October 21, 2011. Toronto to San Francisco, where figure3′s Jennifer Young and Andrew Gallici speak at the international Service Design Conference – From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet.
figure3′s talk is entitled Spatial Seduction: Using Service Design to Rekindle Customer Loyalty.
It’s been a fascinating journey as we’ve prepared for the conference. People are genuinely interested to learn more about our work with organizations who are investing in this new idea called ‘service design’. Some common questions we’ve been fielding:
Q: What IS service design?
We liked this definition from the Savannah School of Art and Design: “Service design is the practice of analyzing and systematically mapping complex service systems to create user experiences that are sustainable and profitable to service providers and meaningful to their customers.”
Let’s dig a little deeper and look at the key words in this definition:
‘Meaningful’ – a great customer experience is successful in part because there is an underlying purpose, message, or emotional connection that happens between a consumer and the service that was purchased, or enjoyed.
‘Sustainable’ – the experience was so well mapped out that it is repeatable, consistent, dependable and trustworthy – resulting in customer loyalty.
‘Profitable’ – service design is ultimately about a transaction between supplier and customer. The customer is happy to pay for the service because the experience was memorable and enjoyable. The provider realizes a solid return on its investment in building the customer experience.
Service Design is big business. Speaking at the conference, Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Solutions estimates its value in the U.S. as conservatively $2B – and growing fast.
Q: Why is a Canadian interior design firm speaking at a conference about the design of services?
Simply, because every user experience of any service happens within a space. It is not enough to build a smart strategy for a service offering in isolation of the place where the customer receives the service. We see ‘service design’ as a holistic inclusive process where the physical environment is a direct result of the research and strategies that are the foundation of a choreographed experience.
The practice of interior design is undergoing a seismic shift. Designers have an opportunity to not only craft user experience but to drive that experience in all touchpoints in space.
Q: What is figure3′s talk about?
What do telcos and banks have in common? We’ll ask the conference audience, ‘How many of you love your bank? How many of you would recommend your telecom provider to a friend?’ Last week we asked Canadians on the streets of Toronto for their viewpoints: here’s what they had to say.
Financial services and telcos are two of the top five most despised industries in North America. Yet, we know from working with BMO and TELUS in creating new concept stores and branches that transformative solutions are possible. Both these organizations have invested in deep dive research to inform compelling new customer-focused design for their retail locations.
Listen to Paul Dilda, head of physical distribution for BMO share his experience of working with figure3 to create a holistic new environment where both BMO customers and branch employees are learning to interact differently – and building trust, loyalty (and profits) at the same time.
Check in next week for more insights from San Francisco.
If you want to know what your customers want, you need to ask them. Sounds simple, right?
To learn what one client’s customers want, we are recreating an entire store inside a warehouse. This allows us to test new interactive shopping technologies by observing real customers through hands-on ethnography research.
For another client we went on the road and conducted in-store customer intercepts in four major U.S. cities by observing day to day interactions within transactional environments.
Going to market to ask the customer makes complete sense, yet focusing on qualitative research instead of measurable data is still considered revolutionary, at least outside the design community.
Our findings invariably change the course of our design solutions because they frequently challenge client’s long-held perceptions of performance.
Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, is working hard to convince the business sector to look beyond mere numbers and spreadsheets when making decisions.
In the current Harvard Business Review, Martin warns business leaders to start relying more on qualitative market research.
“Although factors such as design and trust can’t be reduced to numbers, they can be interpreted and understood. In fact, only by understanding them…can we predict customers’ emotional responses,” he writes in his article “Don’t Get Blinded By the Numbers.”
We couldn’t agree more.
When a regional fashion chain decided to expand across Canada, we were engaged to conduct in-depth market research to understand the new market.
We chatted on-line with more than 100 shoppers to gain insights into how different age groups in regions across Canada like to shop. Some were so engaged that they send us photographs of their favourite outfits. We even took several people out for shopping trips. The result of all this work is research with a level of authenticity never seen before.
This research not only helped us with the design of the store, the retailer now has a deeper understanding that will pay off in other business decisions, even informing product selection for the regional market.
Businesses also need to better understand their employees. Our firm has designed workspaces for some of Canada’s top companies, and our success is built on understanding what the employees want and need to stay happy and inspired.
One of our teams is right now sifting through more than 100 employee surveys looking into how people are really working within a large Canadian corporation. We discovered that more than half of the employees are ready to embrace a work from home program, much to management’s great surprise.
When it comes to understanding your employees and customers, there should not be any surprises.
http://hbr.org/2011/03/column-dont-get-blinded-by-the-numbers/ar/1
At figure3 we love the idea of ‘play’ as a driver of innovation in business.
Jon Kolko, author of Exposing the Magic of Design www.fastcodesign.com sees the role of designers as builders of a playful culture. In his view, the social activities that create an inherently innovative culture happen where people congregate naturally. To him a spirit of fun in the office can be captured in a professional setting without resorting to stereotypical beanbag chairs. Treating adults like kids doesn’t free their spirits and make them creative, it just makes them behave, well, like children.
We entirely agree with Jon.
Our design processes with our clients use play-based facilitation techniques to foster intelligent open-ended discussions. Creative facilitation is about hands-on, visual tools to break down inhibitions, encourage dialogue, get to the essence of a topic, build connections between one thought to the next and the next and the next.
Iterative thinking needs visual stimulus to make work visible so participants can connect the dots from a good idea to a great one. Kolko calls this kind of interaction creative ‘flow’. Creative spaces enable group flow by design.
Why not then create transparent walls to scribble on? Mobile multiple-use tables with built-in touch screens connected to off-site Skype users? Drop mini think-tank rooms for focused thinking, right next to big-screen electronic panels for viewing, editing, surfing, online sharing in open lounges?
The days of the traditional meeting room are not gone yet. But most innovative businesses are breaking away from the sterility of Mad Men boardroom architecture and asking for transparent, open and inviting spaces where their people can be playfully creative.
In our view, play is hardly juvenile. It’s laying a groundwork for consistent innovation.
“Tiger Mom” is a pussycat compared with the latest parent making headlines over her child rearing values.
New Yorker Nicole Imprescia is suing her daughter’s private pre-school for failing to properly prepare the 4-year-old to ace the admission test that would open the doors to an elite private school, and eventually an Ivy League university. She wasn’t happy to see her daughter merely learning about shapes and colours and playing with kids as young as 2.
Ivy Leaguer Amy Chua, a Yale law professor, jumpstarted the child rearing debate earlier this year during her promo tour for her new book espousing raising children with very strict and enforced rules. Learning by rote is embraced, as is homework centred on repetitive drills.
The debate over how we raise our kids does have important implications if we consider that we are likely impacting our country’s standard of living. It’s time to move this education discussion to the business pages.
If countries hope to prosper, they need to drive creative capabilities in our future business professionals. The building blocks of innovation are, well, building blocks.
Encouraging children, through play to use their imaginations is fundamental in nurturing creativity, which in turn breeds innovation and leadership.
Innovators know this. It is no coincidence that some of the world’s most creative organizations fall over themselves to make sure their employees have fun and play on the job.
One of my firm’s core areas is designing workspaces for growing, innovative businesses. For many of their business leaders a key goal is to offer employees a place to work that is fun, deliberately playful and inspires creativity.
But as Hilary Stout at the New York Times postulates, “recent studies and stats are suggesting the culture of play in North America is vanishing.”
Let’s all do our part and turn off our computers once in a while – and start playing to reignite our imaginations once again.
Please pass the Lego.
If you are a $11 billion a year retailer with 17,000 outlets across 55 countries how do you align customers and staff alike around your brand in a consistent and sustainable way?
At a talk in Toronto, Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks Corp. was asked this very question. He spoke about the ‘smell’ of the brand, which he discovered had shifted from ‘coffee amora’ to ‘burn cheese’. As Schultz described it, “We are not in the burnt cheese business.”
What Schultz was really saying is the company had forgotten its DNA was all about the customer experience — how we walk through the doors, pick up the coffee aroma and are reminded that we have arrived at a special place.
We can even put a value to that experience. In the case of Starbucks, it lost a stunning $22 billion in share value as the company lost its way.
While it might be hard for some to relate to the scale and reach of Starbucks, the lesson is universal. In a world where everything — travel, charity, shoes, cars and maybe even politics — is commoditized, the true worth of a brand is actually the experience it delivers. There is no shortage of places to grab a cup of java, so the real consumer value add is in offering an experience like no other.
Here at figure3, we have built our practice on this premise. We creating spatial environments that inspire and connect those who use them, enrich the brand and organization and deliver a memorable experience, whether that is for play, work….or to drink coffee.
What are you doing to enrich the experience of your staff, customers and stakeholders?
Children in the U.S. have become less creative over the past ten years, according to alarming research presented in a recent Newsweek article, “The Creativity Crisis.”
Creativity is often presumed to be the key ingredient of innovation. If that is true, this decline bodes ill for future American – or by extension, Canadian – innovation and productivity.
Authors and researchers Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman define real creativity as the ability to process both divergent thinking (idea generation) and convergent thinking (distillation and clarity).
Design by its very nature is a discipline that nurtures both of these skill sets in order to achieve new creative solutions. This is why the lack of designers in business is a growing concern for MBA educators like Roger Martin, dean of Rotman’s School of Management.
It’s not as simple as dropping right-brain thinkers into left-brain organizations. In order to drive innovation, Martin has introduced the concept of ‘thinking like designers’ into his curriculum to embrace alternative thinking styles.
Sir Ken Robinson has been telling world leaders for years to rethink educational systems to inspire creativity in adults by nurturing the natural curiosity of children.
I heard Sir Ken speak on creativity a few years ago at a gathering of industrial designers in San Francisco. He asked the 500 of us in the audience to rate our own creativity at age 5, and now as adults. Perhaps it’s no surprise that we overwhelmingly rated our childhood creative selves as 9 out of 10 and as adults only 4 out of 10.
His believes this is a result of only rewarding children for correct answers and not exploring other possible answers. This reinforces the linear kind of thinking that is systemic in the children who grow up to become business leaders.
Creativity and innovation is about possibilities, not the ‘right’ answer. Collaborative design thinking stays open to explore and generate ideas and uses a disciplined but non-linear process to develop those ideas into real products and services that break the mold.
This is something to think about when your child proudly brings home her report card – that A+ won’t be for creativity.
Caroline Hughes is strategic partner with figure3 –nurturing the creative spirit of figure3’s design teams.
