Paul Bennett gave an interesting talk at TED about how being empathic towards customers can help you spot small things that make a big impact. Time and time again I get amazed by how simple solutions can have such a great impact on a service or product. Companies usually think that innovation is about spending billions in R&D, but sometimes the simple act of stepping on your customers’ shoes to spot simple, yet often overlooked solutions can make a great difference.
Sometimes I tend to think that design consultancies such as IDEO and Engine also play the role of corporate psychotherapists. Companies usually suffer from this ‘process centred’ obsession, and we just step in to make them realise that solutions are quite simple, it’s just a matter of changing the way of how you perceive things. Innovative companies are the ones that manage to make a leap from process centric to customer centric (sometimes with a bit of a help of user-centric psychotherapy)!
Claire Rowland, from Seren, did a presentation on Service Design at the European Information Architecture in 2007. The presentation offers interesting resources on service design methodologies and processes.
I was going through my old notebook and came across some notes about an interview Sam Lucent (HP’s design chief) gave to Business Week. This interview was published a while ago (November 2005), but the concept is quite contemporary:
As products become much more complex, it’s not about designing the individual product, it’s about orchestrating this complex ecosystem to create a wonderful customer experience. So my job touches on all aspects — all the tangible, visual, real-world aspects of that experience. If you just think of a customer journey, it’s everything from collateral and point-of-sale to packaging to the industrial design, the user interface, and the area where interface and the software and the hardware come together, which we call product interaction. So it’s orchestrating all of those touch points
Sam Lucent had the foresight to understand that in order to achieve competitive advantage, companies need to engage customers in an emotional level by providing delightful experiences. By servitising their products, companies can not only create strategies that are difficult to copy, but also open new market opportunities. In most industrialised countries, the service sector accounts for approximately 70% of the GDP, offering a great potential for product-based companies to expand.
Nike+ is another great example. They’ve managed to migrate from this ‘company/product centric’ campaign - Just do it, to a networked and co-created way of evolving the brand. I just love seeing all these paradigms being broken! Welcome to the service economy!
I really like the way Virgin communicates to customers. They always use plain English, and most importantly, they make every contact feel as a bit of fun. I was having a problem with my internet modem, and received a new one by post. The letter that came with the new modem said:
“We’re are sorry you had problems with you modem; this little box of goodies will help!
… All you need to to now is follow the instruction below…
Ok, here it goes:
…Replace you new modem, using the spanner. It’s there to help unscrew and screw the white cable without too much elbow grease!
Virgin also has a great attention for details. When my broadband pack first arrived, I got this massive box containing all the equipment I needed. To be honest, opening the box and setting my new broadband up was quite exciting (I have to confess, I was feeling like a kid opening a Christmas gift). And then I noticed the ‘caution’ label on the box, which added a bit of fun to whole experience.
Sometimes, small details make a big difference. Next time you have to design something, or get in touch with a customer, try to make it a bit fun. It won’t add anything to your costs, and it surely will have a great impact on your customer’s experience.
Derrick Story interviewed the authors of ‘Subject to change’, recently published by the Adptative Path crew. If you don’t have time to read the book, you can get a sneak preview by listing to the interview’s podcast.
The book talks about how products and services need to be designed through empathic understanding of the user, and how thriving products and services are not stand alone propositions. Successful products and services are build around supportive ecosystems that provide the right environment, staff behaviour, tone of voice, etc.
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customer experience, service design, user-centred research | Tagged: IDEO, empathic research, paul bennett, ted talks, customer centric | 
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Posted by Erick
