Читать книгу Service Design - Ben Reason - Страница 31

A fundamental characteristic of services is that they create value only when we use them. A bus service can’t get people from point A to point B unless they know where to get on and off. Online banking only provides value when customers virtually enter the bank’s machine room through an online banking interface and conduct their own transactions. An empty seat on the train has no value once it has left the station. Even at the dentist’s office, nothing will happen unless the patient opens her mouth and tells the dentist where it hurts.

Product-oriented organizations often fail to see the potential of using their customers to make a service more effective. If customers are well informed about bus routes and schedules, they are more likely to get more efficiently from A to B and more inclined to use the bus, reducing their carbon footprint and easing congested roads. If an online bank is well designed, customers don’t need to spend time and money in a bank building. Services are co-produced between the provider and users. (We should note that this is not the same as co-design, which has customers or users take part in the design process before or after the launch of a product or service.)

On one end of the service spectrum we see network services, such as Face-book, Twitter, and YouTube, that would be useless if people didn’t commit millions of hours to produce the content and activity that give these social networks their value. On the other end of the scale, services such as healthcare are most sustainable if fewer people use them. The best way to ensure that hospitals are efficient is for people to “co-produce” their health by keeping themselves in good shape and so they don’t need treatment. The biggest missed opportunity in development is that organizations don’t think about their customers as valuable, productive assets in the delivery of a service, but as anonymous consumers of products.