order to learn what it wanted to be and where the system was vulnerable to failure. There was no baseline experience to improve on or even refer to.

Deep experiential assessment is the best way to figure out how to make something better. While surveys and other metrics can provide an accurate measure of a customer’s satisfaction, they are not effective tools for Touchpoint 8-1 25

understanding how to improve a service. Just as the research process for a service design engagement is bespoke, so, too, is the definition of success.

The benefits of great service design

Why does service design flourish in Europe and falter in America?

One of the reasons we believe service design has been slower to catch on in the U.S. is that it is adopted in the organisational context of CX work, and as a result evaluated against CX’s quantitative measures. The benefits of great service design do not always lend themselves to a story told in data and, judged by those standards, can be received skeptically. We continually work to legitimise vivid human storytelling as a form of data. This is challenging. Experiential stories are ‘true' in feeling, but less so in an analytical sense. They direct strategy on the basis of empathy, not data, and they are best experienced first-hand, in the field, not distilled into business documents. Companies need to be willing to pursue a more experiential governance model for CX work to see the full benefit of service design thinking.

standards, can be received skeptically.

Today, American companies are turning to marketing technology roles because they are the sum of the two familiar silos of IT and marketing: more of a merging and less of a replacement. In conversation with American service designers, many state that without more quantitative means of assessment and framing outcomes in terms of measurable Key Performance Indicators, service design in America is at a disadvantage. American companies’ prowess at collecting data and using it for marketing and iterating upon their offerings vis-à-vis their competitors leaves little room for approaches that propose investigating the human messiness readily engaged with by service design.

Given the choice, decision-makers in American companies tend to prefer the cut-and-dried lens of data as a means of understanding customer behaviour, rather than the nuanced and not always easily summarised findings that ethnographic research can uncover. Most risk-averse American companies would balk at a proposal 26 Touchpoint 8-1

do not always lend themselves to a story told in data and, judged by those

to design a service that would yield non-measurable results when they could instead employ a CX perspective to iterate upon an offering they already have with results (higher metrics) that can be counted. Of course, an over-reliance upon metrics is unproductive as well, as shown by between 60 and 80 percent of customers who considered themselves 'satisfied' or 'very satisfied’ on the most recent customer satisfaction survey administered before they defected to a competitor.5 So, where to from here?

Despite the differences between service design and CX, each discipline cares about how customers consider and relate to organisations and both could stand to learn from the other. The best way forward must account for a better synthesis of quantitative and qualitative learning. Service designers are getting better at using hard data, at setting the right target for more ethnographic research and at making refinements later in the process. CX professionals are extending their scope, beyond fixing what’s broken to exploring what’s next.

Our CX engagement to improve the call centre experi­ ence drew upon ethnographic research techniques to deliver successful outcomes, measured against hard quantitative criteria. Yet, our team never lost sight of the fact that we would be judged, not by the methods we used, but by the results achieved by our proposed revisions. Similarly, we started from human needs in our service design engagement with Audi, but because we believed in the ability of the service design

5 Eisenberg B. and Eisenberg J., (2006) Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?, Thomas Nelson, Nashville

s e r v i c e d e s i g n a n d c x : f ri e n d s o r f o e s ?

Read Touchpoint Archive Online process to deliver a valuable experience, we could have included assurances of high customer satisfaction ratings in our proposal (had Audi asked for them).

Whether taking CX’s iterative, metrics-informed approach to improving how customers conceive of a brand, or using service design’s toolkit to uncover people’s unmet needs and designing an offering from the ground up, when practiced well, both create happier people, and that’s what matters in the end.

If these fields continue to move closer together, as we anticipate they will, we look for the best of both of these approaches to complement each other. CX needs more holistic and human measures of success; service design needs greater business fluency to leverage an organisation’s capability better. Each can get what it needs from the other.

330+ articles free access

Touchpoint, the Journal of Service Design, was launched in May 2009 and is the first and only journal dedicated to the theory and practice of service design. Published by SDN three times per year, it provides a written record of the ongoing discussions within the service design community.

To improve the reach of this unique resource, Touchpoint has opened its Archive (all issues except the three most recent). That means more than 330 articles related to service design freely available on our website. Enjoy the opportunity to search articles by volume and issue, by authors or keywords.

Visit SDN website and sign in for a free Community Membership to dive into the Touchpoint Archive! Full issues of Touchpoint may be also read on-screen and on mobile devices via the Issuu website and app.

www.service-design-network.org Touchpoint 8-1 27

Why Customer Experience Isn’t Enough Silicon Valley Needs Service Design Silicon Valley is the home of most of the world’s most influential tech companies. A focus on design and customer experience is everywhere, from the CEO down to the newly hired designer.

Many tech companies that once dominated through features and functionality now compete almost solely on the customer Erik Flowers is a Principal Service Designer at Intuit, a financial services company, where he is re-envisioning customer experiences, and building organisational capacity to design end-toend and surface-to-core.

Megan Miller is Senior Service Designer for Stanford University IT, where she works to design seamless and quality customer experiences for the university and build momentum around service design.

Erik and Megan are Co-Founders of www.

PracticalServiceDesign. com, an online resource and community of practice for service designers.

28 Touchpoint 8-1

experience. But today, competing on the customer experience of touchpoints isn’t enough.

Just ten years ago, having a dedicated experience design team would have been an exception, not a rule. As technology has boomed, especially with the intro­ duction of the smartphone in the past decade, experience design has grown from a luxury to a necessity. Today, we see design at the forefront of company identity, and not a single company would admit that customer experience isn’t a top priority. It has been the best way (so far) for companies to differentiate in a sea of rapidly innovating competition.

Yet experience design in the technology industry has largely remained confined to the digital medium, and companies still approach design from the perspective of the product and its digital interfaces. This deeply-rooted culture of the 'product' – the software, website, or mobile app – still reigns supreme across Silicon Valley and drives much of the strategic integration of design into company culture.

A changing landscape Design in tech is rapidly evolving. There are new players on the scene, such as Airbnb, Uber and Instacart, service-based companies that are using technology to deliver fantastic service experiences, where the technology is purely an interface layer to facilitate the delivery of value to the customer. These companies are taking The Valley by storm and are playing a major role in shifting customer expectations.

Companies such as these are standing out because of their focus on using digital as a means to meet real-world, non-digital customer needs. For example, shopping for groceries, getting a ride across town quickly or saving money on an overnight trip. The digital experience is a means to providing service, not the other way around. Their delightful, orchestrated, multi-channel experiences are being

s e r v i c e d e s i g n a n d c x : f ri e n d s o r f o e s ?

embraced by customers and are establishing a new bar for consumer entitlement and expectations, not just with similar services, but across all industries.

More and more, we are seeing these 'liquid' expectations prevail (a concept championed by Shelley Evenson of Fjord), where customers expect the same level and quality of service regardless of the channel, medium or industry. As they swipe left and right on their smartphone screens, they ask: 'Why can’t the post office be more like my experience with Instacart? Why can’t my medical provider have the same on-demand service experience like Uber?'

These liquid expectations, in combination with a much more mature, technically-savvy customer base, has led to a rapid growth in customer entitlement across all industries. Customers are seeking more value from digital technologies, expecting a product to become a service and businesses to become service providers.

People don’t want a shopping app to just show them what is available to buy, they want a company to take care of the shopping for them, full stop. People don’t want an app that can call various cab companies, they want a company to provide them with a safe, fast and convenient ride.

An opportunity for service design This is why now is the time for service design in Silicon Valley. How companies deliver their service experience is becoming just as important (if not

Customers now have 'liquid' expec­ tations of service experiences that cross industries, from finance to hospitality to entertainment. Digital experiences are enabling these liquid expectations, prompting customers to ask, 'Why can’t my entire date night be like this?'

Touchpoint 8-1 29

Shifting from products to services requires not only a new mindset and methods, but also new organisational structures. Whereas in a productbased organisation, teams are organised around each product and organically piece together the customer experience of company offerings, in a services-based organisation, teams are organised in alignment with the end-to-end customer experience of the service, with each 'product' as a touchpoint along that journey.

30 Touchpoint 8-1

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more important)Â than the value offering of the product itself. The product then becomes just a touchpoint of their holistic service experience.

Over the past decade, the product itself was the differentiator, but this is all changing. More and more we are seeing companies shift towards a services model: where once they offered a single app or product, now they are trying to offer more. A prime example is a typical Software as a Service model (SAAS), where we see the service layer being added to online software, previously treated more simply as a product, now becoming a monthly subscription model but still not managed as a coordinated, end-to-end service experience. Think of Adobe as an example, where Photoshop once required a one-time payment for software as a product, but now is part of the Creative Cloud subscription service.

As companies add value through new offerings, layered onto a product-based infrastructure, service ecosystems are being established organically around what once was core product-based functionality.

These ecosystems of offerings are what we as service designers understand as connected services.

But the tech industry is late to the service design party, and the lack of strategic planning or foresight regarding products turning into services leads to an unorchestrated and ad-hoc ecosystem of services.

This inheritance of a product-based mindset and organisational structure is a major challenge for Silicon Valley companies who are trying to adopt a services approach. Although specific touchpoints may have ownership and design teams supporting them, the gaps between these touchpoints and the ecosystem of the service as a whole may not have an owner to provide holistic design direction. Customer experience and design are still stuck in product-based silos, instead of transforming the organisation to think holistically across a multi-channel experience.

This results in customers having to assemble their service experience from the various product offerings on their own, instead of the way it should be, where the business designs the end-to-end service that the customer experiences. It is between these gaps and organisational silos where service design will help companies stay cohesive and deliver customer experience that goes beyond just delighting on a touchpoint-by-touchpoint basis.

The service design transformation Companies have an opportunity to differentiate on how well-designed their holistic service experience is, across channels and beyond just digital. Many companies are already trying to make this transformation, but don’t yet have the tools or mindset to make the shift. This is where service design can offer a new approach that goes beyond customer experience to evolve the way the organisation operates. This requires a shift in mindset from product to service, a shift in the way organisations are structured to make space for service design to happen and a rise of design leadership to help organisations adopt more integrated and holistic approaches to designing for services.

We, as service designers, have an opportunity to lead this influx of practice into the technology industry, helping organisations see their ecosystem of products as interconnected services and growing capacity for designing across the service ecosystem they are creating.

Challenges for change This transformation will not be easy. There are major challenges that we face in bringing service design to a product-based technology culture. The first is mindset. Helping companies see the difference between providing excellent product experiences and excellent service experiences will be critical to making this transition. This involves educating teams on the end-to-end customer experience that crosses touchpoints and channels and helping them see where they fit in that end-to-end experience.

Touchpoint 8-1 31

The second challenge is organisational and involves understanding the difference between managing a product and managing a service and implementing this change across the organisation. Product management is much more siloed and focused around the specific technology or product being provided to the customer.

Services, in contrast, involve the many layers of that service experience, from sales to onboarding, to customer support and incident management. This service management practice looks very different from an organisational standpoint and may require a shift in core structures and reporting in a fundamental way.

How do we help create adoption of service design practices in organisations that are struggling to even understand how their products are becoming services?

The last challenge is one of capabilities: the development of services methodologies and practices across the organisation. This involves the introduction of service design and service management tools and best practices to all levels of the organisation, helping staff grow in their abilities to support a customer perspective in providing service experiences, no matter which silo they sit in.

Facing the challenge We have to help our organisations understand a services mindset: not just the customer experience, but the internal business experience side of it as well. We do this through introducing core concepts, terminology and methods and tying those to the heart of the business in a tangible way. This will help us adopt a more end-to-end customer-experience mindset across our service experiences and allow us to build organisational bridges between touchpoints in a holistic way and to consider the variety of paths by which a customer can travel through a multi-channel space of a service experience. In this way, we can create customer experience that is seamless and navigable and organisation structure that supports the design of and transition between touchpoints to meet customer needs and expectations at each phase of the journey.

As we mentioned earlier, there are many companies in Silicon Valley that are facing these challenges head-on, and adopting service design as a core competency in their organisations. But this adoption of service design has yet to become the norm. Silicon Valley is still a place built on delivering value through product-focused touchpoints.

We also have to help our organisations to see the path of transformation from products to services and to understand what this might mean for managing both customer experience, as well as business process.

This may mean leveraging service management practices, facilitating cross-functional collaboration by acting

32 Touchpoint 8-1

s e r v i c e d e s i g n a n d c x : f ri e n d s o r f o e s ?

Three major challenges and opportunities for service design: developing mindset,

only going to accelerate: it’s a part of the trend towards personalisation and the ‘customised service’ economy.

building capability.

Much as, over the last decade, we have seen a transi­ tion of UX as differentiator to UX as requirement, we believe that service design is poised to be the next big differentiator in tech. As the medium of brands is becoming more and more irrelevant, the only thing customers will attach to our names to is the service we provide.

as internal consultants and establishing new lines of communications internally within the company.

But companies should not feel like they have to reinvent the wheel. Technology companies can benefit from looking to and adapting the ‘design-for-service’ practices of mature service-oriented industries, such healthcare, finance and hospitality that have already embraced service design at the core of their business.

By co-opting practices from these service sectors, tech companies can gain a huge head-start in developing internal services infrastructures to meet the challenges that lie ahead.

changing organisation and

This will require new roles to emerge that will take responsibility for designing service experience across the service ecosystem, roles that are accountable for end-to-end customer experience across the organisation. These new roles will help align internal, touchpoint-specific teams to the overall customer journey.

Lastly, we have to help our colleagues build capability for integrating service design into their day-to-day work. This means enabling them through developing shared terminology, frameworks and methodologies that embody a services-based approach. It means empowering them to utilise service design practices and helping them integrate their work into a broader context.

The time is now The need for service design is being driven by a combi­ nation of customer expectations and organisational growth. Customers are now expecting that companies serve them in more ways than just offering products and, to meet this demand, companies are now producing a more diverse ecosystem of offerings for their customers to interact with. This expansion of both customer expectation as well as company offerings is

Empowering the future For Silicon Valley to adopt service design, we have to make the space and empower our organisations.

Designers have to be empowered to extend the reach of what it means to design to include the things that happen in the gaps between touchpoints. Companies have to be empowered to recognise the larger picture they are creating and place people into roles that can help design for the experience of that larger picture. And, most of all, leaders have to be empowered to allow these changes to take place and to have the courage to embrace the future of technology as a service.

The future of Silicon Valley is not about technology. In a place of boundless inspiration, innovation and invention, we have the responsibility to introduce the new normal. To create a future where the value we provide is no longer derived solely from the products that we build, but from the service that we perform for our customers.

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Great Customer Experiences Don’t Happen by Accident Developing a world-leading customer experience for Dubai Airports at the crossroad of the world.

It was only two days into my six months of being the interim Head of Customer Experience for Dubai Airports that I was told “The crux of the problem is that building great experiences is everyone’s responsibility but only one person’s job.” Customer experience (CX) was seen as hugely important, but the James Samperi is a Director at service design consultancy Engine. Since August 2015, James has also assumed the role of Interim Head of Customer Experience for Dubai Airports. He heads up a new and agile research and design team focused on delivering an innovative end-to-end experience that aims to change the paradigm of the conventional airport.

development of ‘experiences' was still elusive. For an organisation made up of operations people, analysts and engineers, the idea of being in the business of experiences didn’t yet resonate.

As a Director at Engine service design, I’d been helping Dubai Airports develop a CX vision for a year alongside the thenhead of customer experience. But, when he left, it prompted Dubai Airports to ask me to continue leading the work. My emphasis was to 'get momentum', moving CX from being an elusive ambition to a set of tangible activities and work streams that could make a difference to our customers.

Dubai Airports Dubai Airports is the currently the busiest airport in the world, welcoming 80 million passengers in 2015 and with an expected rise to 100 million by 2020.

Dubai Airports is also in the middle of developing what will be the world’s largest airport, Al Maktoum, which will be able to handle up to 125 million passengers in its first phase.

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Across both airports, the challenge for CX is the same: how to maintain and enhance the service levels whilst accommodating an unprecedented increase in the numbers of passengers.

Maintaining service levels wasn’t just critical for Dubai Airports, but equally significant for the airlines, as 70% of the passengers travelling through Dubai are connecting. In real terms, this means that, for the 56 million passengers who have to wait, decompress and spend time before catching another flight, the airport is a significant part of their end-to-end customer journey, too. There was a lot of focus on what Dubai Airports would do.

The size of the challenge led to Paul Griffths, Dubai Airports CEO, to challenge the organisation to become passionately and singularly focused on delivering a world-class customer

s e r v i c e d e s i g n a n d c x : f ri e n d s o r f o e s ?

experience and for each individual to start understanding their role in delivering it. For Paul, CX required an significant transformation:

“Airports, for too long, have been considered just infrastructure businesses.

Actually, we have a vital role to play in enabling a level of customer service that certain airlines have already got right in the air but some airports have let them down with on the ground.” Paul Griffiths, Dubai Airports, Gulf Business, July 2015.

The CX ceiling One of the challenges in responding to the CEO was that CX was seen as a role of the research team who were tasked with measuring the quality of the current experience and then making recommendations on what to fix. Although the team was valued for highlighting what needed to be addressed, it very rarely gave enough guidance as to how to address the shortfalls and take advantage of the opportunities.

The organisation needed CX to support them in making a more significant step change, and that would require a different approach and service design was seen a means of providing it.

CX and service design – a potent combination As the temporary head of CX, my task ­became one of closing the gap between the ambition of ­developing a world-leading customer experience and people seeing customer experience as a means of achieving incremental gains.

For some time now, I’ve been a strong believer that CX and service design are two complimentary disciplines.

CX has been critical in cementing an understanding of the customer and the business as a service provider. It has helped organisations better under-

Dubai Airports currently welcomes 80 million passengers per year, making it the world’s busiest airport

stand their service, how it performs and why to care about getting it right: losing customers is expensive.

I’ve seen CX create a mandate for change, build business cases and promote investment in service.

Service design has benefited from organisations that have a mature understanding of their CX but have failed to make inroads into improving it sufficiently. Service design then becomes a means of enhancing that service so it works better, delivers better value and can be operated more effectively.

At Dubai Airports, we needed to find a synergy between both approaches.

Great experiences don’t happen by accident, they are designed What Dubai Airports had in ambition it lacked in clarity of direction and an idea of what the ultimate destination would look like for their CX: both critical when you need to organise yourself around delivering it. Service design offered a means to developing the pathway and the end state.

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Service Design Airport of the Future workshop developing key concepts and

Illustration: Roger Mason

solutions

The first step was to work with the organisation to create a clearly articulated and compelling vision that felt inspirational, tangible, ambitious but still attainable.

The vision would be used to set a path from 2016 to 2025 when the first phase of the new airport will be completed.

As designers, we were excited by the possibilities of the future and well placed to manifest and interpret these possibilities into solutions for today and tomorrow.

Adopting service design gave Dubai Airports an advantage over using solely CX practice, as a design approach would enable them to strike the right balance between meeting their aspirations, whilst grounding it in an understanding of the constraints of an airport operation and operating environment.

The design process became the vehicle for developing compelling customer experiences The programme of work kicked off with a series of design workshops bringing together a cross section of people from within the organisation and with a suite of external experts from outside the organisation to create an ambitious view of the future Dubai Airport.

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As inspiration, we drew on other industries, from innovative digital services such as Airbnb, animators and storytellers Pixar and understood how Amazon and Apple had both re-imagined retail. We also set specific creative challenges such as ‘what if an airport made you feel better than the flight?’ The experts bought their own experience to bear, outlining trends in technology within a 2050 timeframe and bringing to life the changing shape of travelling, shopping and work in the future to influence the development of our vision.

These workshops generated a series of visions that were eventually refined into a single, more-grounded and attainable target for the airport of today.

It would be hard for me to imagine how this leap would have been made without service design practitioners, as they were able to lead the interpretation of a mass of inputs into the design of the experience of all aspects of an airport.

Being inspired by customers and their worlds We found that CX, for all its focus on customers, has a tendency to de-humanise people and make it much harder for the organisation to engage with their wants and needs.

s e r v i c e d e s i g n a n d c x : f ri e n d s o r f o e s ?

Qualitative design research to understand customer needs, attitudes and behaviours to air travel

Dubai Airports ­Customer Experience vision wheel

But now, with a vision articulated, we began to work with the CX team to develop a different way of defining our customers. Informed by more qualitative design research, customers are no longer described solely through the lens of their reason for travel e.g. for business or for leisure but are, instead, defined through specific behaviours and attitudes towards travel.

Customers are now described as ‘comfort junkies’, ‘escape artists’ and ‘experienced compromisers’ instead, and their behaviours better described and understood.

We were then able to articulate how the vision would play out across the key touchpoints of the experience for each customer by creating aspirational journeys.

This has also fed back into today’s CX measurement activity as we began to better understand the impor­­­tance

of each aspect of the current airport experience, ­depending on which customer’s perspective we’re using to view it.

We have now been able to compliment the more generic customer data by segment-specific research across the experience and to understand the relative performance within each segment. This has provided more actionable data for understanding today’s experience and we have been able to address the problems in a more targeted and informed way. For example, we now understand that the Wi-Fi service is particularly problematic for 'escape artists' who are power users of the Wi-Fi to self-serve and stay productive on the move. This has now prioritised the improvement activity and investment for Wi-Fi to cater for this group.

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Translating vision into action One of the largest gaps at Dubai Airports has been turning CX strategy into action. CX teams had become frustrated that the vision wasn't being realised in the right ways or getting the traction they felt it deserved.

Service design was seen as a means of equipping the CX team to go deeper into this detail and give them a critical path to bringing any design to fruition.

The most useful analogy I’ve heard is often explaining designing an experience by talking about building a house. You could draw a picture of a house and give it to a builder and ask that it be built; the builder would scratch his head and ask for the architectural drawings. The architect is necessary to take the concept through development and to create the detail that means the house can actually be built.

Working with the CX team, Engine set about detailing the service design including developing a detailed view of the service and its supporting ‘architecture’ required for its delivery.

As well as detailing the products and services a customer might encounter, the design team focused on

specifying how the various services and experiences could be made adaptable and scalable to meet the myriad customer and operational needs.

For example, some concepts proposed using beacon technology: a means of identifying where a passenger is via their smartphone to provide a series of personalised services. The team began to define a means of using proximity technologies to create a series of ambient services that could be tuned into and that would support specific customer types. In one instance, for families, children are provided with a headset that, when they move through the building, they can follow a narrative that tells a story of a nomad travelling through Arabia.

This narrative proposed to entertain children, whilst helping their parents by keeping children engaged and prepared for the operational pinch points like security and immigration without it bei ng confusing or scary.

The same technology has been proposed to cater for the vast number of customer that are travelling for the first time and who cannot speak English or Arabic.

Using a different channel, they are able to tune into a pre-recorded airport guide that steps them through the

Characteristics& needs

Escape Artists Regular travellers who have their own routine through the airport. They often travel in business class, use the lounge facilities when it suits them, and will move freely between standard and exclusive facilities to pick and choose what suits them best. Travel discretely escaping the hustle and bustle at every opportunity, either to get work done or to relax after a busy working day. They tend to be cash rich and time poor.

Emotional needs

Functional needs

/ Seamlessness and the ability to escape are paramount.

/ Speed, convenience, privacy, connectivity and access to" up-to-date information.

/ They need to feel respected vrather than looked after, enabled rather than pampered, with people on hand to assist only if needed.

1 / © Engine Service Design 2015 / enginegroup.co.uk

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/ The ability to optimise their experience at a whim and respond to changes in circumstance.

The Escape

Makers – It’s great when

Breakers – It’s terrible when

Artist persona,

/ There is a comfortable and quiet space where the Escape Artists can make time as they wait.

/ They are not able to access the facilities they want to.

outlining their

/ They are stuck in places where there’s no escape, such as the gate lounges.

behaviours,

/ Getting interrupted by staff, noise or other passengers when they are working or relaxing.

attitudes and

/ They can arrive just in time and zip straight through to the airport into their flight, without having to wait around.

needs

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AREA: FOOD & BEVERAGE / PROPOSITION: FOOD MARKETPLACE

Alignment to the vision:

The World Village

A retail space where customers can find a variety of street food and ingredients, as well as restaurants from all over the world.

Eve r

yd a

y

Free

PAYG

M

ic ag

Enri

ch in

g pes ca Es

Food Marketplace

Product type:

Premium

Extracts from key design documentation for illustrating key product and service

Example: Vendors in Dubai’s Global Village which has unique handmade global items, multicultural entertainment and cheap street food from 26 different countries (mostly from the region) and two continents.

Example: The World Village, Dubai Airports customer journey example.

concepts

airport in their own language, no matter how niche, therefore improving their anxiety and comfort.

This service ‘architecture’ has become an organising framework to start building a programme of work for developing a compelling customer experience, as it defined the experience but provided the master plan for the necessary partnerships, enablers, functions and products that combine to create the airports customer experience.

For the first time there was a vision with a directive point of view sitting at the heart of it. One that wasn’t a generic way of improving the ‘any airport’ experience but one that was very much of Dubai Airports, whilst satisfying the needs and desires of customers.

For the first time we had a plan so the CX could be built.

Creating the right conditions and collaborating consistently The vision, customer types, products and service ­con­cepts and the service architecture have been used as critical assets for guiding collaboration across Dubai Airports and guiding development activity. It has given the CX team the tools to drive the right conversation

63

within and outside of Dubai Airports with airlines and other stakeholders.

Much of the CX team’s recent efforts have been reemphasised from reporting and research to working with different development and operational teams across the business. Identifying existing work that is already driving in the right direction, what needs tweaking, working into the gaps and most importantly identifying what needed to be stopped.

The changing face of customer experience at Dubai Airports Through a close collaboration, the customer experience at Dubai Airports will be the product of both service design and CX approaches.

The current Dubai Airports CX team are now better equipped to take more of an active role in driving improvement projects through to implementation using service design as their guiding framework, as well as their own enhanced CX tools to monitor and manage improvements in today’s airport. The relationship is a harmonious one and one that can only ultimately benefit all of our customers.

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2015 Service Design Global Conference

Service Design and Transmedia Storytelling: A Convergence of Practices Transmedia storytelling refers to the practices of crafting a world of interrelated story experiences spread across different media platforms. Recently, transmedia storytelling has become popular in film, TV, video games and in advertising. It allows authors to create new ways of engaging their audiences. Service designers Sandjar Kozubaev (@sandjar) is a Futurist and Experience Designer at Sparks Grove, an innovation and design division of North Highland Worldwide Consulting. Sandjar combines his background in economics and design to help organisations imagine futures and bring them to life.

He is also pursuing a Ph.D. in Digital Media at Georgia Institute of Technology.

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can learn valuable lessons and techniques from transmedia storytelling, because in many ways, a great service is a well-constructed narrative that extends across different forms of media.

Transmedia storytelling principles The Matrix franchise created by the Wachowskis was a pioneer in transmedia storytelling, a concept proposed by Henry Jenkins, a media scholar. The story of The Matrix extended far beyond the films themselves into anime series, video games and other media. Jenkins used The Matrix as an example to develop his theory in his influential book Convergence Culture.1 In it, he described a new cultural era shaped by how media content pervades various devices and platforms and how the audience seeks out and interacts with this content and participates in its creation. It is noteworthy that the book was published in 2006, a year before the first Apple iPhone was released. Ten years later, the principles of transmedia storytelling are as relevant as ever, not only for media producers but also for designers.

Jenkins proposed seven principles of transmedia storytelling. I will summarise them briefly here, but you can find more information in many of Jenkins’ own writings. 2 1. Spreadability vs. drillability Spreadability refers to the audiences’ participation in spreading pieces of content through various social networks.

Drillability refers to the process of digging deeper into the content to uncover richer stories and back-stories that are not present in the main narrative.

1 Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, New York 2 Henry Jenkins official website http://henryjenkins. org/2010/06/transmedia_education_the_7_pri. html

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‘Hacked' official Capitol home page at www.thecapitol.pn

2. Continuity vs.Figure multiplicity 1 Continuity refers to the unified story arc that reaches across multiple parts of the story. Multiplicity on the other hand refers to the ability for a story or a character to be present in multiple incarnations or parallel universes and the fans’ ability to retell the stories in their own alternative ways.

3. Immersion vs. extraction Immersion refers to the audience’s ability to peek into (literally or metaphorically) a different world, while extraction refers to the ability to take parts of that world into everyday life.

4. Worldbuilding This refers to the idea that stories unfold not just in a particular time and place, but in fully-fledged worlds with their own rules, culture and logic.

5. Seriality In transmedia storytelling, bits and pieces of the story are

spread across various forms of media in ways that takes full advantage of the unique affordances of that media.

6. Subjectivity Since the story is in a fully-fledged world, stories can be told from the point of view of a particular subject or groups of subjects. Each subject provides a unique, even conflicting, account about an aspect of a story. This is subjectivity.

7. Performance Sometimes fans don’t want to simply retell their versions of the story, they want to perform it themselves. The performance principle applies to all sorts of these practices from cosplay, to roleplay and to fan videos.

To illustrate these principles, I will use some of the tactics used by The Hunger Games franchise, which is a based on the bestselling book trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The story explores the trials and tribulations of young people in the fictional country of Panem, where youth are sacrificed every year in a Gladiator-style fight Touchpoint 8-1 43

Service Design Principles

Transmedia Storytelling Principles Spreadability/Drillability

User Centered

Continuity/Multiplicity

Co-creative

Immersion/Extractability

Sequencing

Worldbuilding

Evidencing

Seriality

Holistic

Subjectivity

Transmedia storytelling and service design: a comparison of principles

Performance

to the death. The filmmakers created a whole series of transmedia storytelling elements to engage the audience.

In one of them, an ad campaign employed actual amputees as models to depict survivors of the brutal games. In another, they created an official government TV channel on YouTube, called Capitol TV, to spread propaganda. They also launched an official government website, including a fictitious country-level domain at www.thecapitol.pn. Towards the release of the third and final instalment, the site appears to have been hacked by rebels and leads the viewer to another site at www. revolution.pn where a person can pledge allegiance to the rebellion and read about its key members.

A Comparison of principles At first glance, the applicability of theory and practice of transmedia storytelling appears limited to mass entertainment. However, a closer examination reveals many commonalities with service design. These commonalities are evident in the following comparison of transmedia storytelling principles with five service design principles proposed by Stickdorn and Schneider in This Is Service Design Thinking. 3 This comparison should not be regarded as direct

3 Stickdorn, M., Schneider J. (2011) This Is Service Design Thinking. BIS Publishers, Amsterdam

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and rigid. It tells us more about the common orientation of these two domains than it does about the similarity of the individual components. Two aspects of this similarity in orientation are worth mentioning. First, both service design and transmedia storytelling are concerned with creating and orchestrating experiences that are largely immaterial. The material from which the experiences are made is, for the most part, irrelevant.

Second, both practices arise from and thrive in a network of economic, cultural and social relationships. Services became more prevalent in economies in the postindustrial period. Transmedia storytelling became more prevalent as a result of the media proliferation enabled by the networked computing. It is no accident that these practices have common techniques.

Transmedia service design Outside of mass entertainment and marketing/ advertising, transmedia storytelling as a fundamental approach to value creation is rare. However, the following two examples show that it can be very effective.

The first example is Red Bull GmbH, the manufacturer of an energy drink of the same name. Red Bull is a unique company in its own right. It created the energy drink market long before other major players. However, what makes the company extraordinary is its transmedia approach to growth. If you visit the company’s home page

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at www.redbull.com, chances are that you wouldn’t know that this company sells an energy drink. The site serves as a media hub for a whole variety of experiences that Red Bull creates. Even when you visit the product page (in this case, the U.S. version) at http://energydrink-us. redbull.com/, the product is not what greets you there.

Instead, it is a picture of a stuntman standing on the edge of a platform in the stratosphere, about to plunge towards the earth. The title of the picture proclaims Giving Wings to People and Ideas, a bold and challenging statement.

One might mistake this approach to communication as simply sophisticated branding. It is true that other drink manufacturers often employ similar tactics, a practice known as lifestyle branding. In the case of Red Bull, however, it is a direct reflection of who they are and what they do. Form follows function. Red Bull has evolved from being a drink manufacturer to being a culture maker of which the drink is just one part. The diagram below summarises some of these activities.

The activities range from organising sports events and one-of-a-kind stunts to producing magazines and music.

On their own, they seem disjoined, but together they create a transmedia story and the ethos of Red Bull. In many cases, Red Bull doesn’t just sponsor these activities, but actively develops and operates them.

The second example of transmedia storytelling and service design is The Lego Group, the creator of one of the most popular toys in the world. Like Red Bull, Lego is a unique company in its own right. The Lego

Lego Movie

4 Source: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=lego.htm

Generic Characters

Lego Movie Toys

Video Games Within Established Storyworlds (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman, Harry Potter)

Original IP

???

Theme Parks

construction sets have almost universal appeal and command a premium price. In recent years, Lego embraced many of the practices from transmedia storytelling playbook, which lead to extraordinary success.

For example, Lego licensed its toys to video game developers who created a series of games based on the Star Wars movies. The game recreated many of the classic scenes of the movie in its own unique, whimsical tone so characteristic of Lego. It enjoyed great commercial and critical success and led to the creation of analogous games based on the Indiana Jones, Batman and the Harry Potter franchises. In 2014, fans enjoyed The Lego Movie, a full-length feature film. According to Box Office Mojo, the film grossed almost $500m worldwide. 4 All of these activities contribute to the overall transmedia world of Lego including its theme parks and, of course, its toys.

The success of Lego and Red Bull can be attributed to many factors. Both of these companies are privately held and it is difficult to say exactly how financially successful they are. However, these two examples demonstrate that the principles of transmedia storytelling are applicable not just in entertainment but in other domains, including service design. Reframing services as media and applying transmedia storytelling to service design, could open new opportunities for service relevance, impact and growth.

Toys within Established Storyworlds

Transmedia world of Lego

Many more media

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Breaking the Blueprint Hybrid Tools for Future Services

As designers, we have more stakeholders, fewer resources and more demanding publics to contend with. We’re no longer concerned with only solving discrete or isolated problems, where the end solution can be predicted. In this new era of service design, tools are secondary to the problems that need solving.

Chris Ferguson is the CEO of Bridgeable and leads strategy and design projects with some of the world’s largest and most innovative organisations in Canada, the US and Europe.

His work with the team at Bridgeable has been honoured with numerous awards and he writes and presents regularly about the intersection of human-centred design and business strategy. He holds degrees in biology and entrepreneurship.

At SDGC15, we hosted a workshop that sought to explore this idea. The session began with a provocative statement: tools alone aren’t the answer.

We asked participants to put problems first and tools second, tasked them with breaking the tools they were most comfortable with (namely the service blueprint) and asked them to create a hybrid tool that could be used to address a meaty systemic service challenge.

What follows is an overview of the workshop, including some of the thinking used to structure the session.

Chad Story holds a dual role at Bridgeable, both as an employee and researcherin-residence. His research examines how design infrastructures can facilitate publics participation in social innovation. He is currently a PhD student in the Communication & Culture program at York University.

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Seeing the big picture: from touchpoints to service systems In the early days, re-designing touchpoints made up the bulk of service design projects, as we’re accustomed to making artefacts or because our clients wanted to see immediate results. The tools we used reflected this, tracing simple journeys through one or two touchpoints. What we’ve learned since, though, is that well-

designed touchpoints alone are not sufficient. For example, an organisation may have done a great job ensuring their website gives prospective clients the information they need to make an informed purchasing decision but, if the service agreement they are asked to sign is convoluted and difficult to understand, all of that work at the touchpoint level is wasted.

The work of service designers today is largely concerned with organisational transformation: optimising internal processes, policies and structures to ensure that the back-of-house and front-of-house are aligned to the needs of people using services. In this regard, service designers are venturing into the area of organisational planning and design, the traditional domain of management consultants. This work requires more complex tools reflecting journeys across many touchpoints and touching on the fiefdoms of a diversity of stakeholders (e.g., Finance, HR, and IT): service blueprints or touchpoint maps are great examples of these kinds of tools.

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A team member presenting their prototype titled, 'Stakeholder Impact Map', designed to help identify areas of mutual benefit between diverse groups of stakeholders

Looking at our most leading-edge projects, we’re starting to see what’s next. Design has evolved, from a practice oriented towards the solving of discrete problems, to a mindset for thinking through complex organisational arrangements: from nodes to networks.

Now, we see our work increasingly oriented towards constellations of services and intricate assemblages of actors (e.g., competitors, manufacturers, regulators, government organisations, lobby groups, etc.). At this level, successful service delivery requires coordination between organisations that, in themselves, have their own organisational arrangements to contend with.

Service design can be used to bring these organisations into closer alignment: sharing resources, coordinating regulatory reviews, ensuring legislation is of mutual benefit and accounting for the life-cycle costs of production. We envision contexts in which the interests of different groups are held in balance: each organisation, to some degree, is dependent on the success of others. Take, for instance, a typical telecommunications company:

customers don’t meaningfully differentiate between who manufactures their cell phone, who ships it, who regulates the industry and who ultimately provides the voice and data service they’re accessing. Instead, they see it as a bundle of cohesive and deeply interdependent elements that can make or break their experience as customers. As service designers, it’s our job to build alliances between these competing interests, breaking apart the tools of the past to address the challenges of the present.

Assembling hybrid toolkits In addressing these more complex problems, we’re working towards the development of toolkits rather than tools: collections of components that can be recombined and hybridised into bespoke tools that address the particular climate in which a given intervention needs to flourish.

This approach requires the borrowing of bits and pieces from a variety of established tools. For instance, combining multiple experience maps within a single blueprint, overlaid with current and future organisational initiaTouchpoint 8-1 47

tives. This conscious approach of carefully selecting components in response to the needs of the system is paired with a problem-finding practice oriented around co-creation. These hybridised toolkits are used to facilitate dialogue between participants in structured design workshops. In contrast to traditional service design tools, largely used to communicate information in the form of static artefacts, this hybridised approach encourages participants to present conflicting points of view. The tools become a space where stakeholders collect, sort, and synthesise knowledge, working through problems together.

Co-creating tools for future services To give workshop participants a taste of what this new approach might look like, we asked them to co-create a hybrid service design tool that could be used to collect information at a large multi-stakeholder workshop.

Participants were asked to imagine a scenario in which they had just joined a design team tasked with imple-

A participant presents a 3D prototype titled, 'Service Tube'.

A physical space that workshop participants could navigate together

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menting a new service that would give parents access to their child’s Electronic Medical Records (EMR).

The ­service would enable parents to keep track of data, such as a child’s growth milestones and immunisations.

In this scenario, the government agency responsible for overseeing the project assembled stakeholders from the private and public sectors to examine the systemic implications of launching the service, namely to mitigate any disruptions in existing healthcare delivery.

Teams were given 15 minutes to break apart a set of partially complete service design artefacts and build their own hybrid tool, with instructions, that could be used to facilitate and collect data in a multi-stake­ holder workshop.

The challenge was messy and difficult. As expected, groups struggled at the beginning to make sense of all the existing data and artefacts that were given to them. Slowly, though, they began to break these pieces

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“A great exploration of the different tools required for complex service problems compared to more tame ones.�

Workshop participant.

as designers sits at this nexus: between systems.

We make connections and forge alliances between competing interests. The tools needed for this work must be as fluid as the challenges that are upon us.

We must think beyond static artefacts, predictable problems and closed systems to embrace the hybrid and contingent nature of services today.

down, prioritising the information most relevant to the group of fictitious workshop participants. They also began to identify gaps in the information. For many, these unknowns became the jumping-off point for the structure of their hybrid tool. One group, for instance, developed a 'Stakeholder Impact Map', a canvas used to identify competing or complementary areas of concern related to the project. The hybrid tool became a more neutral space where participants could project their disagreement and dissent without offending other stakeholders. Looking at the canvas from afar provided a necessary framework to assess where areas of mutual benefit might exist.

Perhaps the most ambitious prototype presented was titled 'Service Tube'. The creators proposed building a physical space (3D) wherein workshop participants could travel down a series of corridors that would prompt them to think through complex questions related to the challenge. The physicality of this approach is particularly unique in that it draws upon the embodied knowledge of stakeholders as they encounter various provocations within the space.

The hybrid tools proposed by each group highlight the importance of the sociocultural contexts in which they will be used. We know that design is political. This is even more true as we take on more complex problems.

In taking part in the workshop, participants were exposed to the possibility that their work operates beyond the walls of a specific organisation, and has an effect within a broader constellation: interlocking networks of people, processes, artefacts that are relationally tied to one another. Our work Touchpoint 8-1 49

Transition-oriented Service Design The School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University has restructured its design education from undergraduate to doctoral degree programs within a strongly values-based framework. This is a response to both changing professional practice conditions and a desire to see designers take more responsibility for leadCameron Tonkinwise is the Director of Design Studies and Doctoral Studies at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Cameron’s research focuses on the way systems of shared product use can reduce societal materials intensity and re-embed economic interactions in cosmopolitan social contexts.

ing large-scale social change toward more sustainable futures.

In this restructure, the principles and practices of service design – co-creation of value over time – are made central to all forms of design, rather than service design being a minor addition to other design practices.

Design is the art and science of en­hancing the quality of life. To this end, the profession often claims to pursue ‘good design'. Good design is not necessarily considered to be an ethical or political value, just a measure of the most appropriate design for a comprehen­sively understood context. The modern practice of design tends to believe that a wellresearched, well-tested, well-crafted design will not only delight customers with more convenient ways of living and working but also maxi­m­ise resource productivity for both the corporate sponsor and society at large.

One of the key factors that is often left out of any evaluation of ‘good design’ is time. Quite the reverse, designers

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aspire to their good designs becoming ‘timeless classics', which only happens if our societies stop changing.

It is cliché to insist that our global consumer societies are these days undergoing accelerated rates of change.

In fact, many aspects of our everyday lives seem remarkably unchanging: doing the laundry, preparing meals, commuting, meeting, all seem resistant to radical disruption, so far. A sense of things ‘speeding up’ perhaps comes more from information technology connectivity. As many products and so their associated practices have converged into one kind of screenbased device (of varying sizes), we seem to experience change at a small-scale more often as our interfaces are modified by regular system upgrades.

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New Program Framework Design for Interactions Designing for interactions between people, the built (designed) world, and the natural environment

Products Communications Environments

Design Tracks Sub-disciplinary specialty

Design for Service

Design for Social Innovation

Transition Design

Design within current business models

Design for alternative economies

Design for systems level change

Areas of Design Focus Inform courses, projects & research at all levels in the school And represent increasing depth of socio-temporal context

But it is also the case that several large-scale consequences of modernisation are coinciding in escalating ways: resource constraints and climate change, income inequality and long-term debt crunches, ageing populations and infrastructures, globalisation and refugee migration, etc. These crises demand that designers think in longer time horizons, even as it feels as though our future options are collapsing.

Design can therefore no longer hope to meet the requirements of any one context without taking into consideration the sets of changes that will happen to that context, and its adjacent contexts, with an increasing pace. This is easier said than done.

One of the primary challenges is that negotiating interrelated changes over time cannot be done in a neutral fashion. Systems change can only be approached with clear value positions. This was recognised by

Social & Natural Worlds

Context for All Design

Horst Rittel when he famously developed the idea of ‘wicked problems', multivariate challenges that only have argued-for temporary responses, not solutions. To put it in a more designerly way: to observe what cannot be expected in a changing system, you must nevertheless begin by looking out for certain things: to understand such systems, you must make interventions with specific objectives.

What you start searching for or seeking to accomplish will have to change as you make sense of these shifting contexts, but you must begin with wellarticulated aims and evaluative criteria. To negotiate complexity, you must proceed purposefully toward a clearly articulated end that you value, and yet you must also be able to modify your goal as your actions reveal aspects of that complex situation.

Megan Neese, an alumnus of the CMU School of Design, recently made this point in relation to her Touchpoint 8-1 51

work with an innovation unit at Nissan investigating connected forms of mobility. In order to get a handle on the complex ecosystem associated with the future of the ‘smart car', Neese argued that her team needed to impose boundaries (place-based) and establish values for ideation and decision-making (sustainability).

The School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University has always been close to these design issues. While Richard Buchanan, who is most well known for having turned designers’ attention to Rittel’s work on wicked problems, was Head of the CMU School of Design, communication and product designers, and some of the first North American scholars to teach service design, such as Shelley Evanson, began to work with computer scientists on what we now call human-centred interaction design. When Terry Irwin became Head of the CMU School of Design just over five years ago, this expansion of the practice of design into more dynamic, interconnected realms was renewed with a thorough curriculum restructure, from undergraduate to doctorate.

There are three things to notice about the way the school has now organised its design education programs.

1) Values-based The diagram aims to show that we cast all design within a wider commitment to transitioning our societies toward more sustainable futures. This is not a contingent, supplementary aspect to designing, something designing merely could or perhaps even should be sensitive to. Rather, this value is the overriding object of all designing: design happens in service of transitioning toward societies that are more compatible with the limits of what we call ‘nature’. The design of products, communications, environments and services involve the depletion of resources in the name of creating value. We teach designers that designing always involves taking responsibility for negotiating that trade-off, not 52 Touchpoint 8-1

just for each design one at a time, but with respect to a number of connected designs over time. Such systems tend to be more bio-regionally specific, yet also more diverse than existing capitalist ways of resourcing our societies: ‘cosmopolitan localism.’

2) Transition At the moment, 'transition design' is a placeholder name for an ambition, a vision of a way of practicing design that enables structural social change. Transition design is the focus area for doctoral and faculty research at the CMU School of Design. There is an articulated model of what it should entail, but this is something that will have to be filled out and modified as it is tested in variety of situations, and as effected transitions modify the nature of those situations. The intention is that the CMU School of Design itself transitions in form and focus as the field of transition design is developed.

It draws on a range of existing research and initiatives, mostly outside of the practice and discipline of design: ecosystem transitions and resilience, technological innovation policy and transition management, transition towns and other distributed social innovations in response to climate change, transition economies moving into and out of consumer capitalism, personal life-stage and health transitions.

These discourses together inform a multi-level, multi-stage approach to designing. A transition design always aims to be more than a response to particular contextual need: it also aims to create a platform for different kinds of lifestyles and work-practices.

Transition designs respond to current contexts in ways that make alternative ways of resourcing our societies more viable. Having implemented one design into a shifting ecosystem, the transition designer can then follow up with subsequent designs that create pathways to those alternatives. This is not just designing for a present with a future, it is designing toward the secondorder futures that become possible and even likely given the future that present design establishes.

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The CMU School of Design is working with a model that foregrounds four aspects of transition design: i) Vision – modernist designing worked toward strong visions of radically transformed societies. A complete rebuild of the environments in which we dwell, including the mass distribution of new kinds of goods into those environments, was supposed to create new kinds of more rational human being. We now live in the unforeseen consequences of those reductive visions being imposed uniformly upon different bio-regions across the world.

A consequence of our being post-modernist has however been, it seems, a reticence by designers to develop rich pictures of the futures they see themselves designing toward. We try to re-establish in transition designers the skill of thinking through comprehensive future scenarios, imagining multi-stage developments, but always with an alertness to how conditions are never predictable and visions will need to change as we proceed. ii) Theories of Change – when designers are problem-solvers, they tend not to need an account of how their design works, as long as it does. When designers engage in complex social situations with the aim of bringing about change, they need to be more responsible for the moves they make. Because transition designers are pursuing long-term transformations in shifting ecosystems, there are fewer opportunities for evidence-based practice. Designers must, instead, have a diverse precedent bank and a variety of techniques for discerning patterns, both existing long-term trajectories and more current habits and expectations. All this means an education that spends much more time versing designers in theories and histories of social change and technological change. iii) Posture and Mindset – designers have traditionally offered expert services to clients that in the end benefit those clients’ customers. This mediated relation to customers can put designers at a remove from the contexts for which they are designing.

Responsible designing uses social research to bridge

that gap but, in the end, it remained rare for the designer to have to ‘suffer’ what they had designed.

Transition designing, by contrast, begins with the assumption that the designer is part of the system that they are redesigning. The role of distanced expert is not possible. It is precisely because designers are always already implicated in the design context that they need guiding visions and theories of change. iv) New Ways of Designing – the previous three aspects of the model culminate in different ways of designing. At the CMU School of Design, we characterise this generally as 'design for interactions'.

Transition design is less the design of products, communications and environments and more the designing for multi-level, multi-stage change with products, communications and environments.

3) Service Design Service design is diagrammatically at the centre of the School’s curriculum because it is exemplary of the new ways of transition designing. To this extent, we do not see service design as another distinct practice of design that happens to make use of product, interior and interaction design for service touchpoints. Instead, all designing is approached through the lens of service design. This follows the paradigm shift effected by service-dominant logic and the recognition that all value, even when centred around a material good, is co-created by both providers and recipients. There are two key facets of service design that are crucial in this regard: i) Improvization – designing something means giving it forms that can structure the use of that thing.

Designers cannot determine how their designs can be used, but their aim is, in most cases, to make the use of something habitual. Service designers also aim to regularise service encounters, but because services are, by definition, encounters between people, even when mediated by digital platforms that allow proxies to automate many aspects of the interaction, services have unique elements each time. Service designers must be Touchpoint 8-1 53

disposed to working with more variability than designers of artefacts and environments, whether material or digital. This tolerance is more appropriate for the way transition design seeks to evolve change over time. ii) Designing (for/of/with) People – all designing, even when focused on the details of material products, is done for people, to aid the practices of their everyday lives. By contrast, service design, rather than the design of things for people, should not deny the responsibility that accompanies the fact almost any service designing involves some designing of people. Service designers script interactions, telling people where to move and what to say and do, when and how. Those people are both service workers and customers. There obviously are limits to how dictatorial service designers can and should be. They must leave space for improvisation, as the previous point indicated, and their ways of dictating interactions – through signs and furnishings and even uniforms, etc – are not precise. Even so, compared to all other kinds of design, service design is much more directly ‘of people'. This is why all responsibly done service design projects involve extensive changemanagement processes. (See also Sangiorgi 2011.)1 Transition design embraces these unique aspects of service design, taking responsibility for designing how people interact in order create new kinds of relationships and economies. Transition designers recognise the limits of this project, hence the emphasis on transition, designing how people interact over time, structuring interactions but then restructuring them in the light of the improvisations that are made within those structures.

The Example of the sharing economy A decade ago, the current scale of people sleeping in strangers’ houses with AirBnB and getting lifts in strangers vehicles with Lyft could not have been anticipated. Sustainable design researchers at that time

1 Sangiorgi, Daniela. 2011. International Journal of Design, 5.2.

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When you design the activities of a service worker, you are designing their livelihoods; you are creating what they will do for much of their waking life; you have the opportunity to transition them to more meaningful work conditions.

were advocating ‘sharing economies,’ and they were doing so precisely as part of ‘servicisation,’ the transition from selling products to selling the use of those products: what were called then ‘product service systems'.

The sharing economy has proven not to be inherently good. Many digital platforms creating markets for peer-to-peer services are eroding service provider’s economic sustainability. Nevertheless, the rise of various forms of the sharing economy does signal opportunities for societal transitions.

And these again foreground service design.

What is distinctive about sharing-economy systems are the ways in which participants can make a range of contributions in exchange for services besides money. Platforms lower the transaction costs for people wanting to ‘pay’ or ‘earn’ with time and skills and/or equipment. This is an example of how, in the School of Design’s curriculum, service design within existing economies blends into design for social innovation within alternative economies.

One consequence of the service designing of sharingeconomy platforms has been a wider recognition of the ‘co-creation’ of value. Something that used to be a specialist insight of service design experts (though has also been advocated to business more generally by advocates of service-dominant logic) is now more commonly present in every peer-to-peer economy interaction. When I make arrangements to meet my AirBnB host at a time and place convenient to them to get access

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to their apartment, I am very aware of the work I am contributing to receive this accommodation service, no matter how well service designed the interaction.

This is the kind of systems insight that transition designers bring to service design. To put it the other way around, consider the value co-creation slogan: ‘treating customers as employees and employees as customers'.

If the former is the key to service design – help customers to say and do the things that will allow the service

provider to best meet their needs – the latter is a key to a transition-oriented service designer: when you design the activities of a service worker, you are designing their livelihoods; you are creating what they will do for much of their waking life; you have the opportunity to transition them to more meaningful work conditions.

At CMU School of Design we are now skilling service designers in the art of transitioning organisations toward these kinds of more sustainable futures.

Service Design Research explore | improve | innovate

www.sedes-research.de

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Tools and Methods­

Customer Journey Measures Adapting CX metrics for service design

We present customer journey measures as an approach where customer experience (CX) metrics are made available and relevant for practitioners of service design. By ‘customer journey measures’, we mean a combination of quantitative and qualitative customer feedback that allows us to track CX in the context of Asbjørn Følstad is Senior Researcher at SINTEF, the largest independent research organisation in Scandinavia.

He holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Oslo.

His research concerns usercentred design, in particular, how to involve users in service design and innovation.

Knut Kvale is Senior Research Scientist at Telenor Research and Professor at the University of Oslo. He holds a PhD from the Norwegian Institute of Technology. His current research interests are customer journey mapping, customer experience measurements and service design.

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customer journeys. We describe our experiences from applying customer journey measures in two business cases, both from the operations of a major telecom provider.

CX metrics in service design?

For service designers, it is critical to understand how customer experience (CX) evolves through the customer journey. As the customer moves through the series of touchpoints and actions that constitute the customer journey, pleasant surprises, efficient interactions, disappointments and frustrations all contribute to how the customer experiences the overall service (Rawson, Duncan, & Jones, 2013).

Service designers, while typically skilled in well-known qualitative methods such as observations, interviews, cultural probing and workshops, may overlook a potential useful source of customer insight: CX metrics.

After surveying more than 200 large companies across the world, Temkin (2014) found that the vast majority of these employ CX metrics pertaining to,

for example, customer satisfaction and likelihood to recommend. Seven in ten had implemented the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Because both our example cases employ this latter CX metric, we discuss the NPS as an example metric throughout this presentation. However, the main takeaways should be transferable to other CX metrics, such as customer satisfaction and customer effort score (CES; Dixon, Freeman, & Toman, 2010).

The field of CX metrics has, in recent years, seen three interesting developments of particular relevance to service designers: simplification, qualitative followups and duality in concern.

Simplification in CX metrics is a consequence of the observed challenge in making customers respond to lengthy

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Start-point measure

Touchpoint measure

End-point measure

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?

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Figure 1: Visualising the assessment-based approach

surveys. In line with this development, the NPS includes only one item: on the basis of your latest interaction with the company, “how likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” (Reichheld & Markey, 2011).

Qualitative follow-ups are increasingly being used.

As CX metrics are simplified, it is difficult to know customers’ specific reasons for giving their scores.

Hence, it has become common to supplement CX metrics with an open question where customers may speak freely about which aspects of the service really matter for their experience. Herein lies a wealth of potential insight for service designers.

Duality in concern is seen in the parallel employment of metrics concerning the overall customer experience, such as the NPS and satisfaction and metrics targeting threats to the intended experience, such as the CES (Dixon et al., 2013). While the ultimate aim of service designers and service companies alike is to deliver superior CX, many companies arguably do not. Hence, companies need to measure both overall experience and deviations in the service delivery process.

Customer journey measures CX metrics are typically employed for specific touchpoints (e.g., customer service) or at an overall company level (e.g., brand perception). However, service designers are likely to require customer insight at the level of the customer journeys. Hence, to put CX metrics to work for service design, we suggest framing CX metrics as customer journey measures, that is, using CX metrics as the basis for gathering and analysing customer feedback at the level of customer journeys. The recent developments in the field of CX metrics make this a viable option: the simplification in CX metrics makes it feasible to implement these across multiple touchpoints, and the qualitative follow-up questions provide richer customer insights. Before presenting our case experiences, we briefly highlight three success factors in applying CX metrics as customer journey measures.

‘Quant-qual' questioning While numbers are important, qualitative data are key to rich insights. Hence, when putting CX metrics to use for service design, the metric should be seen as a step along the way to gather insight into the reasons behind the customers’ scores, in other words, the root causes.

The availability of qualitative follow-ups to a CX metric is therefore critical to its usefulness for service designers.

In NPS, the recommended practice is to offer customers Touchpoint 8-1 59

a chance to provide qualitative follow-up in the form of a free-text response detailing their main reason for giving a score (Reichheld & Markey, 2011). We refer to the complementary use of questions, where the scores on a quantitative metric are interpreted through a qualitative follow-up, as ‘quant-qual' questioning.

Assessment-based and deviation-based approaches To provide comprehensive insight into CX, it is beneficial to investigate both overall CX and threats to the intended experience. Understanding overall CX implies an assessment-based approach, where customers report on their overall customer experience at strategically important points in the customer journey, for example, through the NPS with an open-ended follow-up. For this purpose, an end-point measure is arguably the most versatile, as it provides the customer with an opportunity to provide feedback on the entire customer journey. The end-point measure may be supplemented with a startpoint measure at the initial journey touchpoint or with touchpoint measures during the journey (see Figure 1).

Threats to the intended CX may be investigated through a deviation-based approach. Here, the customer is asked to report on deviations in the expected customer journey, such as unexpected channel switches or calls to customer service. The customer

may be invited to report on customer effort in general or, more specifically, on the number of calls made to customer service during the journey (see Figure 2).

Analysing data from customer journey measures For the service designer, the qualitative customer feedback from ‘quant-qual' questioning is often the most useful part of customer feedback and also the natural starting point of analysis. As we do not know in advance the customers’ reasons for their scores, analysis needs to be data-driven, where coding categories are developed from an initial review of the dataset.

Such data-driven coding may also be beneficial on a routine basis, as it serves as a mechanism through which to identify emerging issues or opportunities.

Customers with different scores on the CX metric typically have given different reasons for their scores.

Disappointed customers have different reasons to satisfied customers. Hence, it will be important to include in the analysis a stratified sample of customer responses so that the reasons pertaining to all levels of satisfaction may be identified.

While the reasons provided by a single customer often are brief and superficial, the pooled set of data provides rich insights. While a single disappointed customer may provide one reason for the score, the

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Deviation report

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Figure 2: Visualising the ­deviation-based approach

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data from large numbers of disappointed customers may provide several reasons between them, as well as insight into how frequent these reasons are. This approach to qualitative analysis may be somewhat challenging at first, as it is markedly different from the analysis of in-depth qualitative data from a small number of customers. In the latter form of analysis, each customer may generate multiple insights. In the analysis of data from customer journey measures, insights are drawn across customers, something that makes it easier to generalise findings.

From a service design perspective, this analysis of customer journey measures shows that, even for a faulthandling customer journey that, by default, includes pain points on the side of the customer, the CX throughout the process may be positive, provided the design and management of the service are properly established.

The analysis highlights the importance of the early identification of customers with long-term issues with the company, as they will need particular attention to be turned into satisfied customers.

Case experiences To exemplify and share experiences from our use of CX metrics as customer journey measures, we present two cases from an international telecoms provider: case 1 demonstrates how CX measures at different points in the customer journey increase analysis richness; case 2 showcases the importance of including a deviation-based approach.

Case 2: The impact of deviations Service delivery sometimes leaves customers frustrated, due to pain points in the service process. These are often seen as deviations, where the journey is not unfolding according to plan. In Case 2, we complemented our assessment-based approach to customer journey measures with a deviation-based approach. Specifically, in addition to having the customer assess their experience of the overall journey through an end-point measure, we also asked customers to report on any calls made to customer service during the journey. For this specific customer journey, the ordering and installing of a specific telecom service, we gathered data from some 300 customers at the end of the customer journey.

Interestingly, we found that deviations in the form of calls to customer service indeed affected CX, but not necessarily in a negative manner. Rather, customers having their issues resolved efficiently tended to have an even better experience from the journey than customers who did not need to call customer service. When asked for their reasons for giving a good score, customers were highly likely to report the treatment they received from customer service. However, issues that had been called in but not resolved efficiently were truly detrimental to CX.

Case 1: Experiences across the journey Measuring CX across the customer journey allows us to see how experience evolves. We analysed NPS data (scores and free-text) from some 300 customers involved in a fault-handling process. The customers responded to the NPS when reporting the fault and when the fault was registered as fixed. On this basis, we identified changes in customers’ scores and analysed their reasons for the scores given at the start and end points. Our first finding was a real surprise: most customers did not change scores much; they scored either high (this was the largest group) or low throughout the journey. The reasons given showed that, though customers clearly experience annoyance when having to report a fault, they may still retain a good experience throughout the journey if treated in an efficient and courteous manner.

On the other hand, low-scoring customers often told stories of prolonged problems and multiple unsuccessful attempts at fixing their problems. These problems could be outside the control of the company, such as faulty or poorly set-up equipment on the customer’s end, but were nevertheless detrimental to CX.

These findings accentuate the need to design efficient service recovery, so that service recovery becomes a positive driver of experience. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of complementing an assessment-based approach to customer journey measures with a deviation-

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based approach, due to the potential importance of service recovery, or lack thereof, for the CX. Implications Implementing much-used CX metrics as customer journey measures may be truly valuable to service designers as a source of customer insight from implemented service processes. To serve this purpose, questionnaire items reflecting simple CX metrics need to be complemented by qualitative follow-up questions for the customers to express their reasons for their scores. To strengthen their service design programs, companies may benefit from implementing CX measures not only at the level of touchpoints, but also at the level of customer journeys. In particular, the end-point of the journey represents an important point of measurement.

To enable the analysis of CX at multiple points in the customer journey, the company may benefit from having a common approach to CX metrics and any data point needs to include a common customer identifier.

Though the response from a single customer rarely provides rich insight, the combined responses of larger numbers of customers do, by way of data-driven qualitative analysis. The responses of low-scoring customers tend to be richer in detail and also tend to concern a broader spectrum of issues, highlighting the importance of paying particular attention to the responses from these.

As the CX is coloured both by the design and orchestration of the customer journey as well as deviations from the expected journey, we recommend including measurement instruments reflecting both the overall experience and any unexpected customer effort or need for service recovery.

Looking forward Service designers are increasingly called upon both to demonstrate the benefit of their work, and also to support the management and the gradual improvement of established services. In this context, customer journey 62 Touchpoint 8-1

measures may be particularly valuable as they provide reliable customer insight at relatively little effort, something that enables its gathering and utilisation on a more routine basis rather than only as an exploratory effort in the early phases of larger design projects. In the future, it may be beneficial to continue the exploration of how CX measures, today mostly used by marketers, may also be employed for various service design purposes.

We hope that our conceptualisation of customer journey measures may serve as a basis for such an exploration.

References - Dixon, M., Freeman, K., & Toman, N. (2010). Stop trying to delight your customers. Harvard Business Review, 88(7/8), 116–122.

- Rawson, A., Duncan, E., & Jones, C. (2013). The truth about customer experience. Harvard Business Review, 91(9), 90–98.

- Reichheld, F., & Markey, R. (2011). The ultimate question 2.0; How net promoter companies thrive in a customer-driven world. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

- Temkin, B. D. (2014). The state of CX metrics. Technical report. Waban, MA: Temkin Group.

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Design Toolkits for Customercentred Transformation Helping organisations rethink their customer experience Today, service design tools and methodologies provide a solid framework for organisations to not only understand customer needs and develop relevant solutions, but also to change how they work, facilitating internal cross-functional collaboration and activating structured processes of customer-centred Gianluca Brugnoli is an architect, PhD, Executive Creative Director at frog, professor at the Design School of the Politecnico di Milano and has 20 years experience in designing services and integrated user experiences for some of most important international companies.

Roberta Tassi is Principal Designer at frog. She has led service design programs for healthcare and financial services clients in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. She is also the author of the Service Design Tools website and is a contract professor at Politecnico di Milano.

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transformation. In this way, design toolkits help organisations meet their innovation goals in the short term, while they deliver and spread competencies that will enrich and shape the internal innovation culture in the long-run.

Customer-centred innovation is not only about bringing the user perspective closer to the various stakeholders involved in a project: it also demands a deep, endto-end systemic transformation of the organisation and processes that make the final service experience possible.

Organisational transformation requires a manageable and sustainable approach that can generate progressive results over a series of iterations, which help organisations gradually learn and change. In that transition, service design tools help by providing a structure that enables those continuous iterations, and ultimately drives towards the creation of a customer-centred culture.

Design toolkits are customised sets of tools and guidelines that facilitate internal collaboration around all of the aspects

needed to bring customer experiences to life. They include strategic resources, such as experience principles and design processes, and practical resources, such as instructions and printable worksheets.

They are inspired by service design methodologies, evolved and tailored to target the specific strategic and practical needs of a specific organisation or market segment.

Design toolkits can exist as digital repositories as well as physical booklets.

They are often first created to solve one specific challenge that involves just a part of the organisation and are then, in a second phase, consolidated, published and disseminated with the help of internal champions, to be applied to many other innovation challenges and to gradually impact the entire culture of the organisation.

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Intesa Sanpaolo Customer Experience Playbook, example of a hybrid user journey

There are three dimensions to consider when looking at design toolkits as foundation for a new innovation culture: 1. Customer insights: design toolkits help effectively ground innovation in user insights. Although information and data are already available, the challenge is often how organisations combine those data to improve the service experience. A toolkit provides simple assets to elaborate on user insights, to quickly identify experience gaps and to generate meaningful ideas.

2. Collaborative approach: design toolkits streamline internal workflows by creating platforms for effective conversations. When projects and ideas need to be developed across departments, toolkits allow sharing key reference frameworks and provide processes and activities to effectively work together around specific challenges.

3. Strategic alignment: design toolkits provide customer experience goals, guidelines and principles to keep a solid and consistent vision throughout the various development cycles. A toolkit can support decision-making processes by creating direct connections with a set of defined

customer experience goals that are applied as criteria to evaluate, filter and prioritise design and strategic choices.

The following case studies show how the use of design toolkits results in effective and efficient approaches to customer-centred innovation.

Intesa Sanpaolo co-creation program: new retail banking customer experience In 2014, leading Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo completely rethought the retail branch customer experience. The key goal was to better meet new client expectations and needs across different channels, attract new customers and to address a new service strategy. The redesign of the retail model turned out to be part of a broader service design challenge concerning how the entire Intesa Sanpaolo offering is delivered to the customers, as well as how the organisation itself approaches innovation.

The co-creation project was conducted by a joint team with a sequence of fast iterations, using various design tools to involve all the relevant stakeholders – from users to employees, bank directors and internal managers – to simultaneously rethink all service components and quickly prototype a new customer experience concept.

The design toolkit supported the following steps: Touchpoint 8-1 65

1. Collecting and analysing customer needs: a working group – composed of bank directors, internal managers from each department involved, the internal innovation team and frog design experts – mapped the customer behaviours and expectations by creating user archetypes and analysing the key user flows for the current banking service.

2. Ideating and designing: the team used user archetypes and flows to generate ideas around the ideal retail experience and to finally identify a new conceptual model for the branch layout that could support several hybrid digital and physical interactions.

Starting from the envisioned scenarios, a step-bystep description of the experience was used to map all of the service requirements and dialogue with the various teams involved (IT, real estate, marketing and communication and human resources).

3. Testing and prototyping: the new concept was built in a full-scale prototype to test the key service interactions with real clients and employees, as well as to train the bank personnel on the new service model and continuously support internal discussions and feedback collection. The team identified ten key client missions to be verified with a role-playing game that simulated the experience within the retail space, bank advisor and client interactions included. During five weeks, over 300 people were involved in the testing and workshop sessions.

The highly iterative and collaborative approach accelerated the whole design process by keeping everybody engaged and aligned on the key customer experience goals, streamlining decision processes and giving a sense of control to all of the teams involved. Every department was an active part of the conversation and could easily elaborate on its own set of requirements, while also understanding and embracing the key customer-experience principles defined with the new design toolkit.

The process led to the creation of a new customer experience concept in only three months and to the creation of a fully functioning service prototype in the next six months. Within one year of starting the project, Intesa Sanpaolo was able to deploy the new layout and service model across Italy in more than 50 branches.

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The methodology applied to that challenge is now well-understood inside the organisation and has become a solid foundation for many other innovation processes, thanks to the important role played by the Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Centre, as its internal owner and ambassador.

GE Oil & Gas co-creation program: design-driven innovation and partnerships Given the complexity of emerging technological challenges and the pressure to create new competitive advantages by bridging product and service components, GE Oil & Gas worked with frog to adopt a design-driven process for partnering with clients and for providing custom solutions that could perfectly meet their needs.

The process – a co-creation program that can be adapted to different client scenarios – allows GE Oil & Gas to engage their customers in a new way. Together they can outline effective solutions to selected problems, increasing the long-term success rate of the relationship.

The toolkit that frog developed for GE Oil&Gas includes: 1. Research planning and field-research guide: a set of methods and tools to teach GE engineers how to run field research with their customers to better understand their problems and needs and directly gain insights on their activities and behaviours.

GE Oil & Gas and Woodside, Ideation Workshop (Karratha Gas Plant)

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GE Oil & Gas and Transcanada, Ideation Workshop, scenario modeling exercise (right side) and idea developing and prototyping materials (below)

2. Insights synthesis and identification of opportunities: once the data have been collected, tools such as journey and system maps are used to analyse key insights, pain points and opportunities. Those represent clear structures to approach the analysis without getting lost in the technical details, allowing GE engineers to quickly navigate the complexity of data collected.

3. Idea generation: the key opportunities are finally used to engage the client in ideation sessions aimed at finding solutions together that could work for both parties and could potentially become the starting point for a new offering or contract. In this phase, the toolkit provides a set of co-design games to select from, according to what is relevant in that context.

The design toolkit developed for GE has been socialised through different platforms over time, including the internal UX Center of Excellence website that collects reference principles, processes and high-level guidelines and a printable workbook that gives access to detailed instructions and templates.

frog's collaborative design process brought GE Oil & Gas together with their customer TransCanada to co-create a new product and secure an ongoing partnership. The story of Nova LT16 gas turbine is an example of how design toolkits allow teams to quickly develop new ideas grounded on real customer needs, while building lasting relationships.

1 Full case study – http://fro.gd/1KordXF 2 Full case study – http://frogdesign.com/work/ge-ux-centersexcellence.html

Touchpoint 8-1 67

Education and Research

Assessing the Perception of Service Design The Impact of Satisfaction

Academic researchers agree on the difficulty of developing metrics and evidence-based frameworks for assessing the impact of service developments. Understanding the complexity of such a challenge, based on a systematic literature search, we focused on researching participant’s (practitioners and clients) perception and satisfaction of service design methods, techniques, and tools.

Maria De La Vega, Jagriti Kumar, Chelsea Lyle and Rebecca Ngola are graduate students in the service design program at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, USA. Their professional backgrounds include graphic, interior, interaction and web design.

Methodology This paper reflects results from a study involving two phases. The first phase obtained quantitative input from service design project participants about their satisfaction perception. The second phase involved a qualitative study, mainly based on interviews with service design project participants, to further explore their perception of satisfaction about service design projects. The low number of responses from clients, and a hesitation of practitioners to share our study with their clients revealed a lack of trust.

Discussion We synthesised 369 literature excerpts from 19 research papers and discussions from 9 interviews, which identified 31 broad summaries. These revealed 8 key insights that support our 2 themes: importance of trust and impact of satisfaction.

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1. ‘Ask how, not what’ The application of service design is more important than how it is defined.

Interviewees and literature agree that service design should be adaptable and change depending on audience and application; “Ambiguity should be embraced; a constant definition is not necessarily needed, or even desirable.”1 Whether or not service design is a process, a phase, or an approach is uncertain. There is confusion around the meaning of service design and how it is connected to approaches such as humancentred design, UX, CX, and design thinking. Since the latter is a familiar term, it is often trusted and adopted into

1 Blizzard, Jacqualyn, Leidy Klotz, Geoff Potvin, Zahra Hazari, Jennifer Cribbs, and Allison Godwin (2015), 'Using survey questions to identify and learn more about those who exhibit design thinking traits.'

Design Studies 38: 92-110.

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the definition of service design because it “serves as a toolbox [that contains] ‘research and ideation methods for the non-creatives’ and ‘structures the creative process.”2 2. ‘Don’t hate, collaborate’ Practitioners and clients are increasingly aware that an interdisciplinary approach is obligatory for service design practices. To collaborate and co-create effectively, a common language must be cultivated to establish trust. Most interviewees of our study came to service design from a variety of different fields.

When asked about the methods and tools that were normally used, they responded that a single method by itself did not work, and that integrating tools from their previous fields were key. They also emphasised the importance of adapting the use of tools according to the project’s need and the client’s area of focus.

The relationship between clients and designers is important for producing effective service cultures within organisations. Empowering co-creative processes between these service design participants is a challenge in large-scale service design implementation.

Interviewee 2 proposes that failure to exchange information and knowledge yields potentially unsuccessful results, due to the client or organisation not fully understanding how to sustain their project solutions. Service design practitioners should be able to transfer ownership of the solutions to the client in order to add value to the final service. Ideation workshops, collaborative immersion methods, techniques, and tools, and the exploration of organisational cultural contexts with clients can support seamless integration of service design into their operations and business strategies, yielding high satisfaction results.

4. ‘Help me, help you’ According to Interviewee3, “Design has matured to the point where it has a high degree of business value.”

5. ‘Sharing is caring’ One of the most important and often overlooked collaboration tools for designers is communication.

Communicating effectively leads to mutually beneficial co-creation sessions which foster empathetic and confident relationships between the client and service design practitioner, according to Interviewee 3. “Not only is it important for the clients to relate to the project,” said Interviewee 6, “it gets them into a comfort zone.”

Using language and tools the client understands makes alignment with the design process much easier and replicable at a faster pace in future projects. Establishing trust and allowing clients to understand and relate to this design process from the start of a project increases the chances of successful solutions.3 Demonstrating qualitatively and quantitatively how service design impacts customer retention, loyalty, and advocacy help organisations buy into service design more confidently.

2 Schmiedgen, Jan, Holger Rhinow, Eva Köppen and Christoph Meinel, (2015), 'Parts Without a Whole?: The Current State of Design Thinking Practice in Organizations.' des Hasso-Plattner-Instituts für Softwaresystemtechnik an der Universität Potsdam. Technische Berichte Nr. 97.

3 Løvlie, Lavrans, Andy Polaine, and Ben Reason, (2013), 'Service Design: From Insight to Implementation.' New York: Rosenfield Media, LLC.

6. ‘Measure the unmeasurable’ There is an overwhelming consensus amongst inter­ viewees that the success of projects heavily depends on the specific type of project and its objective. Variance in context, perspective, and metrics poses current

3. ‘Teach me’ Continuous research and interdisciplinary collaboration hones the service designer’s ability to adapt to constantly changing complexities of service design projects.

“These self-learning practice[s] merge personal and professional networks as people tend to ‘follow the good examples of colleagues’, work groups, other teams and friends.”2 This begs the question: Is academia adequately preparing future service designers for interdisciplinary collaboration? Additionally, is the responsibility on academia or the industry itself? If so, this responsibility may be the key to increasing practitioner performance, which ultimately leads to client satisfaction.

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challenges to making flexible service systems in dynamic environments. The metrics for all projects are defined according to their unique scopes, client parameters, and indicators. The most challenging aspect of metrics is the measurement of non-financial consequences, such as loyalty, engagement, and satisfaction among stakeholders. There are disparities in the shared language of mea­surement techniques and existing methods of measurement (NPS, KPI, ROI, SERVQUAL, etc.), but they don’t demonstrate how to improve services.3 7. ‘Evolution for contribution’ Changes are needed to advance the service design industry, and as designers, we should consider how we contribute to the shaping of this field. Our roles change with customer’s evolving expectations and innovation adoption rates. We need to acknowledge the pace of change and be adaptable for achieving better service design solutions.

Conclusion How do we create credibility and trust between practitioners and clients in interdisciplinary, global industries without a standard language or measurement of satisfaction? “It is important to understand how differences in service ecosystems across countries affect[s] the design and delivery of services.”4 According to Interviewee 1, with the understanding of these differences, the service designer is uniquely suited to communicate what still works within the relationship paradigm in a way that doesn’t refute established research methods but coexists in a positive way. The goal is not to be a design superhero attempting to solve all problems, but to build partnerships across organisational, political and cultural levels in a climate of professional humility.3

8. ‘Expanding horizons’ Service design can broaden perspectives to target social challenges and long-term sustainable changes that bring well-being and create value for society, according to Interviewee 6. Service researchers ranked improving well-being through transformative service in socially relevant work as the highest priority.4 Generating and measuring value to society over time is a defining factor in the way service design is implemented and sustained. The time needed to research, test and implement service design doesn’t always fit with client constraints, and it often tests the capacity (time, resources, and effort) of most clients, says Interviewee 5. It is essential to establish trust and be transparent with clients from the beginning of service design processes in order to build stronger relationships.

4 Ostrom, Amy L., A. Parasuraman, David E. Bowen, Lia Patrício, Christopher A. Voss, and Katherine Lemon, (2015), 'Service Research Priorities in a Rapidly Changing Context.' Journal of Service Research 18 (2), 127-159.

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Giving Brands the Human Touch – and Gaining Customer Commitment How can brands and service providers establish long-lasting relationships with consumers in a time of waning customer loyalty? Europa Bendig and Stefan Baumann of the Hamburgbased innovation research and consulting agency STURM und DRANG have tackled this issue in a baseline study entitled Stefan Baumann is Managing Partner at STURM und DRANG and is convinced that people can only be understood in their cultural contexts. A studied consumer psychologist, he explores the changing consumption patterns of today in order to develop strategic visions and innovations for the markets of tomorrow.

Europa Bendig is Managing Partner at STURM und DRANG. As a qualified architect and engineer, she is trained in translating consumers’ diffuse demands into service and product concepts that create human-centric experiences.

Her passion lies in discovering cultural insights and foresights to inspire innovation that makes a real difference in people’s lives.

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Committed. The results: digitalisation is transforming how we bond – with other people, with objects and brands or with the companies we work for. The trend researchers have developed a relationship model and framework that visualises people’s needs in different modes of relationships: a relevant new tool for brand management and service design.

Every innovation starts with people. If people won't accept an innovation, such as a new service or upgraded product, there is little hope for it on the market. Innovation should thus always be approached and pursued from a people perspective.

That's why innovation is really always 'human innovation'. Whether B2B or B2C, in the end it's H2H: human to human.

When we talk about people, we are talking about relationships. Everyone knows how important relationships are in our lives, and science in fact confirms it. Recently, the Harvard University Grant Study1 , ongoing for 75 years now, again provided evidence that relationships – not money or fame

– are what make life worth living and are the source of human happiness.

Recently, STURM und DRANG conducted a baseline study, entitled Committed, to explore relationship models for the digital age, investigating bonding, commitment and relationship behaviour among generations X, Y and Z. Extensive trend scans and meta-analyses were augmented by qualitative insight and trend research with international experts and lead users using online research

1 Waldinger, R. (2015). ‘What makes a good life?

Lessons from the longest study on happiness’. TED. Lecture. [Online] Retrieved February 11, 2016, from https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_ what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_ longest_study_on_happiness

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The line up of STURM und DRANG’s relationship online think tank included experts in media usage, interactive design and digital strategy

communities. The aim was to examine the desires and behaviours evident in human relationships at the beginning of the 21st century.

How digitalisation is changing relationships Relationships and relationship patterns are profoundly changing in the process of digitalisation. The factors driving these developments are digital omnipresence, granularisation and multi-optionality.

Digital omnipresence is the phenomenon of staying connected with friends and family at all times via the internet. This connectedness is changing human behaviour, as it creates more contacts, continuous communication and an always-on 'ambient awareness',2 a term coined by economist Andreas Kaplan. Significant relationships often suffer, however, at the expense of pseudo-close relationships.

People feel more like part of a larger network, yet also feel increasingly unique.

Digitalisation confirms our feeling of being singular. Intelligent algorithms provide us with customised s­ uggestions for movies, music and books. Writer ­Christoph Kucklick calls this phenomenon 'granulari­ sation'.3 But the consequence of being singular means to no longer share a common denominator with others.

Consequently, we become socially incompatible.

In the digital world, we get options in abundance pointed out to us and suggestions of what might be the perfect fit. But as soon as we've found a suitable partner,

2 Kaplan, A. (2012). 'If you love something, let it go mobile: Mobile marketing and mobile social media 4x4'. Business Horizons, 55(2), 129–139.

3 Kucklick, C. (2014). Die granulare Gesellschaft: Wie das Digitale unsere Wirklichkeit auflöst. Berlin: Ullstein.

Touchpoint 8-1 75

a great apartment, or a fascinating job, we doubt the decision we have made. Making a move in one direction always means ruling out a host of other choices, leaving us indecisive and non-committal. The viability of too many future roads just doesn’t leave enough time to come to a well-founded decision. The abundance of options, or multi-optionality, directly weakens commitment, which is the basis of any stable bond. This multi-optionality thus weakens bonding.

At the same time, research also showed that desire for human ties is getting stronger: the more digitalisation encroaches into our everyday lives, the more personal contact declines, the less we are being touched. In between the screens through which we communicate and the logic of algorithms, we long for faces and for surprising, irrational behaviour. In short, we long for a human element.

How do these findings relate to brand and product offerings? When bonding with brands follows the same

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Relationship Architect Map Drawing on the research, STURM und DRANG created a Relationship Architect map that structures the research insights by relationship mode (Intimacy, Chance and Purpose) and mode stages (Initiate, Cultivate, Hold). The map provides a framework for services and brands to create concepts and strategies to support relationships in the digital age.

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rather relationship partners for human-like interaction, like Lufthansa’s 'Bedtime Stories' service, which allows travelling parents to transmit personally recorded bedtime stories to their kids back home.

The Chance Relation arises through possibilities and access. This relationship type is particularly characteristic of Generation Y: people between the ages of 21 and 34. The chance relation is about searching for enriching opposites aligned around a common objective. Brands can provide a platform for bringing like-minded people together. The Audi Unite carsharing portal for private households is one example of corporate enactment of this relationship type.

The Purpose Relation arises through participation and finding purpose. The very young Generation Z is most active in networking with like-minded people around the world, united by a common vision to effect change. Such changes may be in the areas of environmental responsibility, such as outdoor outfitter Patagonia's move to get customers to repair damaged clothing items rather than throw them away.

Each one of the three relationship modes can be split into three stages, depending on the customer’s relationship history (initiate, cultivate, hold). For example, initiating a relationship requires approaches different from cultivating or holding a relationship.

STURM und DRANG identified specific tactics for each of these stages, which are particularly suited for the cultivation of relationships in the given mode.

Brands interested in working in a structured way with the bonds of its customers could start examining user groups by separating them into the basic relation­ ship mode followed by breaking those down further to the specific tactics provided in the Relationship Archi­ tect. Here are a few examples of the specific tactics:

recorded the longest customer service call in company history, lasting an incredible eight hours.

Collaborative Filtering is a tactic to cultivate the relationship with chance-minded customers.

By now it is part of Retail 101, which boils down to Amazon’s phrase: "You might also like...”

In-group proximity is a tactic that holds relations with customers in purpose mode. It fosters empower­ ment and a sense of belonging by creating sub-groups within the customer base, like career network LinkedIn’s app Lookup where only co-workers within a company can connect and share invisible to outsiders.

Practical application in service design The research results are especially relevant in Service Design, a field where the interaction and thus the relationship with the stakeholder is at the centre.

In this context, the insights are applicable in two ways: The framework of three relationship modes can be employed to assess and design touchpoints along the customer journey on a more general level, as it offers a first indication of the type of interaction most suitable for a product and/or service.

Secondly, the Relationship Architect map works as a tool that offers enterprises practical methods and strategies to create and maintain relationships with consumers and employees.

In our non-committal digital age, true commitment can only be achieved when human needs are met with human empathy. The findings in the study and the translation into the Relationship Architect map help to identify consumers' desires and requirements along each step of the customer journey. Designing brands and touchpoints with a human touch will make it possible to tailor products, services or organisational structures that people connect with in the long term.

Thick Presence, or moments of undivided attention, is a tactic brands can employ to initiate a relationship with customers who long for intimacy. US shoe retailer Zappos, for example, has Touchpoint 8-1 77

Interview with Richard Ekelman In this issue’s profile, Touchpoint Project Manager Cristine Lanzoni and publisher Prof. Birgit Mager speak with Richard Ekelman, Service Designer at Chicago-based bswift, and cofounder of the annual Service Experience Chicago conference.

Richard Ekelman is a Service Designer at bswift and co-founder of Service Experience Chicago, a 501(c)3 charity dedicated to accessible Service Design education. He has consulted for Fjord and Slalom and worked internally at Walgreens and bswift.

He holds an MFA in Service Design from SCAD.

Cristine Lanzoni: Richard, you have been raising awareness of service design for some years now. In 2013, in Chicago, you founded Service Design Meet-up and in 2014, Service Experience Chicago.

How did your life and professional path lead you to become a service design evangelist?

Richard Ekelman: It was my time in the Navy – I spent four years in the U.S. Navy – that really made me think about how badly things are designed for a system.

There are so many things that are so important to people's lives that you can be creative and can solve big problems.

That's how I kind of started my path to service design. I studied product design at Pratt Institute for a year and I felt that product design was really interesting, but something that was not going to fit me long term. When I transferred to SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design), I discovered service design. I met Diana Miller and Robert Bau. The program was starting and it felt like a good fit, with my background in psychology and a passion 78 Touchpoint 7-3

for research. Then, I was recruited by Acquity Group, which is now Fjord, and got to Chicago.

Being one of the first people to graduate from a service design grad program in the U.S., I feel like it's a responsibility to spread awareness and to help people understand what service design is and maybe even make career changes if that's what they decide to do. Or, if they're happy and successful in their current field, to add new things to their toolkit.

And that's why I started the Service Design Meet-Up, and really just wanted to get it going. Chicago is a great city, the design community is very, very friendly.

And luckily, thanks to the work that the Service Design Network has done over the years, there is something to build on. Without that, I don't think we'd have been able to do much of anything.

Birgit Mager: Probably you would! I love the idea that people feel devoted to the field and just because they were fortunate enough to get into it have energy to share.

p ro f i l e s

Maslow's hierarchy of needs framework

Self Actualization A servive that lives and thrives as the best version of a itself that oers the greatest competitve advantage.

applied to service Esteem Can the service sucessfully oer a consitent value exchange while having the self confidence to adjust and change over time without losing its core values.

Belonging A developed connection to the service’s parent brand. Does the service belong to the brand family? The service needs to behave, look, and sound like a member of the family.

Safety & Support Enabling processes and technologies support resources like supply lines, hiring practices, and organizational room to grow. Measurements to know how the service is growing.

Basic Needs to Serve Basic needs like fascilities, technology resources, and leadership to raise the service over throughout it’s life.

RE: It's a passion of the things that we do. We've been lucky to attract a range of people from organisational change managers that would not consider themselves designers too, and we're trying really hard to connect with start-ups and small businesses in Chicago. Small businesses are hard because, even if we have an event, it's hard for them to take time off from their business.

But just making service design accessible and creating evidence of it, in what they can do with it, that's really what we focus on.

CL: And how do you see the current service design scene in Chicago?

RE: In Chicago, it's interesting because we have a lot of industry that is looking for change. We have a lot of

newspapers, so there's a strong community of content strategists, which, I think, in the U.S. is the biggest miss in service design and customer experience. People focus so much on the kind of things that you would traditionally associate with UX or interaction design or visual design. Those are all very important, but when one thinks about content strategy, it's a way to think about ‘How to deliver the right message at the right time in a way that brings your brand to life across the moments of a service’. Coming from a psychology background, I think that services can be approached like Maslow's hierarchy of needs: ‘Does the service have what it needs to live?

Does the service have self-esteem? Are you designing your service so that it is recognised as a part of your brand family? What is the personality of your service?’.

If you think about it that way, if you can support your Touchpoint 7-3 79

service to reach self-actualisation, and that's the best form that you can, it aligns more with services as life cycles. There is really no end, you're just always adjusting to grow. Services need to be raised much like people do.

BM: Interesting model, to apply Maslow to service.

Especially since Maslow is, even in psychology now, something that people do not really find super sexy anymore. But, I think it's good piece for conversation: ‘Is your service hungry? Is your service warm?’

RE: Right. Maslow as a framework has weaknesses, but it's a way to think about services in terms of growth and learning. You don't have to know Piaget's stages of development or Skinner's behavioural models to understand the principles of raising good services that live and evolve over time. I feel Maslow is accessible in that sense.

RE: Right. I would say – and this is probably an unfair statement – CX is service design for people that don't want to get their hands dirty with real problems. If you think about customer experience, to your point, it's easy to stay on the surface. It's easy to really not dig deep into the processes, the culture and the company's fibre. Illustrating the difference like a swimming pool: shallow end, deep end. It's like bringing CX into the deep end. When you're in the shallow end you can do a lot of things that are fun without knowing how to swim.

When you get into the deep end, you've really got to be able to swim at different depths, on multiple levels.

BM: In many cases, we say service design starts with wicked problems and with open-ended projects. And customer experience often has a clear briefing on what needs to be achieved, and that's quite a difference. Plus, I really like that the term ‘design’ is anchored in service

CL: In this issue of Touchpoint, we are bringing up the dis­

design. Because it makes clear, there is design.

cussion about the relationship between service design and customer experience. What is your perspective on it?

RE: I think largely that they are labels that will dissolve.

A lot of people I meet in advertising or in marketing might not know to call some aspects of their work ‘service design’ or might not know how much deeper they need to go to reach service design. In some ways, the real difference is how the discipline is applied. CX is really just an evolution of advertising by another name.

If you think about: ‘We're designing for moments of a service, or moments of an experience’, however you call it, it's largely the same end, but the journey makes all the difference. Sometimes I think customer experience can look a lot like service design, but the work lacks the right kind of research that reflects that initiative is designed for what people, it becomes pretty clear it's not truly human-centric. Customer experience as it's practiced – at least from what I've seen in Chicago – can very easily be company-centric instead of customer-centric…

BM: And ‘packaging’ instead of designing. Hiding the bumps by making them look nicer, instead of avoiding the bumps.

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RE: Service design, at least in my experience, usually can start in any number of different ways. I feel like customer experience looks at: ‘What are people doing? And how can we entice them to do something we want them to do?’. Whether that's the right thing or wrong thing for the person in their relationship with a brand. I think brands will end up realising that they have splintered themselves trying reach people they don’t know. If they are not delivering their core service, then all of those enhancing really nice – maybe even sexy design-type things – are really not that valuable because, at the end of the day, the relationship will suffer regardless of the how cool enhancing aspects of the service might be.

If the advertising community in Chicago had more of an ethnography mentality, they would gravitate towards service design instead of CX, but they gravitate towards CX because it is easier for them to sell repeatedly because they don’t solve any real problems. I feel like that's a personality difference between the people that practice service design versus CX. At a couple of CX events that I've been to, it's just advertising and ego. No one ever talked about their failures, what they learned in their

p ro f i l e s

process. If you go to a service design conference, people talk openly about their failures and what they learned from working with the people they were solving for. Also, the leaders in service design are so accessible. There's humility there. I feel like CX is very ephemeral and service design is fundamental, you can focus on the end-toend system and not just, ‘How can I sell you new things’.

Service design is much better at sustaining the relationships we form with the brands and services we live with.

Boston. There are great things going on in pockets, there's a pretty vibrant community springing up in the Raleigh/Durham area, St. Louis, Minnesota, Pittsburgh and many other places, but it has to connect to grow…

BM: Yes, we have to build that map and figure out a strategy where all the different hubs in the United States work together. We need to make sure that this energy creates synergy. That's going to be a very exciting time. We thank you for this really great interview. Very passionate!

CL: Based on this experience of yours, how do you see the future of service design in the U.S.?

RE: In the U.S., it's at a time when there are no small service design firms. They've all been bought. There's so much need and people that know to ask for it are grabbing it. And we have to see more cohesion within the United States. Chicago, for design, is a big city that's ­really a small town, but our ‘small town, big city’ is not necessarily connected with New York, San Francisco, Austin,

RE: Thanks for having me and it's a real honour to be asked. I also invite all readers to connect with the growing service design community here in the U.S. and join the Service Experience Chicago 2016: Systems of Care. A two-day conference focused on Service Design for healthcare and financial services as integral aspects of how we experience care. It will be hosted by General Assembly Chicago and Capital One on August, 25 – 26, 2016. Registration at www.serviceexperiencechicago.com

SDN members, log into the SDN web­site to get a discount code for this event!

Systems of Care August 25-26, 2016 serviceexperiencechicago.com

Presented by Touchpoint 7-3 81

inside sdn

A New Era at SDN

Some very exciting changes are taking place at the Service Design Network. Through­out the last 13 years, SDN has evolved from a network of passionate academics and practitioners, which shared thoughts and collaborated on small research projects, to an open community that we facilitate and encourage, creating evidence for service design as a strong and relevant discipline.

Today, SDN has become a strong creator of content, publications, reports and initiatives. We’ve become a really genuine and inspiring network that strengthens the idea of service design as a driver for success in the public and private service sectors.

Redefining SDN core values Throughout recent years we have sharpened our strategy. Our main purpose is to build awareness for service design in the public and private service sectors, and in the world of policy makers. We have grown to become, among other things, a promoter of service design as a discipline.

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I strongly believe that by promoting service design, we will also strengthen the market for our agencies, we will strengthen the opportunities for our academic members, and we will strengthen the relevance of

New brand identity The difference is evident at first glance. We are giving a fresh and modern identity to SDN. Implicitly, this change also symbolises a new level of maturity: we have evolved from a facilitator for the service design community, to a curator and creator of content. This is what the new brand identity, the logo and the website stand for.

service design industries.

We will continue to facilitate communications. We will continue to curate platforms for exchange, but we will, more than ever before, create content that is relevant for the community and for the growth of service design.

More benefits for the community The most evident benefit for our members is that access to our digital platform is a lot easier. The content is organised in a much more inviting way. Members can create and upload their content. The personal member

profiles are more fun and attractive – they show more of the creative personality of SDN, and its members.

The Service Design Network has a continuously growing community of associated members – people that follow us, that join in our conversations and that are loosely connected to SDN. With the new era of SDN, we want to embrace them and give them an official space as community members. And there is an abundance of content for these community members associated with SDN. The impact that we have as a lobbying organisation is strengthening the discipline of service design – this impact will be bigger the more members and

community members we have. So we are opening up – we are embracing everyone who is passionate and interested in service design.

The future of SDN, the future of service design Service design as a practice will accelerate its growth. It has been growing continuously over the last 20 years, but now it has reached a point of massive acceleration. It becomes apparent when we see companies hiring more service designers, companies that are building their own service design expertise within the organisation and companies acquiring service design agencies. We see a growing market with many opportunities

for service design as a strategic instrument and as a hands-on practice to improve and innovate service experiences for users all over the world.

The Service Design Network will be the driver for this development.

We will connect the inspiring people, and we will equip our community with knowledge, methods and the tools they need in order to successfully apply and evolve service design.

By Birgit Mager, President of Service Design Network.

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Service Design National Conference in Japan: ‘Evolution of Service Design in Japan’ SDN Japan Chapter held its 3rd Service Design National Conference on 23 January 2016, at Fujiwara Hall, Keio University. It was a full-day conference with 200 participants from various industries and agencies.

Three years have passed since the SDN Japan Chapter was founded, and since the basic concept of service design has become known in Japan. Meanwhile, a lot of companies have started service design projects and, therefore, this conference was expected to share outcomes and ongoing issues.

Hideki Omiya from Recruit – the largest service business company in Japan – presented their brand-new business named AirREGI, a virtual point-of-sale (POS) terminal service and explained their vision and how they developed the ecosystem. Akira Kudo from IBM Interactive Experi-

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ence presented their global and local strategies, and shared their idea of service design skill development.

Also Hiroshi Yamaguchi from Dai Nippon Printing Service Design Lab presented their three-year j­ ourney in the realm of service design.

Besides these guests, international speakers such as Jamin Hegeman from AdaptivePath/SDN, Katrine Rau from GE, Alisan Atvur from Novo Nordisk and Tenny Pinheiro from Hivelab shared topics from the service design global community with Japanese practitioners.

There were also two panel discussions with speakers, moderated by Masanao Takeyama and Atsushi Hasegawa, the representatives of the SDN Japan Chapter. We explored

the agenda of service design in Japan from various points of view. A reception party was also held after the conference, where participants could network and discuss their issues.

During this conference, we found out our common agenda and topics such as interdisciplinary partnerships, differences between large companies and start-ups, and the tacit knowledge of organisations.

Several ideas on Special Interest Group (SIG) emerged from the discussions and SDN Japan Chapter is determined to keep up its activity.

Atsushi Hasegawa, Ph.D., is President of Concent. He is a member of SDN National Chapter Board, representative of SDN Japan Chapter and the co-chair of the Service Design National Conference in Japan.

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vol 8 no 1

| | may 2016

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About the Service Design Network The Service Design Network is the global centre for recognising and promoting excellence in the field of service design. Through national and international events, online and print publications, and coordination with academic institutions, the network connects multiple disciplines within agencies, business, and government to strengthen the impact of service design both in the public and private sector.

Service Design Network Office | Ubierring 40 | 50678 Cologne | Germany | www.service-design-network.org