Month: April 2015

The third session of the Service Design book club covered Chapters 5 and 6. These chapters cover techniques for describing services, which fed well into work we are doing this quarter to improve our customer experiences. Jenni and I took the opportunity to try the book’s technique of service blueprinting to create a holistic view of our customer’s experiences. If you have not read the book, I think you’ll find this technique useful as it’s easy to apply without full understanding of service design. And if you have read the book, you know the examples in the book are hard to read and/or not in English, so hopefully this shows a real-world example.

We spent a couple hours creating our service blueprint, using a whiteboard and big stickies to easily change our approach as this was our first time service blueprinting. We started by drawing several swimlanes on the board (where TBD are blank spaces):

Physical Evidence	TBD	TBD
Customer Actions	TBD	TBD
Onstage	TBD	TBD
Backstage	TBD	TBD
Product/Systems	TBD	TBD

We then created the backbone for our service in large stickies. A key point from the book is to set a boundary for the blueprint as it can easily get out of scope if you don’t constrain it. Our backbone had about a dozen stages, with the first couple looking like this:

Physical Evidence	Signed Contract	Welcome Email
Customer Actions	TBD	TBD
Onstage	TBD	TBD
Backstage	TBD	TBD
Product/Systems	TBD	TBD

We then gave detail to each stage to show what the customer, onstage, backstage, and product actions are. Many of our stages had blanks for some areas as there are not activities onstage or backstage.

Physical Evidence	Signed Contract	Welcome Email
Customer Actions	Product/Service Selection	First Login
Onstage	Contract Negotiation	Welcome Text
Backstage	Legal/Finance	Account Provisioning
Product/Systems	Provisioning System	Email Automation

We tracked our open questions and ideas for improvement along the way on different stickies. At the end we had one of our key service reps join us in the room to review what we created, which led to some great conversations and corrections to our understanding. Most notable were discussions around how certain product features aren’t used by our teams as we thought they were, and around how we could make the final contract termination stage better to help our customers stop using our products.

I think the experience was great with a new PM for a number of reasons:

• The blueprint creates a foundation for understanding our full customer experiences, not just the product interactions.
• Trying a new technique together gives a space to experiment and collaborate towards a shared success with a blueprint artifact.
• The stakeholder review at the end helped form a key relationship for Jenni.
• The blueprint creates shared understanding for Jenni and I which can be used between us as well as with the development team and stakeholders.

We are planning on sharing the blueprint with others as a scaffold for this quarter’s work and to further validate some of our improvement ideas. I think it was a successful activity and would recommend it, especially for product work that impacts a customer across multiple touch-points in their life cycle.

If you are interested in hosting your own Service Design book club, here are some discussion questions from these chapters:

• What did you think of Service Blueprinting? Should we set up a workshop to create one? From the book, where the importance of the mapping activity is highlighted: “First, it wasn’t the map itself, but the mapping.”
• A theatrical metaphor was used to describe frontstage/backstage service activities. Did this resonate with you? Why or why not? From the book “Shostack’s line of visibility has transmuted into the frontstage/ backstage metaphor in which anything that the “customer” experiences is frontstage (on-stage would be more appropriate to the metaphor) and everything else that goes on behind the scenes to make that happen is backstage.”
• Are there backstage activities that we could bring frontstage to improve our service experience? From the book “Often, this backstage activity is evidenced in some way by bringing it frontstage, such as the folded toilet paper tip in a hotel bathroom that indicates the room has been cleaned.”

For the second session of the Service Design book club, we covered Chapters 3 and 4. These chapters focused on the importance of research and many techniques to gain customer insights.

For a new Product Manager, the techniques discussed in Chapter 4 are a great introduction to the tools in the discovery tool belt. And more important, these chapters stress the value of discovery in gaining insights that power service design decisions. As you train a new Product Manager, it’s helpful to take this same spirit of discovery in talking about new ideas that the new PM may have. Rather than dismissing a new idea due to your preconceived notions of what’s best, take the stance that the new idea is worth testing. Talk to the new PM about how their idea can be validated, either through existing data, interviewing internal stakeholders, or reaching out to customers. And be comfortable saying you don’t know what’s best. By showing how you go about learning and gaining customer insight, you’re teaching the new PM “how to fish” rather than giving them the “fish” of your prior experience.
As we covered this section at work, we had a fruitful conversation focusing on how our Customer Experience (CX) Team currently shares insights and how we could do it better. Our CX Team has a blog, and we knew we could drive more internal traffic to it. We talked about ideas such as adding new posts to Slack or Chatter and creating posters of valuable insights to distribute. As the HourSchool case study suggested, we also talked about ways to better ingrain CX into existing standing Services meetings to make customer insights a regular part of our services planning and give it continual focus.

If you are interested in using Service Design for you own book club, here are some discussion questions you can use for Chapters 3 & 4:

• Do you agree with the focus on qualitative over quantitative research? Is it better to get 100 insights or 10 truths from research? From the book: “Statistics are not very actionable for designers—we need to know the underlying reasons.”
• Do we utilize our internal staff enough when performing research? Are there ways we could utilize them better? From the book: “When time is short and a service improvement project has a limited budget, it is often a good idea to prioritize the research time with staff and data to dig quickly into the detail that is needed to design great services.”
• The HourSchool case study mentions that research became a regular part of meetings. Would it be beneficial to make research updates and recruiting a regular part of Service Team meetings? From the book “Announcing new classes, soliciting requests, and recruiting volunteer organizers are now standing agenda items.”
• As we learn about Service Design and create exciting improvements to our Services, how can we ensure our actions and momentum continue on? From the book: “Service innovation should have a lifespan beyond the length of time the service designers are involved in the project. This means recognizing that other stakeholders may engage in many of the activities of service design as part of a continual process of change.”
• Were there any discovery tools you’d like to try? Should we do a Service Safari together? Should we put together a Brand Sheet to use in discovery with customers?