Last week I had the opportunity to present at the Service Design Global Conference in San Franscisco. Great to see some old friends and meet new ones.

My presentation was inspired by a few observations I got over the years working with Service Design, especially when trying to ‘sell’ service design projects to clients who are more likely to belong to a mainstream market.

If you are interested in learning more, you can donwload the presentation from here

Keeping in touch with customers

These notes made me feel connected to what was happening in the restaurant. The owners could have left a simple sign saying: “We’ll reopen on June 11th.” But the decision to be open and transparent resonated with customers like me. It made me feel like part of part of closer to them.

Being transparent is a crucial step in making an emotional connection between service users and providers. It makes businesses seem more human and closer to their customers. It also helps to make customers feel more valued and trusted, which in turn leads to enhanced customer loyalty and advocacy.

Take UPS or FedEx as an example. These companies offer a fair degree of service transparency by allowing customers to track their packages in real time, leading to an extra level of reassurance and peace of mind.

In Brazil restaurants have to display a sign saying “please visit our kitchen” to comply with health and safety regulations. Although I haven’t met anyone who has asked for a kitchen tour, the offer surely makes the service provided by restaurants more transparent. As a result, restaurants seem more trustworthy and customers feel more comfortable.

However, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In order for transparency to work, businesses need to ensure that not only the customer facing aspects of a service – but also the infrastructure enabling service delivery – are well designed. You probably wouldn’t recommend a restaurant with a dirty and messy kitchen, would you?

Good service is about trust, and being transparent is a certain way of gaining the trust of customers

This article was originally posted on the Engine website.

If you missed the last service design conference hosted by the Service Design Network, you can still check out the excelent presentations and some pictures on the SDN website.

Worth checking out the presentations from my ex colleagues from Engine, Tamsin and Joe.  Apparently Julia’s presentation, “Moving forward – learning from the health sector” was quite interesting too, but it seems that there is no link to download her presentation yet.

Last Christmas I took an Air New Zealand flight from Auckland to Queenstown, and I have to say: it was the best check-in experience I’ve ever had.

Once I arrived at the terminal, I was quite impressed by how simple the process was. I basically had to follow two big signs on the concourse:

1. Start here (this sign was just above the self service kiosks)
2. Bag drop (this sign was just above a conveyor belt)

I got so excited about the whole thing that I had to take a few pictures while Jane, my girlfriend, was dealing with the check-in:

Scanning our e-ticket

Selecting the passengers

Answering the security questions

Printing the luggage tags

Weighing your bag and attaching luggage tags

Going to step 2: luggage drop-off

Job done!

The whole thing didn’t take more than 5 min!

Mpass: using your phone as a boarding pass

Air New Zealand is also rolling out self-service scanners at the boarding gates: you can either use your boarding pass or an mPass – a service that allows you to download your boarding passes for Air New Zealand flights onto your mobile phone. It generates a bar code that you can then scan at the kiosks to check-in or at the gates to board.

Scanning kiosks at the boarding gate

mPass: using your phone as a boarding pass

At Engine, we designed a similar concept for Virgin Atlantic, and the results were quite impressive. Check-in times were reduced by 50%, and passenger satisfaction increased substantially.

The great thing about this check-in is that it takes staff from behind the counter, enabling them to roam the concourse to help passengers. It’s a win-win situation: the airline has a much more efficient process, enabling staff to deal with problems that really matter (passengers with excess luggage or delayed flights), and passengers can go through a hassle-free check-in. Great example of how service design can bring value to both users and providers.

More info on Air New Zealand’s new check in here

The Norwegian Design Council will host a conference on Service Design and Service Innovation in November.

They are inviting people to submit papers and abstracts on the following topics:

* boundaries, foundation and constituent parts of the emerging discipline of service design
* history and trajectories of service design
* inclusive-design approaches to services for all
* critical views
* methods, tools and processes
* case studies
* relation to design thinking, design leadership and design management
* education and research perspectives

more information regarding submissions and deadlines here

Good practitioners know what their job really is: to spread customer-centered thinking throughout the organization. If you can get decisionmakers to sit in a listening lab for a day, you’ve hit a home run: they’ll start to “get it” within the first two 45-minute sessions.

Changing the organization is the brass ring. Once the organization changes, everything follows: from the strategy (“let’s provide world-class service to our customers, and measure our progress”) down to the tactics on the site (“let’s stop naming links with our internal jargon”).

via Good Experience

I had to catch a flight from London to Auckland, with a 7-hour stopover in Shanghai.  And I have to tell you:  by the time you reach Shanghai, you’re already completely wrecked, and you know you are going to face another 12-hour flight to NZ.

Well, for those who want to have a nap or just chill out in a comfortable room while waiting for your connection, there is always the option to book a room at the Dazhong Merrylin Hotel. The hotel sits right inside the airport terminal, and you can book rooms for periods as short as a few hours. Extremely convenient and value for money.

I’m wondering why airports don’t do this more often. Hotels in terminals. You just need to walk around any airport, and you’ll probably see hundreds of people trying to sleep in the not-so-comfortable terminal seats. So, here’s an idea: capsule hotels (the ones invented in Japan, mostly used by office workers who can’t commute back home after a night out with colleagues) inside terminals. Cheap, doesn’t take too much space, convenient, and definitely more comfortable than any airport seat.

Looking for new ideas to invest in, Sir Richard Branson?

What’s interesting about the presentation is how Tim explores the interesection between design and business. Quite often, designers and business people don’t share the same views on the same problem. Business people are ‘left-brained’, and focus on execution . Designers are much more ‘right-brained’, focusing on exploration.

It is at the intersection between the design world and the business world that innovation trully happens.

you can download the presentation here

Joseph Schumpeter – Economist

Boeing and Airbus have taken different routes in terms of product strategy. Airbus thinks big is better, and came up with the gigantic A380 for super long haul flights. Boeing believes that the future of travel will be more ‘hub’ based. People will fly medium sized planes to the main airports, and from there they will get connections to the final destination. It’s early to predict which strategy will be the winner, but from a passenger’s point of view, I already have my favourite: the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Not only is this aircraft built with the latest technology, such composite materials to make it more lightweight and heads up displays in the cockpit (the same technology used in military fighters), but also it was built with the passenger in mind.

Simple concepts, such the experience passengers have when entering the aircraft were taken into consideration. Instead of entering through the galley and feeling a bit claustrophobic right from the beginning, passengers flying in the Dreamliner see an open, welcoming space once they step inside. It feels more like arriving in a nice restaurant rather than boarding an aircraft.

it feels like entering in a restaurant through the kitchen

Another good example of user centric innovation is the lighting: to help your body adjust to the new time zone, the lights simulate the sunset and sunrise. Small things that make a big difference!

It seems that for the majority of us, economy class travelers, things will get a bit better!

source: Tim Brown, http://designthinking.ideo.com/

Tim Brown started a blog about design thinking, which is great. Lots of ideas and insights, not only from his posts, but also from people who are happy to comment and contribute to the discussion (as you might imagine, the blog is already quite popular!).

But this is a blog with a twist: as he described in the ‘about’ section, Tim is using the blog as a sandbox to toy with ideas around design thinking, share with everyone else, and promote discussions, which in turn might create more ideas. Any interesting outcomes will be part of the new book he is writing about design thinking. So, if you want to be Tim’s co-author, check his blog, and start contributing to the discussion.

I saw this interesting article on Fastcompany magazine, which once more proves that customer driven innovation is a really powerful tool to achieve competitive advantage.

Back in 2007, Virgin Megastores was outbeating competition, with a sales increase of almost 14%. According to Dee Mc Laughlin, the marketing chief, the recipy for success was quite simple: they just observe customers, and find out what they really want:

“We observe and then we innovate. For example, HD and Blu-ray are hot right now. We observed that our customers were saying, “what is the difference between the two?” You can tell them what the difference is, but unless they’re actually seeing what the difference is, it’s not going to help sales.

“So, we’ve put an HD and Blu-ray wall into all our stores. It’s really spectacular looking. Where before we had consumer confusion, which was potentially stifling sales of both systems, now our customers actually can see what the difference is and choose for themselves which format to buy.”

Innovation is not always rocket science (nor is something that needs a huge investment in R&D). Sometimes the most innovative solutions is right under your nose. It’s just a matter of oppening your eyes, and seeing what really matters.

Well worth checking it out.