From health insurers adopting wearable devices, to Google’s Self-Driving Car Project, all eyes are on the creation of dynamic customer experiences. Marketing Directors are telling their teams to really push customer communications. Operations Managers are putting aside “service innovation” budgets.
What many do not realise, is that although our services and technologies are evolving digitally, the fundamentals of quality Service Design have not changed. Expert Service Design requires process changes to be justified by an increase in value to the customer.
As leading providers of Service Design in Dublin, we find ourselves answering the same questions for new and existing clients alike. ‘What does Service Design mean to me, as a B2B service provider?’ or ‘Is this new trend relevant to our industry?’ To this end we are publishing a short series of blog posts to simplify key terms and definitions associated with Service Design. The first post in our Service Design series explained the most important step in any Service Design initiative; understanding your Service Touchpoints:
“…any interaction a customer has with your service. These are experiences which must make positive impressions, impart essential information and add value to the experience of your brand.”
Visibility
Once you have identified your service touchpoints, your next move is identifying the line of visibility. The line of visibility separates the ‘onstage’ steps, interactions and assets from ‘offstage’ processes, business staff and operating environments. Visibility is the separation of what the customer can see and interact with, from what they can’t.
In our last post we used the example of a mobile network advertising on a billboard. In this case, the billboard, store environment, sales staff and billing letter are the ‘onstage’ service touchpoints the customer must interact with.
In this example, the ‘offstage’ service elements are the timely design and printing of the advertisement, the knowledge transfer on updated prices to store staff and payment systems, and the process of generating the incorrect billing letter.
Perspective
There are two high-level goals to making this distinction, using the line of visibility. The first is evolving your understanding of the customer’s perspective. If you limit your focus to what they can and cannot see, those elements of your service which lack value become more obvious.
If a utilities company experience an increase in postage costs for example, they may choose to deliver post once a fortnight instead of bi-weekly. This ‘offstage’ process change will have severe consequences for a customer’s experience.
A new commercial customer will expect to have their first payment acknowledged within a few days. If the first letter is not posted for to up to two weeks, this customer will have to start making assumptions. “Will I put the bins out or won’t I? Surely they would have let me know by now? I’m not so sure.” They will feel their financial contribution to the company is undervalued.
Furthermore the untimely first letter will no longer serve its purpose if the customer has already called customer service for confirmation of their payment. A negative perspective of the utilities provider is created, even though the change in mailing frequency is making the company short term savings.
Process
The second high-level goal of considering the line of visibility is the ability to improve service processes and identify new opportunities. By mapping out the full service ecosystem and taking care to include the line of visibility, repetitive or unintuitive service processes stick out like a sore thumb.
As shown above, leaving the customer uninformed can cause a dramatic increase in the amount of customer support calls, taking the money saved from postage expenses and putting it straight into overtime for administrative staff.
Impact
The relationship between Process and Perspective is made clearer by studying the line of visibility. If the business manager created a paperless billing option for customers, postage costs would diminish significantly. Resources assigned to generating letters could be reallocated. Furthermore opportunities would arise for promotional communications with customers via email.
With unified, subtle changes to ‘New Customer’ forms, website content and staff training regarding a paperless billing option, the service provider can not only maintain but improve the quality of their customers’ experiences
