Service design and the connected customer
Cassandra Moore, PhD is the Director of User Experience Strategy at Piehead
Have you ever called customer service only to find they can’t see what you just did on their website? Or clicked on a display ad that takes you to a home page rather than the product you were looking for? If so, you know how fragmented customer experiences can be. You’ve experienced it from a customer perspective.
But what about the flipside? How would customers evaluate the various touchpoints in their experience of your services? With so many new ways for customers to interact with you — TV, online and print ads, email, desktop web, social media and mobile to name a few – it’s difficult to create a seamless experience. And it’s difficult to take a customer’s perspective when you’re so close to your own processes.
As your customers gain new ways of interacting with you and your brand, however, new approaches to understanding and optimizing those interactions are emerging. Enter Service Design. In a nutshell, it’s a method for identifying your customer touchpoints across all channels, evaluating their effectiveness and strategically altering them to create a seamless experience.
Sounds good, right? So how does it work?
Research with both customers and stakeholders align business practices with customer touchpoints, identifying service gaps and pain-points. The outcome is depicted in a graphical format called a Service Blueprint. The Blueprint provides a “big picture” of the touchpoints and supporting business processes across all marketing channels.
Good service design creates value for both your customers and your business. Customers win by getting a seamless, efficient and pleasant experience. You win by learning where to focus resources and how to increase efficiencies. By identifying new customer touchpoints, improving performance around existing touchpoints, and delighting your customers, you increase your ROI.
A seamless cross-channel experience will be a big factor in engaging customers as digital touchpoints increase. How is your service design? Are you ready for the multi-device, always connected customer?
