Academically speaking
Š Brand Manual, 2018 All rights reserved
Academically speaking
This book is academically inclined An academic inclination has been determined to be a casual 7 degrees off center, against a lamp post or door way. First perfected by James Dean.
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Service design is the method whereby we do our work. We focus on understanding what actually creates value for the end customer, and then build the brand, service or product based on that insight. In essence, it is about designing the customer experience (the “how” you do things) because the “what” is give or take exactly the same as what your competitor does. Essentially, all banks, telcos, cars, clothes, airlines and so on, do the same thing. But how they do it, can be radically different from each other.
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# Wilson
The customer experience matters, because 92%* of purchases are made based on recommendations from friends. And it is their customer experience that recommendations are based on, both online and offline. This is what you read about, because before you buy something, you google it. You’ll find out how it was to choose it, buy it, use it and get help with it. Which is why designing the customer experience is the most important competitive advantage you can control.
* Source: Nielsen
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Want Need
Service design is a way to help see your company from your customers’ perspective. And understand that your customer’s journey from need to satisfaction is much longer than just the moment of transaction, when they finally buy something from you. By helping the customer throughout their whole journey, you can ensure that the transaction is as valuable to them, as it is to you.
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UY BBUY
Designing services, that take into account all touch-points along the customer’s journey from need to satisfaction, ensures that value is delivered to the customer, not just a product or service. After all, service delivered does not automatically equal value received. Understanding, what is actually valuable to the customer, ensures that the company focuses on the right issues.
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Or like Lucius Burckhardt put it in Design is invisible, “It isn’t the streetcar that makes the experience good. It is the timetable.”
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Learning service design is about learning empathy. You’ll learn the methods and tools of how you can “walk a mile in your customer’s shoes,” to realise, that no matter how good the shoes, they won’t improve the pavement.
Understanding your customers' motivation behind decisions, why they do things, not just what, will allow you to become not only customer centric, but customer responsive throughout your whole organisation.
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Every company needs service design. But you don’t want a bunch of consultants to come in and mess up your services for you. You want to be able to do that yourself. Which is why we spent over 400 hours putting together a course for service design. It doesn’t cover everything we know about service design, let alone everything that can be known about service design.
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It describes how we work. What we know works. And what will work for you. 21
Service design has two distinct parts
> Deliver
Discover > Define
1. Figuring out what the actual problems are, that your customers face. 2. Developing and testing solutions to the problem, with customers, until the best one is launched. The following pages contain an easy step-by-step guide. Just follow the steps.
Develop > Deliver
Discover >
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1997 Don't get in strangers' cars! Don't meet people from the internet!
2017 Summon strangers from the internet to get in their car.
It all starts with abandoning your most closely held presumptions. Not because they are wrong. But because the may be outdated. 25
Before you rush off, write stuff down.
Define your expectations. Do this go give yourself a pointof-reference, so that at the end of the project you can explain to others what you did, what you learned and what was so different about service design vs business as usual.
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Your team
Multi-disciplinary, crossfunctional, T-shaped. The more diverse the better. The more different viewpoints you have, the more useful the end result will be.
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Customer journey mapping Define the context of your customer and service. What are the stages of the journey, who are the stakeholders, what is the timeframe, what are the restrictions?
To create a journey map you’ll need to work with personas. You’ll need to do quite a bit of research to create useful ones that you can run a workshop with.
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The journey map will have taught you quite a bit, so you’re tempted to see it as gospel. Don’t. Use the journey map you’ve created to define the research methods that you need to uncover the true plight of your customers, and how they really feel along their journey from need to satisfaction.
Validating your journey map with real customers Talk to real customers. In their home. And take your time. You’ll probably learn that they are using your product wrong. Which is OK, and means you’ll have to reconsider where value is actually created. Because the one thing you’ll invariably find out is, that what is difficult for you is just a hygiene factor for your customer. And what they love about you, was something you thought was just a side-effect. 33
Touchpoints. Touchpoints. Touchpoints. Map internal processes and structures as well as the external touchpoints between your brand and your customer. By including all the direct and indirect ways your brand touches on your customers, you’ll see that instead of dozens
you may have hundreds of interaction points, most of which will be outside your control. To understand what’s going and why, you’ll need to do deep interviews with stakeholders.
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If possible, observe your customers using your product or service. You’ll learn a lot.
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Along the way, while doing all this research, you’ll manage to have quite a few Heureka moments: ideas about what could be improved. Both inside your company and for customers. What could be simplified. Improved. Re-invented. You’ll ask yourself, why you didn’t see this before. Your new ideas can be validated, through benchmarking. Because your ideas are responses to problems and opportunities along the customer’s journey from need to satisfaction, you can research other companies and / or industries, where similar problems have already
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been solved. The better you are at root-cause analysis, the more likely you are to be able to see the actual problem and realise, that the same problem has already been solved in other places.
Which provides you with the cheapest way to innovation – steal good ideas. 6
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Eventually, you’ll come to the point, where you actually understand your customers and what they actually have problems with. Now, half the battle is won, because you are re-defining the problem from your customer’s point-of-view. You see where your business is actually creating value for your customers. And where you just thought it was.
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Now is the time to look back at your initial expectations and where research led you. And put together a presentation to your disbelieving colleagues that proves that this service design stuff actually works. By including your initial expectations, you are illustrating the importance of empathy and process, and that the results are not just opinion.
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If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.
You know who
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The discovery process until the clear and concise description of problems to be solved, is fairly standard. It follows a pattern that can be easily predicted and planned. No matter if the business is huge or tiny, spread out or homogenous. The logistics of the exercise usually take up more time than the actual digging. Once you’ve found the problems that actually need to be solved, it is time to find the right solution. Which is where things get tricky. Even talking about it is complicated because, it all depends. 45
Now, we could go on but there are two rules in life, if you’re good at something:
1. Don’t tell them everything you know and 2.
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Curious? Interested? Titillated? We do service design every day and have prepared a number of courses that can be custom tailored to your company’s challenges. Get in touch and we’ll be more than happy to teach you how to do it yourself. Or you can wait until next year, when we’ll publish the second half of this story. 49
What the whole course covers
Hypothetical customer journey map Starting the project: defining presumptions and gathering the right team
Research methods Personas Timeframe definition
Before start
Touchpoint mapping
BenchDiscover > Define marking
Understanding context
Ideation Customer journey map validation Conversations w/ stakeholders
Story t
Visuali
Con definition problem solv
telling
isation
ncise n of the m to be ved
BM canvas Service blueprint
Brand platform Touchpoint design!
Develop > Deliver
Launch and feedback loop
Hi-fi prototyping
Lo-fi prototyping
KPI
After the end Summarising the project: learnings and observations
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Brand Manual is a service design and branding consultancy. We help improve products and services one touchpoint at a time. We make them talk about you.
www.thebrandmanual.com/ bm-academy
It is nine years since we started Brand Manual. And 8 years since we started to annoy clients, partners and acquaintances with these little books that contain nuggets of wisdom and pages of random access memories, which may have (or not have), wisdom contained within them. This book is no different. This book describes our service design course.
This book is about learning service design. Which according to Forrester is the most important design discipline you’ve never heard of.
Previously, on the subjects of Service Design, Future, Innovation and Branding: www.issuu.com/thebrandmanual