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Serv ice Des ign
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Serv ice des ign: Des igning exper iences that create valueDoing business is a lot like playing hockey. To be successful, you need a skilled and well-balanced team. You need a game plan that directs you towards success, and everyone on the team needs to know the role they play in executing the game plan. Let’s be honest, minus the pads, big wooden sticks and the various types of checking, that sounds a lot like what you do to build a successful business, right?
The most important thing a hockey player can do once they hit the ice is gain control of the puck, and with the help of their teammates, guide the puck across the ice to score a goal. Wayne Gretzky, the Great One, was extremely good at that. When he was asked to explain how he became so good, he said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
That quote becomes significant for businesses when you realize that in a business context the puck is really your customer base.
In a blog post for the Harvard Business Review®, author Ravi Sawhney explains that businesses operate in an environment of constant change. And while customers are certainly not simple, they can be “both logical and irrational, motivated by opportunity and emotion, full of contradiction, impacted by economic conditions, and often difficult to define,” they more or less remain the same over time.1 That being the case, Sawhney proposes, “If you want to know how to be best positioned for business success, you have to understand where [your customers] are going.”2
So what can you do to become more successful at anticipating where the puck’s going to be? May we humbly suggest drafting a Gretzky? And by Gretzky, we mean service design. What is it? Put simply, when you have two coffee shops right next to each other that sell the same product at the same price, service design is the reason why you walk into one shop and not the other.3
At its heart, service design is about understanding customer behavior, and using
that understanding to design new offerings, or change existing ones, to deliver a
better experience for customers. In today’s hyper-competitive environment where
products and services are quickly commoditized, service design provides a means
of creating customized consumer experiences that drive unrealized value and
increase ROI.
1 Sawhney, Ravi. “People Are the Puck.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 01 Sept. 2011. Web. 25 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/people_are_the_puck.html>.
2 Ibid3 Stickdorn, Mark, and Jakob Schneider. This Is Service Design Thinking: Basics - Tools - Cases. Amsterdam: BIS,
2012. Print.
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The economic case for serv ice des ignAuthor Joseph Pine lays out the economic case for service design in his TED®
Talk “What consumers want.” In his presentation, Pine charts the evolution of
economic value over time.4 He illustrates it this way:
• Commodities—This is where it all started. Originally, commodities involved
extracting things (crops from the ground, fruit from trees, etc.) and selling
them. The value comes from having the commodities to sell or trade
º Example: A coffee bean. As a commodity it has a value of 2¢ to 3¢.
• Goods—Goods were the next evolution of economic value. Goods involved
taking commodities and turning them into something. The economic value
comes from what’s put into making the finished good.
º Example: Packaged coffee (roasted, ground and packaged on a shelf). As
a “good,” that same coffee bean now has a value of 10¢ to 15¢.
• Services—Services developed from taking goods and customizing them,
leading to the birth of a service-based economy. Once a service becomes
common, however, it starts to become commoditized.
º Example: Brewed coffee. Now, as a result of performing the
service of brewing, the value of the coffee is 50¢ to $1 for a cup.
• Experiences—Experience, the outcome of service design, is what
results when you customize a service. This is where the new
economic value is being created—think about the rise in value from
the simple brewed coffee service supplied by Burger King® to the
experience of meeting for coffee at Starbucks®.
º Example: Starbucks, where the experience has a value of $2 to
$5 per drink.
Service design is a means of aligning your organization in terms of
people, infrastructure, and other resources, to best enable it to move
from offering goods and services to offering experiences. In today’s economy,
consumers have tons of choices for both goods and services. Organizations that
provide authentic experiences, where consumers leave feeling better about
themselves and, therefore the brand, are the organizations that will prosper.
The authentic part of that equation is just as important as the experience part.
Pine points out, “… authenticity is … becoming the new consumer sensibility—
the buying criteria by which consumers are choosing who [they’re] going to buy
from, and what they’re going to buy.”5 This is where service design can really
create impact. If done properly, you’re designing your experience considering how
4 Pine, Joseph. “Joseph Pine: What Consumers Want.” TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Jan. 2009. Web. 25 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_pine_on_what_consumers_want.html>.
5 Pine, Joseph. “Joseph Pine: What Consumers Want.” TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Jan. 2009. Web. 25 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_pine_on_what_consumers_want.html>.
© 2013 4imprint, Inc. All rights reserved
customers will interact with you across the entire company. Providing a consistent
experience across all touch points is vital to building authenticity. The key is to
act like you, and do what you say you’ll do at each point in the experience. That
communicates authenticity. Fail to do that, and Pine says, “That’s when you’re
perceived as fake, as a phony company—advertising things that you’re not.”6
Service design, like any major business initiative, will require investment. Peter
Merholz, president of Adaptive Path and an internationally recognized thought
leader on user experience, emphasizes that point in his Harvard Business Review
article titled “Customer Experience Is an Investment, Not a Cost.” He says:
Typically, design is considered a cost—a necessary element of business,
the expense of which should be managed to be as small as possible. But
when you realize that successful design has an impact, driving heretofore
unrealized value, you must think of it as an investment, akin to marketing
or product development, where what matters is a return, and where
spending less can actually be detrimental to your top- and bottom-lines.7
Merholz explains that the companies that understand this principle best are
able to “… connect core business problems, customer behavior, and financial
metrics.”8 In other words, companies that invest in service design, aligning
their organizations to improve the interaction between the organization and
its customers, will start to realize untapped value from solving core business
problems in ways that improve the customer experience.
Merholz outlines a process for quickly identifying business opportunities
and determining the potential financial impact of using service design to
achieve the desired behavior change. He calls it the “linking elephants,”
and it goes a little something like this:9
• Business Opportunity— What is the specific opportunity?
• Desired Behavior— What exactly are you hoping your customer will do?
• Behavior Metric—What’s your target metric for your desired behavior? What
could it amount to in terms of units?
• Value Metric— What’s the value in dollars of the desired behavior?
• Financial Outcome— Your Behavior Metric multiplied by your Value Metric
equals your financial outcome.
6 Ibid7 Merholz, Peter. “Customer Experience Is an Investment, Not a Cost.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard
Business School Publishing, 19 May 2009. Web. 25 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/merholz/2009/05/customer-experience-is-an-investment-not-a-cost.html>.
8 Ibid9 Ibid
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Here’s Merholz’s example, showing how you could quickly gauge the
impact of investing in a “suggested items” area prior to check out on
an e-commerce website:10
• Business Opportunity— Increase purchases per visit.
• Desired Behavior—Customers purchase one additional item per visit.
• Behavior Metric— 5% of visits lead to an additional sale. With 20,000 visits
per week, that equates to 1000 additional items per week.
• Value Metric— Average item price is $12.74.
• Financial Outcome— $12,740 of additional revenue per week.
The linking elephants is a simple tool you can use to quantify that
untapped value that Merholz mentions. And will that investment yield
a return? Put simply, the untapped value can be substantial. Oracle®
Corporation’s most recent Customer Experience Impact Report reveals
that an astounding 86% of consumers would pay more for a better
experience.11 Equally astounding, 89% of consumers give a competitor a
try after a bad experience.12 The report goes on to quantify what those
percentages mean in potential increased revenues for certain industries.
Hold on to your hats … according to the Oracle report, the U.S. airline
industry could have made an additional $8.94 billion in 2010 by providing
a better customer experience.13 Wireless carriers, an additional $14.65
billion each year.14
These are not small numbers. So the real question becomes, can you afford
NOT to adopt service design? Can you afford to gamble with the commoditization
of your products and services? There’s really only one reasonable answer to
that question.
Clearly, investing in service design could generate a significant return for your
organization. But just like with any investment, you have to be clear about your
goals, you have to make a plan for reaching those goals, you need to do some
research and you need to be able to measure your progress so you can adjust
along the way. That’s how you maximize your return, and it’s no different with
service design.
10 Ibid11 Oracle Corporation. 2011 Customer Experience Impact Report. Rep. Oracle Corporation, Jan. 2012. Web. 28
Mar. 2013. <http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/cust-exp-impact-report-epss-1560493.pdf>.12 Ibid13 Oracle Corporation. 2011 Customer Experience Impact Report. Rep. Oracle Corporation, Jan. 2012. Web. 28
Mar. 2013. <http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/cust-exp-impact-report-epss-1560493.pdf>.14 Ibid
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Sett ing your goals and doing your researchIf you want to understand someone, walk a mile in their shoes. It’s a common
saying that we’ve all heard for years. But the secret to its staying power is its
simple truth. Understanding someone, and understanding their motivation, takes
time and study. Service design is built on that practice. But before you start, it’s
important to know where you’re headed. While it’s true that service design is
about taking a holistic view of how your customer interacts with your company,
it’s important, as Peter Merholz pointed out, to identify the core business
problems that you’re trying to diagnose before you start.
One way to start would be to think about what stops your customers from
committing to purchase from you? Obviously the point of creating great customer
experiences is to convert those experiences into purchases. So as you begin to
think about the goals of your service design efforts, consider what customer
needs you must satisfy to motivate them to commit to a purchase.
Merholz, in another blog post for the Harvard Business Review, articulates three
specific sets of requirements that customers need to satisfy before they’ll be
prepared to commit to a purchase.15 They are:
• Functional— Does the product or service meet my basic needs?
• Intellectual—Through comparison, I’m confident I’m getting the best deal?
• Emotional— Could I have a relationship with this brand?
Merholz found that until consumers were able to satisfy all three sets
of requirements, they would go through the motions but never commit
to purchasing. In the context of service design, when you analyze your
customers’ interactions with your company, look for the areas where
customers seem to be on the path to purchasing, and then drop off.
When looking at customer experience with your brand from a holistic perspective,
are they able to fulfill all three sets of requirements? Or do you need to provide a
means for meeting a functional, intellectual, or emotional requirement along the
way? Answering that question may be the key to creating the valuable experience
your customers are looking for that allows them to commit to purchasing. Once
you have some initial goals or targets in place, it’s time to start walking in your
customers’ shoes and mapping the journey.
15 Merholz, Peter. “It’s Not Who Your Customers Are, It’s How They Behave.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 11 Feb. 2009. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/merholz/2009/02/its-not-who-your-customers-are.html>.
© 2013 4imprint, Inc. All rights reserved
Customer journey mappingOne of the realities of business success is as your company grows, a smaller and
smaller percentage of your employees actually interact with customers. This can
lead to a natural, gradual detachment from what it’s really like to interact with
and buy from your company. Since service design is all about understanding
your customers’ behavior and providing them with experiences that provide
value for them, losing touch with what their experiences are like is dangerous.
That’s exactly why so many companies that embrace service design also embrace
customer journey mapping.
Harley Manning, co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the
Center of Your Business, explains the importance of customer journey mapping in
his recent blog post for the Harvard Business Review:
What’s the best way to optimize your customer experience?
Why not fix it where it happens? Improve the experience
on your website. Improve the experience in your retail
locations or call centers. This strategy makes perfect sense,
and it aligns nicely with the way your company is probably
organized—with the website, retail locations, and contact
centers each in their neat little silo.
But based on our research, this natural strategy doesn’t
work because it lacks any understanding of the larger, cross-
channel journeys that your customers take.16
In the post, Manning explains the mapping process is about determining customer
goals, perceptions and behaviors in a holistic way. He says, “Customer journey
maps visually illustrate those findings by showing the series of events that make
up a customer’s interactions with a firm over time. The maps help companies find
problems that occur in the ‘white space’ as a customer passes from one channel
to another.”17
16 Manning, Harley. “Customer Experience Should Be Part of Your Business.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 29 Aug. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/customer_experience_should_be.html>.
17 Ibid
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We mentioned Starbucks earlier as an example of an experience versus a good
or service. Here’s an example customer journey map developed by Little Springs
Design documenting the customer experience at a Starbucks location, noting both
positive and negative aspects of the visit:18
Here’s another example from Lego® mapping the experience for an executive
visiting them in New York City:19
18 Starbucks Experience Map. 2010. Photograph. Littlespringsdesign.com. Little Springs Design. By Little Springs Design. Little Springs Design, 28 Mar. 2010. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://old.littlespringsdesign.com/wp-content/themes/LSD%20theme/images/experiencemap1.pdf>.
19 Temkin, Bruce. “LEGO’s Building Block For Good Experiences.” Customer Experience Matters. Temkin Group, 3 Mar. 2009. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/legos-building-block-for-good-experiences/>.
© 2013 4imprint, Inc. All rights reserved
Manning points to a couple of examples of companies who have effectively
utilized customer journey mapping to better understand their customers and how
they can create better experiences for them:
FedEx®20
The shipping giant went so far as to create a Channel Strategy and
Orchestration Team in 2008 that was organized outside of any of the
existing company silo. The team utilized customer journey mapping to
understand what customers experienced when they transitioned from one
channel within the company to another, like from the website to a local
FedEx location or a phone agent.
The mapping process helped the team clearly identify opportunities for
improvement in all areas of the company. Since the Channel Strategy and
Orchestration Team doesn’t exist in any siloed unit, it’s been able to more
effectively coordinate the efforts for improvement across the company
channels. FedEx’s focus on the customer experience is paying off, and the
company was recently voted the industry leader in customer experience
according to the 2013 Temkin Experience Ratings Survey, an annual survey
of ten thousand U.S. consumers that ranks two hundred and forty-six
companies in nineteen industries.21
Virgin Media®22
Virgin Media, the largest Virgin company in the world, operates
a mobile network, provides broadband service, and home phone
and pay TV services. The challenge for Virgin Media was to create
a consistent and valuable experience across multiple channels
and product lines. The company embarked on an aggressive
customer journey mapping project focused on six specific
customer journeys within their company, including subscribing,
paying, and customer support. Manning describes the ever-
evolving customer journey map as, “a giant sheet of brown butcher paper
covered in red pieces of tape and multi-colored sticky notes. It links all six
journeys together in a continuous flow that crosses five functional silos
within the business.”23
20 Manning, Harley. “Customer Experience Should Be Part of Your Business.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 29 Aug. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/customer_experience_should_be.html>.
21 Temkin, Bruce. “FedEx Leads Parcel Delivery Services in 2013 Temkin Experience Ratings.” FedEx Leads Parcel Delivery Services in 2013 Temkin Experience Ratings. Temkin Group, 21 Mar. 2013. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/fedex-leads-parcel-delivery-industry-in-2013-temkin-experience-ratings/>.
22 Manning, Harley. “Customer Experience Should Be Part of Your Business.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 29 Aug. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/customer_experience_should_be.html>.
23 Ibid
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Virgin Media uses customer journey mapping in conjunction with the
Net Promoter Score system to track how their changes to the customer
experience changes their customers’ opinion of the company. Since
embarking on the initiative, Virgin Media has seen an eighteen-point
increase in their net promoter score24, which represents a significant
improvement in customer opinion. In addition, customer churn has been
reduced by an impressive twenty percent.25
Mapping the customer journey gives you a holistic view of how your company
treats customers, and will give you insight into what the overall experience of
buying from your company is like. The key takeaway here is to focus on the
customers’ experiences and not on your own internal organizational structure.
Fix the problems that customers experience as they transition from one business
channel to another to create a truly valuable customer experience.
Design personasNow that you’ve got a map of your customers’ interactions with your
company, a map that you can use to identify opportunities to improve their
overall experience, it’s vital to define just exactly who your customers really
are. A design persona is just that. Officially, it’s defined as:
Models of key behaviors, attributes, motivations, and goals of a
company’s target customers. A persona is created from primary research
with real customers and takes the form of a vivid narrative description of
a single person who represents a behavioral segment. Organizations use
personas to guide the design of products, channels, and messaging.26
One of the key aspects of that definition is the fact that personas are created
from primary research. Design personas should be an embodiment of what your
research tells you. You’re bringing your customers to life, but the trick is to do so
in a way that accurately segments customers by behaviors. Steve Mulder, Director
of User Experience & Analytics for NPR® Digital Services, in his book The User Is
Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web says
this about design personas, “Personas are expanding from a design tool you use
to decide how to implement a strategy into a strategic tool you use to help define
a strategy in the first place.”27
24 Satmetrix Systems, Inc. “Virgin Media: Embracing the Net Promoter® Discipline at Virgin Media - Putting the Customer at the Heart of the Business.” Satmetrix. Satmetrix Systems, Inc., 2010. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.satmetrix.com/documents/pdfs/VirginMedia-CaseStudy.pdf>.
25 Satmetrix Systems, Inc. “Virgin Media: Embracing the Net Promoter® Discipline at Virgin Media - Putting the Customer at the Heart of the Business.” Satmetrix. Satmetrix Systems, Inc., 2010. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.satmetrix.com/documents/pdfs/VirginMedia-CaseStudy.pdf>.
26 Rapide. “The Future of Customer Experience.” The Future of Customer Experience. SlideShare Inc., 30 May 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.slideshare.net/rapideuk/the-future-of-customer-experience>.
27 Mulder, Steve, and Ziv Yaar. The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2007. Print.
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When developing a design persona, you want to make them as detailed as you
can. Really flesh them out, and make them as real as possible. Include a picture
that’s representative of the group the persona represents. Give him or her a
name, and detail their background. Where do they live? What do they do for a
living? What’s their family like? What are their hobbies? Most importantly, what
is their experience goal with your company? What are they hoping for from
your brand?
Again, the personas are there to help you develop your specific strategy in
conjunction with the customer journey map. As Mulder puts it, “Personas give
you a valuable framework for creating and prioritizing business initiatives, and a
way to enable more effective distribution and alignment of strategy throughout
the organization.”28
You’ve framed your goals, and now you have your customer journey map and
design personas to check your assumptions against. Set your final strategy based
on the research presented by those two tools, and start designing a more valuable
experience for your customers.
Putt ing serv ice des ign into act ionWe’ve talked about service design as a holistic approach for creating experiences
that add value for your customers, and that distinguishes your brand from
competitors. We’ve talked about the economic case for service design, and how
it’s an investment in your relationship with your customers. Now it’s time to make
change. In order to make that happen, you need to treat your services with the
same level of design and detail as you would if you were engineering a car or a
building. You need a detailed blueprint.
The serv ice bluepr intThe key to service design and delivering a valuable experience is making
that experience both authentic and consistent. Consistency is a tough thing
with services because they so often depend on people, and people can be
notoriously inconsistent. That’s precisely where the service blueprint comes
in. The service blueprint is exactly what it says it is, a specific and detailed
design for how a particular service should be performed.
The service blueprint’s goal is to help your organization move beyond depending
on an individual to deliver “great service,” and instead move to a consistent and
authentic customized service that delivers an exceptional experience for your
customers … consistently and without fail.
28 Ibid
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G. Lynn Shostack, senior vice president in charge of the Private Clients Group
at Bankers Trust Company and former chair of the American Marketing
Association’s special task force on service marketing, makes the case for service
blueprints in an article she authored for Harvard Business Review. In the article,
she emphasizes the importance of taking the same disciplined approach to
designing services as most companies do to designing products. She says, “Better
service design provides the key to market success, and more important,
to growth.”29
The service blueprint is designed to guide companies through exploring all of
the issues related to creating and managing a service. In order to create a service
blueprint, you need to:30
• Identify processes— What are the things that will constitute
a service?
• Isolate fail points— Where could things go wrong and what
would happen if they did?
• Establish the time frame— What’s the standard execution
time for the service you’re designing? You would use this for
calculating the cost of performing the service.
• Analyze profitability— What does your profitability look like
under normal circumstances? How would delays affect your
profitability?
Graphically lay these elements out to create a literal blueprint of how the service
would be performed. At the design stage, the key is to consider every interaction
between your customers and your company. Things that are considered to
be good personal service, like a great attitude and attentiveness, should be
incorporated into the hiring, training and performance measurement practices
of the company.31
The real advantage of the service blueprint is that it allows you to map out
the entire service and its various customer interactions on paper and test your
assumptions. Really walk through it thoroughly to find the bugs and rectify them
before the service even makes it off the paper. This will save you time and
money, and also protect your brand from delivering poor experiences to your
customers. Consider testing the service as a “prototype,” and iterating quickly
based on feedback.
29 Shostack, G. Lynn. “Designing Services That Deliver.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, Jan. 1984. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://hbr.org/1984/01/designing-services-that-deliver/ar/1>.
30 Ibid31 Shostack, G. Lynn. “Designing Services That Deliver.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School
Publishing, Jan. 1984. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://hbr.org/1984/01/designing-services-that-deliver/ar/1>.
© 2013 4imprint, Inc. All rights reserved
Handing your customers the controlsSpeaking of feedback, the last key aspect of service design to keep in mind is
the part where you check your progress and make adjustments as you iterate
your new design. We’ve established that service design can be a critical
investment for your organization, helping to align your company and its
customers to create experiences that provide real value. “Align” is the key
word here. It means “to bring into cooperation or agreement with a particular
group, party, cause, etc.”32 In the case of service design, that’s an extremely
appropriate definition, because to effectively utilize service design, you’ll be
cooperating with your customers to design a mutually beneficial experience.
And in order to do that, you’ll need to listen and give your customers a certain
degree of control over your brand as you iterate.
Giving up control can sound frightening, but service design is a collaborative
animal. It only works if you focus on listening and learning about your customers
and understanding their behaviors. Knowing who they are, what they want, and
what you can do to make their experience more memorable is the goal of service
design. Once you’re able to answer those questions, you may find that the results
require you to give your customers more or less control over your brand.
Tim Leberecht, chief marketing officer of NBBJ and founder of the award
winning “Design Mind” print and online magazine, details the concept of
“usefully losing control of your brand.” In his TED Talk, “3 ways to (usefully)
lose control of your brand,” Leberecht describes two very different
approaches for how organizations can use varying amounts of control when
designing their experiences, ultimately making customers happier.
Give customers more controlAs we’ve discussed, service design is a deliberate cooperative effort
between a business and its customers focused on creating valuable experiences
that make customers happier and, as a result, differentiate the brand from
competitors. In his talk, Leberecht provides a few examples of brands that gave
customers an unprecedented level of control over their businesses in an effort to
create a unique customer experience.
Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows33
Leberecht points to this example as an extreme collaboration with
customers in terms of pricing. When Radiohead released “In Rainbows” in
32 “Align.” Definition of Align. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/align>.
33 Leberecht, Tim. “Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand.” TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>.
© 2013 4imprint, Inc. All rights reserved
the fall of 2007, the band decided to offer it online only with a pay-as-you-
like model. For a limited time, consumers could download the album and
pay whatever they thought it was worth, even if that price was free.
The experiment created a lot of buzz for the album, and initial sales were
up from previous Radiohead releases. The band realized they could create
a better and more exciting experience for their customers by eliminating
the price barrier to listening to their new music and turning the control of
pricing over to their fans.
The launch of Microsoft® Kinect®34
Leberecht highlights the case of Microsoft’s popular Kinect motion
controller for its Xbox gaming system. When the device was
initially released, it was quickly hacked. Microsoft’s first reaction
was to fight the hacks and frantically publish software updates to
combat them.
But the software giant ended up changing course once it realized that
allowing the hacks was actually creating a better experience for its
customers. It supported the gaming community by allowing for more
functionality, it created buzz for the product, and it helped create a sense
of co-ownership between the company and its gaming customers. The
“hackability” of the Kinect has spawned an entire ecosystem around the
device, similar to Apple’s App Store. It seems clear, according to a recent
New York Times article, that the openness of the Kinect contributed to
it getting into the Guinness Book of World Records for fastest-selling
consumer device ever.35 And it’s still rolling …
Give customers less controlUnderstanding customer behavior can sometimes lead to surprising results. For
example, sometimes the right answer is to give your customers less control over
their experience. That might be exactly what they’re looking for. To make the
point, Leberecht offers a simple observation, “Giving people less control might be
a wonderful way to counter the abundance of choice and make them happier.”36
He offers two powerful examples of how service design has lead to great
customer experiences by limiting choice.
34 Ibid35 Walker, Rob. “Freaks, Geeks and Microsoft: How Kinect Spawned a Commercial Ecosystem.” The New York
Times. The New York Times, 03 June 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/magazine/how-kinect-spawned-a-commercial-ecosystem.html?pagewanted=all>.
36 Leberecht, Tim. “Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand.” TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>.
© 2013 4imprint, Inc. All rights reserved
Nextpedition®37
The service from American Express® designed for travel enthusiasts in
their 20’s and 30’s creates an exciting vacation experience where the
destination and itinerary are completely unknown until the journey
begins. The itinerary is revealed daily via a smartphone app. The service
creates a completely customized and unique experience by taking control
completely away from the customer.38 The service has since racked up over
two million likes on Facebook.39
Interflora®40
The UK-based florist monitored Twitter® looking for users who were
having a bad day. When they found one, they sent them a free
bouquet of flowers. A great experience where the customer had
no control over the outcome, but it made them happier according
to their joyous replies back to the company. The campaign led to
thousands of social mentions which helped boost Interflora in search
rankings as well.41
While it’s clear that control is a key part of successfully implementing service
design, Leberecht concludes his presentation with the same point that
Joseph Pine made at the end of his: When engaging customers, he emphasizes,
“At the end of the day, as hyper connectivity and transparency expose companies’
behavior in broad daylight, staying true to their true selves is the only sustainable
value proposition.”42 Authenticity matters, especially when you begin to give
greater control over your brand to your customers. Service design requires
openness in order to really transform products and services into experiences.
Conclus ionWe started this Blue Paper talking about hockey, and the importance of being
able to anticipate where the puck is GOING to be. In hockey, that’s everything.
In business, that same principle applies. The key is to know your customer to the
37 Leberecht, Tim. “Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand.” TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>.
38 McCracken, Grant. “The Revolution Inside AmEx’s Nextpedition.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 6 Feb. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/02/american_express_has_launched.html>.
39 Schmid, Corinne. “Enterprise Gamification.” Enterprise Gamification by ItzCorinne. SlideShare Inc., 26 Sept. 2011. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.slideshare.net/itzCorinne/enterprise-gamification-by-itzcorinne>.
40 Leberecht, Tim. “Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand.” TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>.
41 Essex, Mike. “Using Free Stuff to Leverage SEO and Online Brand Building.”Koozaicom. Koozai Ltd., 5 Apr. 2011. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/using-free-stuff-to-leverage-seo-and-online-brand-building-756/>.
42 Leberecht, Tim. “Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand.” TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>.
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point of understanding their behavior and motivations. If you can get there,
you can anticipate where they’re headed and meet them there with an amazing
experience that makes them happier about your brand.
Service design is the application of that concept. As we discussed, today
economic value is being created by experiences: Authentic, consistent
experiences that make consumers happy. Service design provides a
comprehensive approach to learning about customers, then using what
you learn to systematically design a customized service that can be
delivered consistently to create an exceptional customer experience.
Tools like customer journey mapping, design personas and the service
blueprint will help you understand your customers’ behaviors. You can use that
understanding to create new customized services to meet the needs of your
customers, improving the holistic experience of interacting with your company.
Products and services are quickly commoditized today, and service design provides
a means of differentiation through customized consumer experiences that drive
unrealized value and increase ROI. Time to suit up and hit the ice. Just remember,
make sure to skate to where the puck is going to be.
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