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Service Design

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Service design: Designing experiences that create value


Doing business is a lot like playing hockey. To be successful, you need a skilled and well-balanced team. You need a game plan that directs you towards success, and everyone on the team needs to know the role they play in executing the game plan. Lets be honest, minus the pads, big wooden sticks and the various types of checking, that sounds a lot like what you do to build a successful business, right? The most important thing a hockey player can do once they hit the ice is gain control of the puck, and with the help of their teammates, guide the puck across the ice to score a goal. Wayne Gretzky, the Great One, was extremely good at that. When he was asked to explain how he became so good, he said, I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. That quote becomes significant for businesses when you realize that in a business context the puck is really your customer base. In a blog post for the Harvard Business Review, author Ravi Sawhney explains that businesses operate in an environment of constant change. And while customers are certainly not simple, they can be both logical and irrational, motivated by opportunity and emotion, full of contradiction, impacted by economic conditions, and often difficult to define, they more or less remain the same over time.1 That being the case, Sawhney proposes, If you want to know how to be best positioned for business success, you have to understand where [your customers] are going.2 So what can you do to become more successful at anticipating where the pucks going to be? May we humbly suggest drafting a Gretzky? And by Gretzky, we mean service design. What is it? Put simply, when you have two coffee shops right next to each other that sell the same product at the same price, service design is the reason why you walk into one shop and not the other.3 At its heart, service design is about understanding customer behavior, and using that understanding to design new offerings, or change existing ones, to deliver a better experience for customers. In todays hyper-competitive environment where products and services are quickly commoditized, service design provides a means of creating customized consumer experiences that drive unrealized value and increase ROI.

1 Sawhney, Ravi. People Are the Puck.Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 01 Sept. 2011. Web. 25 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/people_are_the_puck.html>. 2 Ibid 3 Stickdorn, Mark, and Jakob Schneider.This Is Service Design Thinking: Basics - Tools - Cases.Amsterdam: BIS, 2012. Print.
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The economic case for service design


Author Joseph Pine lays out the economic case for service design in his TED Talk What consumers want. In his presentation, Pine charts the evolution of economic value over time.4 He illustrates it this way:  CommoditiesThis is where it all started. Originally, commodities involved extracting things (crops from the ground, fruit from trees, etc.) and selling them. The value comes from having the commodities to sell or trade Example: A coffee bean. As a commodity it has a value of 2 to 3.  GoodsGoods were the next evolution of economic value. Goods involved taking commodities and turning them into something. The economic value comes from whats put into making the finished good.  Example: Packaged coffee (roasted, ground and packaged on a shelf). As a good, that same coffee bean now has a value of 10 to 15. ServicesServices developed from taking goods and customizing them, leading to the birth of a service-based economy. Once a service becomes common, however, it starts to become commoditized.  Example: Brewed coffee. Now, as a result of performing the service of brewing, the value of the coffee is 50 to $1 for a cup.  ExperiencesExperience, the outcome of service design, is what results when you customize a service. This is where the new economic value is being createdthink about the rise in value from the simple brewed coffee service supplied by Burger King to the experience of meeting for coffee at Starbucks.  Example: Starbucks, where the experience has a value of $2 to $5 per drink. Service design is a means of aligning your organization in terms of people, infrastructure, and other resources, to best enable it to move from offering goods and services to offering experiences. In todays economy, consumers have tons of choices for both goods and services. Organizations that provide authentic experiences, where consumers leave feeling better about themselves and, therefore the brand, are the organizations that will prosper. The authentic part of that equation is just as important as the experience part. Pine points out, authenticity is becoming the new consumer sensibility the buying criteria by which consumers are choosing who [theyre] going to buy from, and what theyre going to buy.5 This is where service design can really create impact. If done properly, youre designing your experience considering how
4 Pine, Joseph. Joseph Pine: What Consumers Want. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Jan. 2009. Web. 25 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_pine_on_what_consumers_want.html>. 5 Pine, Joseph. Joseph Pine: What Consumers Want. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Jan. 2009. Web. 25 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_pine_on_what_consumers_want.html>.
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customers will interact with you across the entire company. Providing a consistent experience across all touch points is vital to building authenticity. The key is to act like you, and do what you say youll do at each point in the experience. That communicates authenticity. Fail to do that, and Pine says, Thats when youre perceived as fake, as a phony companyadvertising things that youre not.6 Service design, like any major business initiative, will require investment. Peter Merholz, president of Adaptive Path and an internationally recognized thought leader on user experience, emphasizes that point in his Harvard Business Review article titled Customer Experience Is an Investment, Not a Cost. He says: Typically, design is considered a costa necessary element of business, the expense of which should be managed to be as small as possible. But when you realize that successful design has an impact, driving heretofore unrealized value, you must think of it as an investment, akin to marketing or product development, where what matters is a return, and where spending less can actually be detrimental to your top- and bottom-lines.7 Merholz explains that the companies that understand this principle best are able to connect core business problems, customer behavior, and financial metrics.8 In other words, companies that invest in service design, aligning their organizations to improve the interaction between the organization and its customers, will start to realize untapped value from solving core business problems in ways that improve the customer experience. Merholz outlines a process for quickly identifying business opportunities and determining the potential financial impact of using service design to achieve the desired behavior change. He calls it the linking elephants, and it goes a little something like this:9 Business Opportunity What is the specific opportunity? Desired Behavior What exactly are you hoping your customer will do?  Behavior MetricWhats your target metric for your desired behavior? What could it amount to in terms of units? Value Metric Whats the value in dollars of the desired behavior?  Financial Outcome Your Behavior Metric multiplied by your Value Metric equals your financial outcome.

6 Ibid 7 Merholz, Peter. Customer Experience Is an Investment, Not a Cost.Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 19 May 2009. Web. 25 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/merholz/2009/05/customerexperience-is-an-investment-not-a-cost.html>. 8 Ibid 9 Ibid
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Heres Merholzs example, showing how you could quickly gauge the impact of investing in a suggested items area prior to check out on an e-commerce website:10 Business Opportunity Increase purchases per visit. Desired BehaviorCustomers purchase one additional item per visit.  Behavior Metric 5% of visits lead to an additional sale. With 20,000 visits per week, that equates to 1000 additional items per week. Value Metric Average item price is $12.74. Financial Outcome $12,740 of additional revenue per week. The linking elephants is a simple tool you can use to quantify that untapped value that Merholz mentions. And will that investment yield a return? Put simply, the untapped value can be substantial. Oracle Corporations most recent Customer Experience Impact Report reveals that an astounding 86% of consumers would pay more for a better experience.11 Equally astounding, 89% of consumers give a competitor a try after a bad experience.12 The report goes on to quantify what those percentages mean in potential increased revenues for certain industries. Hold on to your hats according to the Oracle report, the U.S. airline industry could have made an additional $8.94 billion in 2010 by providing a better customer experience.13 Wireless carriers, an additional $14.65 billion each year.14 These are not small numbers. So the real question becomes, can you afford NOT to adopt service design? Can you afford to gamble with the commoditization of your products and services? Theres really only one reasonable answer to that question. Clearly, investing in service design could generate a significant return for your organization. But just like with any investment, you have to be clear about your goals, you have to make a plan for reaching those goals, you need to do some research and you need to be able to measure your progress so you can adjust along the way. Thats how you maximize your return, and its no different with service design.

10 Ibid 11  Oracle Corporation. 2011 Customer Experience Impact Report. Rep. Oracle Corporation, Jan. 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/cust-exp-impact-report-epss-1560493.pdf>. 12 Ibid 13  Oracle Corporation. 2011 Customer Experience Impact Report. Rep. Oracle Corporation, Jan. 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/cust-exp-impact-report-epss-1560493.pdf>. 14 Ibid
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Setting your goals and doing your research


If you want to understand someone, walk a mile in their shoes. Its a common saying that weve all heard for years. But the secret to its staying power is its simple truth. Understanding someone, and understanding their motivation, takes time and study. Service design is built on that practice. But before you start, its important to know where youre headed. While its true that service design is about taking a holistic view of how your customer interacts with your company, its important, as Peter Merholz pointed out, to identify the core business problems that youre trying to diagnose before you start. One way to start would be to think about what stops your customers from committing to purchase from you? Obviously the point of creating great customer experiences is to convert those experiences into purchases. So as you begin to think about the goals of your service design efforts, consider what customer needs you must satisfy to motivate them to commit to a purchase. Merholz, in another blog post for the Harvard Business Review, articulates three specific sets of requirements that customers need to satisfy before theyll be prepared to commit to a purchase.15 They are: Functional Does the product or service meet my basic needs? IntellectualThrough comparison, Im confident Im getting the best deal? Emotional Could I have a relationship with this brand? Merholz found that until consumers were able to satisfy all three sets of requirements, they would go through the motions but never commit to purchasing. In the context of service design, when you analyze your customers interactions with your company, look for the areas where customers seem to be on the path to purchasing, and then drop off. When looking at customer experience with your brand from a holistic perspective, are they able to fulfill all three sets of requirements? Or do you need to provide a means for meeting a functional, intellectual, or emotional requirement along the way? Answering that question may be the key to creating the valuable experience your customers are looking for that allows them to commit to purchasing. Once you have some initial goals or targets in place, its time to start walking in your customers shoes and mapping the journey.

15  Merholz, Peter. Its Not Who Your Customers Are, Its How They Behave.Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 11 Feb. 2009. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/merholz/2009/02/its-notwho-your-customers-are.html>.
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Customer jour ney mapping


One of the realities of business success is as your company grows, a smaller and smaller percentage of your employees actually interact with customers. This can lead to a natural, gradual detachment from what its really like to interact with and buy from your company. Since service design is all about understanding your customers behavior and providing them with experiences that provide value for them, losing touch with what their experiences are like is dangerous. Thats exactly why so many companies that embrace service design also embrace customer journey mapping. Harley Manning, co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, explains the importance of customer journey mapping in his recent blog post for the Harvard Business Review: Whats the best way to optimize your customer experience?  Why not fix it where it happens? Improve the experience on your website. Improve the experience in your retail locations or call centers. This strategy makes perfect sense, and it aligns nicely with the way your company is probably organizedwith the website, retail locations, and contact centers each in their neat little silo. But based on our research, this natural strategy doesnt work because it lacks any understanding of the larger, crosschannel journeys that your customers take.16 In the post, Manning explains the mapping process is about determining customer goals, perceptions and behaviors in a holistic way. He says, Customer journey maps visually illustrate those findings by showing the series of events that make up a customers interactions with a firm over time. The maps help companies find problems that occur in the white space as a customer passes from one channel to another.17

16  Manning, Harley. Customer Experience Should Be Part of Your Business. Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 29 Aug. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/customer_ experience_should_be.html>. 17 Ibid
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We mentioned Starbucks earlier as an example of an experience versus a good or service. Heres an example customer journey map developed by Little Springs Design documenting the customer experience at a Starbucks location, noting both positive and negative aspects of the visit:18

Heres another example from Lego mapping the experience for an executive visiting them in New York City:19

18  Starbucks Experience Map. 2010. Photograph. Littlespringsdesign.com.Little Springs Design. By Little Springs Design. Little Springs Design, 28 Mar. 2010. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://old.littlespringsdesign.com/wp-content/ themes/LSD%20theme/images/experiencemap1.pdf>. 19  Temkin, Bruce. LEGOs Building Block ForGoodExperiences.Customer Experience Matters. Temkin Group, 3 Mar. 2009. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/legos-building-block-forgood-experiences/>.

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Manning points to a couple of examples of companies who have effectively utilized customer journey mapping to better understand their customers and how they can create better experiences for them: FedEx20 The shipping giant went so far as to create a Channel Strategy and Orchestration Team in 2008 that was organized outside of any of the existing company silo. The team utilized customer journey mapping to understand what customers experienced when they transitioned from one channel within the company to another, like from the website to a local FedEx location or a phone agent. The mapping process helped the team clearly identify opportunities for improvement in all areas of the company. Since the Channel Strategy and Orchestration Team doesnt exist in any siloed unit, its been able to more effectively coordinate the efforts for improvement across the company channels. FedExs focus on the customer experience is paying off, and the company was recently voted the industry leader in customer experience according to the 2013 Temkin Experience Ratings Survey, an annual survey of ten thousand U.S. consumers that ranks two hundred and forty-six companies in nineteen industries.21 Virgin Media22 Virgin Media, the largest Virgin company in the world, operates a mobile network, provides broadband service, and home phone and pay TV services. The challenge for Virgin Media was to create a consistent and valuable experience across multiple channels and product lines. The company embarked on an aggressive customer journey mapping project focused on six specific customer journeys within their company, including subscribing, paying, and customer support. Manning describes the everevolving customer journey map as, a giant sheet of brown butcher paper covered in red pieces of tape and multi-colored sticky notes. It links all six journeys together in a continuous flow that crosses five functional silos within the business.23

20  Manning, Harley. Customer Experience Should Be Part of Your Business. Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 29 Aug. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/customer_ experience_should_be.html>. 21  Temkin, Bruce. FedEx Leads Parcel Delivery Services in 2013 Temkin ExperienceRatings.FedEx Leads Parcel Delivery Services in 2013 Temkin Experience Ratings. Temkin Group, 21 Mar. 2013. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http:// experiencematters.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/fedex-leads-parcel-delivery-industry-in-2013-temkin-experienceratings/>. 22  Manning, Harley. Customer Experience Should Be Part of Your Business. Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 29 Aug. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/customer_ experience_should_be.html>. 23 Ibid
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Virgin Media uses customer journey mapping in conjunction with the Net Promoter Score system to track how their changes to the customer experience changes their customers opinion of the company. Since embarking on the initiative, Virgin Media has seen an eighteen-point increase in their net promoter score24, which represents a significant improvement in customer opinion. In addition, customer churn has been reduced by an impressive twenty percent.25 Mapping the customer journey gives you a holistic view of how your company treats customers, and will give you insight into what the overall experience of buying from your company is like. The key takeaway here is to focus on the customers experiences and not on your own internal organizational structure. Fix the problems that customers experience as they transition from one business channel to another to create a truly valuable customer experience.

Design personas
Now that youve got a map of your customers interactions with your company, a map that you can use to identify opportunities to improve their overall experience, its vital to define just exactly who your customers really are. A design persona is just that. Officially, its defined as: Models of key behaviors, attributes, motivations, and goals of a  companys target customers. A persona is created from primary research with real customers and takes the form of a vivid narrative description of a single person who represents a behavioral segment. Organizations use personas to guide the design of products, channels, and messaging.26 One of the key aspects of that definition is the fact that personas are created from primary research. Design personas should be an embodiment of what your research tells you. Youre bringing your customers to life, but the trick is to do so in a way that accurately segments customers by behaviors. Steve Mulder, Director of User Experience & Analytics for NPR Digital Services, in his book The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web says this about design personas, Personas are expanding from a design tool you use to decide how to implement a strategy into a strategic tool you use to help define a strategy in the first place.27
24  Satmetrix Systems, Inc. Virgin Media: Embracing the Net Promoter Discipline at Virgin Media - Putting the Customer at the Heart of the Business. Satmetrix. Satmetrix Systems, Inc., 2010. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http:// www.satmetrix.com/documents/pdfs/VirginMedia-CaseStudy.pdf>. 25  Satmetrix Systems, Inc. Virgin Media: Embracing the Net Promoter Discipline at Virgin Media - Putting the Customer at the Heart of the Business. Satmetrix. Satmetrix Systems, Inc., 2010. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http:// www.satmetrix.com/documents/pdfs/VirginMedia-CaseStudy.pdf>. 26  Rapide. The Future of Customer Experience. The Future of Customer Experience. SlideShare Inc., 30 May 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.slideshare.net/rapideuk/the-future-of-customer-experience>. 27  Mulder, Steve, and Ziv Yaar. The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2007. Print.
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When developing a design persona, you want to make them as detailed as you can. Really flesh them out, and make them as real as possible. Include a picture thats representative of the group the persona represents. Give him or her a name, and detail their background. Where do they live? What do they do for a living? Whats their family like? What are their hobbies? Most importantly, what is their experience goal with your company? What are they hoping for from your brand? Again, the personas are there to help you develop your specific strategy in conjunction with the customer journey map. As Mulder puts it, Personas give you a valuable framework for creating and prioritizing business initiatives, and a way to enable more effective distribution and alignment of strategy throughout the organization.28 Youve framed your goals, and now you have your customer journey map and design personas to check your assumptions against. Set your final strategy based on the research presented by those two tools, and start designing a more valuable experience for your customers.

Putting service design into action


Weve talked about service design as a holistic approach for creating experiences that add value for your customers, and that distinguishes your brand from competitors. Weve talked about the economic case for service design, and how its an investment in your relationship with your customers. Now its time to make change. In order to make that happen, you need to treat your services with the same level of design and detail as you would if you were engineering a car or a building. You need a detailed blueprint.

The service blueprint


The key to service design and delivering a valuable experience is making that experience both authentic and consistent. Consistency is a tough thing with services because they so often depend on people, and people can be notoriously inconsistent. Thats precisely where the service blueprint comes in. The service blueprint is exactly what it says it is, a specific and detailed design for how a particular service should be performed. The service blueprints goal is to help your organization move beyond depending on an individual to deliver great service, and instead move to a consistent and authentic customized service that delivers an exceptional experience for your customers consistently and without fail.
28 Ibid
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G. Lynn Shostack, senior vice president in charge of the Private Clients Group at Bankers Trust Company and former chair of the American Marketing Associations special task force on service marketing, makes the case for service blueprints in an article she authored for Harvard Business Review. In the article, she emphasizes the importance of taking the same disciplined approach to designing services as most companies do to designing products. She says, Better servicedesignprovides the key to market success, and more important, to growth.29 The service blueprint is designed to guide companies through exploring all of the issues related to creating and managing a service. In order to create a service blueprint, you need to:30 Identify processes What are the things that will constitute a service?  Isolate fail points Where could things go wrong and what would happen if they did?  Establish the time frame Whats the standard execution time for the service youre designing? You would use this for calculating the cost of performing the service. Analyze profitability What does your profitability look like under normal circumstances? How would delays affect your profitability? Graphically lay these elements out to create a literal blueprint of how the service would be performed. At the design stage, the key is to consider every interaction between your customers and your company. Things that are considered to be good personal service, like a great attitude and attentiveness, should be incorporated into the hiring, training and performance measurement practices of the company.31 The real advantage of the service blueprint is that it allows you to map out the entire service and its various customer interactions on paper and test your assumptions. Really walk through it thoroughly to find the bugs and rectify them before the service even makes it off the paper. This will save you time and money, and also protect your brand from delivering poor experiences to your customers. Consider testing the service as a prototype, and iterating quickly based on feedback.

29  Shostack, G. Lynn. Designing Services That Deliver.Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, Jan. 1984. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://hbr.org/1984/01/designing-services-that-deliver/ar/1>. 30 Ibid 31  Shostack, G. Lynn. Designing Services That Deliver.Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, Jan. 1984. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://hbr.org/1984/01/designing-services-that-deliver/ar/1>.
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Handing your customers the controls


Speaking of feedback, the last key aspect of service design to keep in mind is the part where you check your progress and make adjustments as you iterate your new design. Weve established that service design can be a critical investment for your organization, helping to align your company and its customers to create experiences that provide real value. Align is the key word here. It means to bring into cooperation or agreement with a particular group, party, cause, etc.32 In the case of service design, thats an extremely appropriate definition, because to effectively utilize service design, youll be cooperating with your customers to design a mutually beneficial experience. And in order to do that, youll need to listen and give your customers a certain degree of control over your brand as you iterate. Giving up control can sound frightening, but service design is a collaborative animal. It only works if you focus on listening and learning about your customers and understanding their behaviors. Knowing who they are, what they want, and what you can do to make their experience more memorable is the goal of service design. Once youre able to answer those questions, you may find that the results require you to give your customers more or less control over your brand. Tim Leberecht, chief marketing officer of NBBJ and founder of the award winning Design Mind print and online magazine, details the concept of usefully losing control of your brand. In his TED Talk, 3 ways to (usefully) lose control of your brand, Leberecht describes two very different approaches for how organizations can use varying amounts of control when designing their experiences, ultimately making customers happier.

Give customers more control


As weve discussed, service design is a deliberate cooperative effort between a business and its customers focused on creating valuable experiences that make customers happier and, as a result, differentiate the brand from competitors. In his talk, Leberecht provides a few examples of brands that gave customers an unprecedented level of control over their businesses in an effort to create a unique customer experience. Radioheads release of In Rainbows33 Leberecht points to this example as an extreme collaboration with customers in terms of pricing. When Radiohead released In Rainbows in
32  Align. Definition of Align. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ align>. 33  Leberecht, Tim. Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_ usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>.
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the fall of 2007, the band decided to offer it online only with a pay-as-youlike model. For a limited time, consumers could download the album and pay whatever they thought it was worth, even if that price was free. The experiment created a lot of buzz for the album, and initial sales were up from previous Radiohead releases. The band realized they could create a better and more exciting experience for their customers by eliminating the price barrier to listening to their new music and turning the control of pricing over to their fans. The launch of Microsoft Kinect34 Leberecht highlights the case of Microsofts popular Kinect motion controller for its Xbox gaming system. When the device was initially released, it was quickly hacked. Microsofts first reaction was to fight the hacks and frantically publish software updates to combat them. But the software giant ended up changing course once it realized that allowing the hacks was actually creating a better experience for its customers. It supported the gaming community by allowing for more functionality, it created buzz for the product, and it helped create a sense of co-ownership between the company and its gaming customers. The hackability of the Kinect has spawned an entire ecosystem around the device, similar to Apples App Store. It seems clear, according to a recent New York Times article, that the openness of the Kinect contributed to it getting into the Guinness Book of World Records for fastest-selling consumer device ever.35 And its still rolling

Give customers less control


Understanding customer behavior can sometimes lead to surprising results. For example, sometimes the right answer is to give your customers less control over their experience. That might be exactly what theyre looking for. To make the point, Leberecht offers a simple observation, Giving people less control might be a wonderful way to counter the abundance of choice and make them happier.36 He offers two powerful examples of how service design has lead to great customer experiences by limiting choice.

34 Ibid 35  Walker, Rob. Freaks, Geeks and Microsoft: How Kinect Spawned a Commercial Ecosystem. The New York Times. The New York Times, 03 June 2012. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/magazine/ how-kinect-spawned-a-commercial-ecosystem.html?pagewanted=all>. 36  Leberecht, Tim. Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_ usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>.
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Nextpedition37 The service from American Express designed for travel enthusiasts in their 20s and 30s creates an exciting vacation experience where the destination and itinerary are completely unknown until the journey begins. The itinerary is revealed daily via a smartphone app. The service creates a completely customized and unique experience by taking control completely away from the customer.38 The service has since racked up over two million likes on Facebook.39 Interflora40 The UK-based florist monitored Twitter looking for users who were having a bad day. When they found one, they sent them a free bouquet of flowers. A great experience where the customer had no control over the outcome, but it made them happier according to their joyous replies back to the company. The campaign led to thousands of social mentions which helped boost Interflora in search rankings as well.41 While its clear that control is a key part of successfully implementing service design, Leberecht concludes his presentation with the same point that Joseph Pine made at the end of his: When engaging customers, he emphasizes, At the end of the day, as hyper connectivity and transparency expose companies behavior in broad daylight, staying true to their true selves is the only sustainable value proposition.42 Authenticity matters, especially when you begin to give greater control over your brand to your customers. Service design requires openness in order to really transform products and services into experiences.

Conclusion
We started this Blue Paper talking about hockey, and the importance of being able to anticipate where the puck is GOING to be. In hockey, thats everything. In business, that same principle applies. The key is to know your customer to the

37  Leberecht, Tim. Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_ usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>. 38  McCracken, Grant. The Revolution Inside AmExs Nextpedition. Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 6 Feb. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/02/american_express_has_ launched.html>. 39  Schmid, Corinne. Enterprise Gamification. Enterprise Gamification by ItzCorinne. SlideShare Inc., 26 Sept. 2011. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.slideshare.net/itzCorinne/enterprise-gamification-by-itzcorinne>. 40  Leberecht, Tim. Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_ usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>. 41  Essex, Mike. Using Free Stuff to Leverage SEO and Online Brand Building.Koozaicom. Koozai Ltd., 5 Apr. 2011. Web. 28 Mar. 2013. <http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/using-free-stuff-to-leverage-seoand-online-brand-building-756/>. 42  Leberecht, Tim. Tim Leberecht: 3 Ways to (usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand. TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC, Oct. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_ usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation.htmlhttp>.
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point of understanding their behavior and motivations. If you can get there, you can anticipate where theyre headed and meet them there with an amazing experience that makes them happier about your brand. Service design is the application of that concept. As we discussed, today economic value is being created by experiences: Authentic, consistent experiences that make consumers happy. Service design provides a comprehensive approach to learning about customers, then using what you learn to systematically design a customized service that can be delivered consistently to create an exceptional customer experience. Tools like customer journey mapping, design personas and the service blueprint will help you understand your customers behaviors. You can use that understanding to create new customized services to meet the needs of your customers, improving the holistic experience of interacting with your company. Products and services are quickly commoditized today, and service design provides a means of differentiation through customized consumer experiences that drive unrealized value and increase ROI. Time to suit up and hit the ice. Just remember, make sure to skate to where the puck is going to be.

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