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The challenge we found when we moved our attention from designing products to designing services was that services are entirely different animals than products. Applying the same mindset to designing a service as to the design of a product can lead to customer-hostile rather than user-friendly results.

Products are discrete objects and, because of this, the companies that make, market, and sell products tend to be separated into departments that specialize in one function and have a vertical chain of command—they operate in silos (Figure 2.1).

FIGURE 2.1 Where is the customer in this picture? Staff working in silos tend to focus on the efficiency of their step in the value chain rather than the quality of the complete customer experience.

Orange

Two days after setting up our service design consultancy, we received a call from executives at mobile operator Orange with an offer for the kind of project we had dreamed about for several years in our earlier jobs in Web consultancies. Could we help them make the service experience a strategic factor in their development of new services?

At that time, Orange had achieved huge success in the UK market through a strong focus on making mobile telephony clear, simple, and desirable for their customers. Still, they recognized that they lacked tools and processes to make the customer experience drive new service development. Their branding wasn’t connected to the services they launched. The website was a marketing channel that didn’t help existing customers get more value out of their accounts. Innovation was technology driven rather than customer oriented.

In fact, Orange were organized like a product factory out of the last century, not a modern, market-defining service provider. The company’s experts were lodged in silos, and the only people who could see the whole picture of their offering were their customers.

To face this challenge, Orange needed to introduce a design approach that bridged silos and channels. They also needed to introduce the service experience earlier in their strategic thinking so that a vision for the service experience could impact technical and business decisions rather than the other way around. One of the problems with thinking about service experiences at the business level is that it is difficult for people to imagine what something as intangible as a new mobile phone plan would look and feel like. Spreadsheets are a poor medium for conveying human experiences.

To tackle this problem, we created a project called “Tangible Evidence from the Future” and designed the experience of 12 new service propositions ranging from new ways to organize call centers to self-service, online plans. Several of the concepts went to market, including a proposal to change Orange stores from vendors of other brands’ phones to places where people could get help with using their mobile services. Another proposition that went to market as “Orange Premier” was a high-end mobile phone plan for people who wanted a unique experience and exceptional service (Figure 2.2).

Orange Premier was a success in the market and introduced a way for Orange to use design as the starting point for business development. We have worked with Orange for the past 10 years to improve their service experience across the board, in projects ranging from innovation strategy to fixing problems with call center delivery.

Our first project with Orange confirmed our thinking that the use of design in this context needed to be reframed from an activity focused on the delivery of products, paper, and interfaces to a process that enables all aspects of a service to play together in a unified experience. We realized that a new landscape was about to open up and that we had to examine how the preconditions for design were changing.

FIGURE 2.2 When we showed Orange how customers could experience a “luxury” account, they decided to launch a proposition with unparalleled attention to the quality of design and customer service.

When companies that sell services are structured in silos, however, problems often arise that affect customer experience. Customers are promised a new mobile phone plan through a website only to find that the assistant in the store knows nothing about it or is not allowed to sell it for the online price. Patients in hospitals are kept in the dark about why they have been waiting for hours, or receive contradictory information during one of the most emotionally difficult times of their lives. The division of the silos makes sense to the business units, but makes no sense to the customer, who sees the entire offering as one experience. This problem is something we will return to frequently throughout the book as we look at how to turn this around, quite literally.

Many service companies think they are selling products. The finance sector is a classic example of this mindset, but insurance policies and bank accounts are services with multiple touchpoints of interaction, not products. When something goes wrong, policy holders want the financial compensation, of course, but the difference in value is whether they have an understanding person on the other end of the phone seamlessly guiding them through the claims process versus being sent an unintelligible 20-page form and then having to wait weeks for their money. Many organizations are starting to examine their customer service offering and the value it can bring. This provides great opportunities for service designers.