Service Design vs. Bureaucracy: How Human is Your Business?

This article was published in the international Service Design Network's Touchpoint magazine in October 2010.

From handier tin openers to more intuitive interfaces, the ability of design to humanise ‘things’ is well known and understood. Services, however, in spite of being provided by people in direct contact with users, are often de-humanised by measurements and policies set at an organisational level.

Top-down directives intended to increase revenue, efficiency or measurability can actually undermine experiences for staff and users, and de-couple what organisations aim to achieve from what their users want.

Following are three examples for bridging this gap illustrating how service design can meet such organisational challenges. It affirms that by transforming the front line you can liberate staff, unlock innovation and provide users with the experiences they demand to help ensure that the bottom line looks after itself.

Customer and Organisational Needs

Service users have fundamentally different needs from consumers of products. They seek individual experiences that bring touchpoints and channels together. They require direct interaction (and often human interaction) with the providing organisation.

Organisations inevitably need to divide tasks between departments and as such, develop roles and incentives to keep each of its components moving, employing automation and standardisation to boost efficiency.

These differences in needs and behaviours can cause a gap to appear, diminishing the user’s experience and in turn an organisation’s fortunes.

De-Humanised Services and Market Stalinism

A fixation on operations and efficiencies can mechanise and de-humanise services. Siloed departments can quickly create bureaucratic hoops for customers to jump through. While customers seek customization, longer-term relationships, and largely measure experiences on qualitative grounds, organisations often consider success in quantitative efficiencies and short-term ROI.

Key Performance Indicators would seem to be a happy medium, but can become subverted by target setting and the shortcuts necessary to achieve them. The minutiae of how to achieve something becomes an end in itself, obscuring and even detracting from why you’re trying to achieve it in the first place. Mark Fisher calls this effect Market Stalinism’ [1], after the USSR’s White Sea Canal project. The primary goal of allowing access for large cargo ships and tankers was hijacked by target squeezing, box-ticking and PR concerns. The result was a glorious media review of an efficiently completed canal, but in truth it was only deep enough to accommodate the small tourist steamers on which the journalists sat.

Market Stalinism at work - Wherever you hear these signs.

The above example may be humorous, but this phenomenon is visible from small-scale interactions to life-or-death scenarios.

Gill Hicks, who was injured in the London Tube bombings of 2005, spoke at the NHS Innovation Live conference last year. She explained how it was those who broke the rules, and the moments when rules were broken, which meant the most to her recovery. From rescue paramedics bending resuscitation protocols, to hospital staff later sneaking her out of the ward to improve her psychological well-being, small moments of individual initiative that did not adhere to organisational rules helped her recovery immeasurably.
Although organisations need to have safety procedure and focus on the bottom line to maintain profits and value, being rule-bound can often have the opposite result.

The cost of dissatisfied users is a damaged reputation and a long time spent trying to win their confidence and custom back. By tying the hands of staff with policy, pragmatism, common sense and innovation are stifled and even discouraged.

Re-Humanising Services

Service Design is the vehicle for uniting desirable user experiences and outcomes (bottom-up needs) with operational necessities and efficiencies (top-down needs). Below are three examples illustrating how organisations can be transformed from frustrating empathy-void automatons to empowered, adaptive, innovative helpers.

1. See the design process as an end in itself:
Lewisham Housing Options

Co-creative activities during the process can be as effective as the final deliverables themselves, in establishing the right culture to sustain a service.



Lewisham Housing Options - Transforming services by engaging staff in the design process

ThinkPublic and the Design Council worked with Lewisham Council to understand how they could better serve constituents who required housing, some of whom were in distressed situations and housing emergencies.

Staff members were all given a camera, some training and then went about interviewing people who were waiting for or had just had their appointment.

Through the direct experience of gathering data, footage and insights, the staff were taken away from their desks, databases and forms. Being re-connected with the situations, fears and hopes of those they serve every day, they began literally to see things through a different lens, asking different questions and getting to the heart of customers’ problems in a personal, human way.

2. See services as constantly in “beta”:
Passenger Personas

Transferring tools and knowledge through workshops, training and method sharing is an often-overlooked activity. It greatly improves the sustainability of a service by equipping front-line staff and management with the tools and processes to improve and evolve the service.

One European airport group has an established protocol for understanding and improving their passenger experience.

‘Greeter’ staff are on hand to help and direct passengers as they arrive in the terminal. At quiet times, this staff put themselves in the shoes of a passenger persona, select a destination, and set off through the airport identifying gaps in wayfinding, accessibility or even maintenance and upkeep. Issues are dealt with swiftly, making the job more satisfying for staff and the experience more pleasant for passengers.

Embedding design and empathy tools creates a strong link between an organisation and its users, ensuring needs are understood. Empowering those who have the grass-roots knowledge of a situation to take action to fix problems means solutions are more informed and services are built coherently, not on an ad-hoc basis.

3. Refrain from imposing common sense guidelines:
Just A Routine Operation

Generic guidelines inhibit staff from trying anything new or different. They cannot best serve individual customers, nor fulfil their role as ‘silent designers’ – observing and changing the system incrementally.

Just A Routine Operation from thinkpublic on Vimeo.

This documentary, created for the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, follows a man's experiences during the sudden death of his wife, who suffered complications after a minor operation.

Rather than encapsulate what was observed through the film into another ‘framework for communications protocol' or a 'critical situation checklist', the film has simply been screened to 2,000 NHS staff. By more directly experiencing the situation the staff can draw their own conclusions, which mitigates the need for 'guidance' because skills and empathy are developed more directly.
To those who may balk at a lack of control, consider Nordstrom, a US department store renowned for its customer service. Until recently, its staff guidelines consisted of just 75 words, including:

“Rule 1: Use best judgement in all situations. There will be no additional rules.” [3]

This laissez-faire approach has empowered Nordstrom sales associates to go to the extremes of customer service. By increasing autonomy and lightening the touch of administration, barriers to common sense, ideas and action are removed, enabling a culture of innovation.

Conclusion

By using Service Design to address organisational challenges, you can create direct and dynamic links between operational necessities and what users want are created, reducing waste and increasing demand.

How well this is done is most apparent at the ‘front line’ where staff and users interact. Organisations need to trust and support the people they hire, so that they can efficiently provide effective services that are meaningful and desirable to people. That is true return on investment.

References

[1] Fisher, M (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (esp. p39, 43)
[2] Just A Routine Operation (2008, Thinkpublic)
[3] Spector, R. (2000) Lessons of the Nordstrom Way
With thanks to Thinkpublic and Sean Miller for case studies and images.

Designing the Future of Knowledge Transfer

I'm proud to report that a project I have been leading at Prospect to deliver a vision for Unlocking Knowledge Transfer (KT) in the UK on behalf of the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network (CI KTN) is now complete, and the Unlocking Knowledge Transfer Executive Summary can be downloaded. It summarises three robust reports illustrating a number of new services, spaces and tools that will help bring academia and the creative industries closer together.

The three reports can be found in my Projects section - I recommend starting with the third of the three Opportunities for Unlocking Knowledge Transfer and digging further if that whets your appetite.

Summary

CIKTN needed a robust vision of the future of knowledge transfer between the creative industries and academia in the UK. We engaged a wide audience through workshops, online surveys and an online platform to develop future scenarios which inspired a number of new opportunities for KT.
Over the course of five months, hundreds of people contributed to inform the three reports which map out the future of KT in the UK, with 16 opportunities (actionable initiatives, services, spaces and roles) for improving KT in the creative industries.

Problem

Now, more than ever, businesses are investing in the knowledge economy to catalyse innovation. The UK's academic institutions are world leaders in creating knowledge and ideas. The Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network (CIKTN) invited Prospect to lead a strategic project exploring the future of creating, sharing and applying this wealth and better connecting academia and business.
Historically, the Creative Industries have not engaged with 'knowledge transfer' (KT) on the same scale as industries such as sciences and engineering, for example. Add to this a harsh economic climate and the increasing overlapping and competition between business and academia and you have a knotty problem; one that design is ideally suited to solve.

Solution

We used a holistic design approach and methodologies in a way that would engage a broad spectrum of people, and make sense of a diverse range of reactions, comments and ideas. This collaborative, co-creative process not only helped us gather information and insights from these stakeholders, but also encourage them to generate new solutions to possible developments in the future.

The project pivoted around the creation of four future scenarios, based on economic, social, cultural and environmental trends amongst other factors. These were designed to challenge and provoke participants and ask; 'How would you thrive in this new world?'; 'What do you fear?'; and 'What needs to be done?'.

Impact

Online surveys, expert interviews, future scenarios and five workshops conducted around the UK informed the three reports delivered through the project. The first, Baselines, documents today's landscape of knowledge sharing between the UK's creative industries and academia. The second, Scenarios, illustrates possible futures and documents how our participants reacted to them. The third, Opportunities, presents a series of robust reccomendations for future services, spaces and initiatives, balancing a wealth of views with feasibility and sustainability, realised through a powerful strategic design process.

How Social Media Has Made Brands Transparent

I've been engrossed in work on social media at Prospect over the past few months, and wanted to marry some of the insights and observations there with some ideas I've had in the pipeline for a while. This article is also available at www.prospect.eu, and covers three key points on why truth, not image, is the new branding.


In particular, we have seen how social media has brought about a new age of branding transparency, where the happiness of customers instantly affects the value of a brand. There are three trends which help explain this:


1. Branding Is Returning To Its Roots As 'Reputation'

Brands are simply the reputation of a business as it was upheld at any moment in the minds of its customers. Before the sophisticated brand machinery of advertising, design, semiotics and visual identity, this was entirely influenced by the quality and consistency of a product or service.

We are coming full circle. Social media's effect of increasing transparency has withered the power and persuasiveness of flashy-smoke-and-mirrors branding. Once again, the products and services must do the talking. Brand equity is directly and immediately linked to the quality of experience you provide.

A painful-to-watch example of this is United Airlines. A disgruntled band watched in horror out of the plane window as they saw their instruments being thrown around by baggage handlers. After nine months seeking compensation for broken instruments, they decided to complain by writing a song, which is approaching 9,000,000 views on YouTube. It's also credited as the main cause of a 10% drop in share price which cost United an estimated $180m. United's out-dated response was a schmaltzy ad campaign. Deflatingly, the online comments greeting their efforts were peppered with mischievous wails of 'United breaks guitars!'. The whitewash had not worked.

2. Customers Are The Advertising Campaign

'Happy customers are your best advertisement' sounds like a whimsical old cliché from a village butchers, but word of mouth has quickly re-established itself as the dominant marketing force and is more relevant now than it has ever been. And it's certainly not just about the small-scale and local who have that much face-to-face time with customers.

Apple, who recently overtook Microsoft to become the highest-valued technology company in the world at $152bn, have taken this to heart and apply it very well. For every expensive advertisement you have seen on TV or online you have probably had a dozen friends or colleagues nudge you to show you their latest iPhone app or tell you "PCs are rubbish. Why don't you get rid of that thing and buy a Mac like this one I'm hugging right now?"

These nudges aren't just happening in person. The savvy purchaser will do a little online research while weighing up their choices, and in a few minutes can be exposed to hundreds of like-minded opinions and experiences. What the customer hears in these critical moments holds a huge sway over whether they buy in or walk away.

3. Customers Are The Boss

Imagine your website as a high street shop and a new customer approaching it. Now imagine hundreds of previous customers standing outside, some shouting in protest and warning the customer away, others singing with elation, 5-star rating placards in hand.

You have the ability to influence the crowd, but the more you use the megaphone, the worse things get. You need to listen to every one in turn and try and resolve their individual cases. You cannot win over everybody, but you need to make sure that the new customer will be tempted in, and at the least, will not be scared away.

Moreover, you have the opportunity to get in touch with the disappointed customers, find out what went wrong, and try to convnice them to stay whilst improving your offer in the process. The customer is always right when talking about their personal, subjective experiences. It's up to the business to provide a better experience in the first place.

Conclusion

As this new mainline has opened up between customers and an organisation's brand, it is the customers, not the providers that have taken the initiative. It has accelerated the movement of feet, allowed easy comparison of competitors and lifted the roof of organisations to allow customers to look inside.

While there is much for businesses and organisations to be wary of, the greatest sin of all is not embracing it. Users will reward the provider who gets it right with loyalty, upgrading, compliance and spreading the word. And quickly. In a time of instantaneous brand re-assessment through social media, your reputation is what you do and your brand equity depends upon what your customers think of the quality of experience you provide.

Service Design Drinks London - 28th May 2010

This evening, come to the water poet near Liverpool street station for some service design thinking talking and drinking! Officially beginning at 7:00, but come straight after work!

Link: <
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With Jaimes, Lauren and Nick all enjoying well-deserved holidays I'll do my upmost to be a topmost host.

http://www.servicedesigning.org/events/service_design_drinks_london_-_28th_may/

Posted via email from steveleedesign

Beyond Petroleum...No, really we are...

I miss making things and thought a bit of light humour and green advocacy was the perfect excuse to dust off the old CS4 and make a new BP logo for Greenpeace's latest creative lobbying experiment against BP. Check out their gallery here:

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/tags/bp

I know boycott's a little strong as everything's made out of or runs on the stuff, but if anyone can suggest a word beginning with 'B' that means "understand we're all responsible for creating a need for petroleum in the first place and therefore must reduce our consumption in little ways each day that mean corporations and governments don't do things we don't want them to" I'd be indebted.

Posted via email from steveleedesign

Using Film To Create Change In The Public Sector

This evening I attended thinkpublic's screening and talk 'Using Film to Create Change in the Public Sector" and was moved and inspired to share a few thoughts.

I wanted to do this firstly because over the past few years I have helped produce films as part of service design projects and have always been an advocate of the power of showing people what their customers are experiencing and saying about them. This is too often done through cleverly-written and clever sounding documents. What's less clever is that 60 pages of statistics, insights and pull-out quotes are far less effective at achieving this than actually showing people their own customers saying what they feel into a camera.

And secondly, because the talks that followed the two shorts uncovered the power of film as not just the means to an end, where a film is presented as part of evidence at the end of a research phase to validate and unlock the next phase, but an end in itself. The two films each unlocked good points about this.

Just A minor Operation: Karen's Story

Just A Routine Operation from thinkpublic on Vimeo.

The documentary was created by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. It followed a woman's experience during the sudden death of her husband, who suffered complications after a minor operation.

What struck the audience was how it refrained to encapsulate lessons learned into a 'seven point plan' or 'framework for patient dignity protocol' or a 'sensitive situation checklist'. Julia Schaeper from the NHS Institute for Innovation explained how the experiences and events were laid bare for the audience (so far at 2000 NHS staff and growing) to draw their own observations and conclusions.

Rather than giving staff guidelines as a result of the film, which seek to standardise and synthesise common sense, good judgement and empathy, the film was shown directly to staff, so that they experienced it. And from gaining experience we mitigate the need to provide often obvious 'guidance' because we develop those skills and emotions more directly.

The NHS is notorious for guidelines, targets and frameworks. But it's also rife across state institutions. Mark Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realism calls this situation in the UK 'Market Stalinism' - where the obsession with targets and how to achieve them obscures and even detracts from why you are trying to achieve them in the first place. We have already arrived in a place where the micro-motivations of efficiency overtakes the macro-motivation of care.

Lewisham Customer Experiences


Lewisham Council worked with the Design Council and thinkpublic to improve the experiences of those using their Housing Options services. many of these people are in crisis, including people who are homeless, running away from domestic violence or in one case, a woman who couldn't begin the application process until the day her house was reposessed.

Again, watching the film transferred more insight than what would have found its way into a research report. Furthermore, the interesting twist was that those filming the consultations and interviews were the council employees themselves.

Peter Gaddson, Head of Strategy and Performance with the Customer Services Directorate at Lewisham Council explained that the employees were 'looking through a different lens' and were suddenly asking different questions to those they would have asked were they working behind their desks, with databases and application forms. The film showed flaws in the system, sometimes satisfactory, sometimes distressing outcomes and a noisy, even chaotic scene in the background. Peter boldly (and bravely) affirmed that "In order to improve, you need to admit that you get things wrong."

A fantastic sentiment at a time when people are more protective of their performance and defensive of criticism, but in doing so, block the potential for real change.