By Chally Kacelnik
Is your service design meeting the needs of your customer or end user? Lots of services are designed on the basis of functional inputs – the different technical components you’re putting in – rather than the desired outputs and outcomes.
I’ll give you an example. I have to have regular check ups to make sure I’m still in remission from cancer. A few months ago, my check ups moved to a big new building funded by a generous philanthropist. It’s really nice, and there are lots of thoughtful things in the new set up that are much better than the old centre. One day, I took my baby along to my appointment and I needed to change him. Nowhere in this huge, beautiful building that cost millions of dollars was there a baby change table. (I don’t think there is an adult change table either, which is the sort of thing you really ought to have in a hospital.) When this cancer centre was being designed, they didn’t connect “cancer patient” with “parents and carers” – the caring responsibilities must have been seen as a bit of a one way street. Lots of public space, of course, isn’t designed for babies and young children, but this was particularly on the nose because this was a statement about the kinds of care that people at their most vulnerable are allowed to give and receive.
Now, my issue was (is!) partly one of environmental design – and when it comes to service provision, the environment does matter. This might be about creating a useful customer service space that supports effective triaging and accessibility, or it might be about creating an online form that is user friendly and feeds the right information into the right fields in your internally-facing system.
That being said, there is a broader principle here: services should be designed in accordance with user needs. Resource should be directed accordingly.
Ask yourself:
- Do we understand who our customers are and how we can create value for them?
- How do they wish to receive services?
- Is the service design oriented towards what our customers receive, or is it framed around the bits we put in?
If that last question seems like splitting hairs, here’s another example for you from a recent customer service review we undertook: when a customer would contact this organisation, the customer service officer would take a message and pass it to a technical expert for resolution. There would then be delays and multiple callbacks because the initial officer didn’t know the right questions to ask at the outset, wasting everyone’s time and effort. This is because the process was designed for internal function to hand off to internal function – not to work as a team to figure out what that initial interaction should be in order to get a timely result for the customer.
Good service design benefits you and your customers. Be deliberate.
At LKS Quaero, we with effective service design. For more information, visit us at lksquaero.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook.
