oneux | designing experiences

do customers want a relationship with brands?

In an HBR article, entitled  'Why your customers don't want to talk to you'  the authors argue that  customers prefer self service channels to face to face interaction with employees. They also raise the concern that this may be because customers 'never wanted the kind of relationship that companies have always hoped for, and that self service now allows customers the "out" they've been looking for all along.' Quite an interesting thought.

They also claim that channel hoping, customers' movement from channel to channel when interacting with a company, increases the likelihood of them being disloyal. That is an easy one to fix. Just design your service holistically. Look at all your touch-points as part of the same service, not as independent channels.

You never know maybe your customers do want to have a relationship with you, but at the moment that relationship is painful... for them.

ensuring excellent service at the point of delivery

In previous posts I mentioned the need to empower the people who deliver the service and create a working culture employees can and will feel proud of.
But how do you maintain and reinforce an employee centric culture for a varied employee base? How do you make sure customers receive a consistently excellent experience across all touch points? Pret a manger is an example of a company which delivers a positive brand experience. The idea is that customers have the same high quality experience when they visit a Pret in any city or country. This is generally true, but there will be cases where customers experience a service that does not much the brand as the service is delivered by people and is not fully automated.
Here is an example: I have been visiting the same Pret every morning for a few months now and have been more than happy with the service. The other day however, I visited a different Pret and I received a brand shock, the Pret experience I received was nothing like what I came to expect. The setting was familiar but the choreography was all wrong. I will spare you the details but it suffices to say that the whole experience fell short of what Pret got me used to and it all had to do with the way the service was delivered by the Pret employees.

So how can we make sure that the experience offered remains consistent? Some ideas:

• Remind staff of brand values
• Maintain a physical environment that reinforces the brand
• While allowing staff to rewrite the rules, ensure these stay consistent to the brand values

service providers at the heart of service design

One of the themes that came out of emergence 2007 was the need to include and engage those that deliver the service we are in the mids of (re)desiging.

Chris Downs, from live | work talked about relinquishing control of the design process as a means of empowering service providers. He gave a convincing example form his own work and talked about relinquishing control, which appears quite bold but in closer inspection I see it as still having full control of the process while taking a step back and becoming good facilitators, another key skill that emerged from Oliver King's (from Engine) run panel . 

Bettina von Kupsch, Head of Customer Experience Management, at Swisscom Mobile, also talked about employees being at the centre of how Swisscom understands service and how they go about institutionalising  their approach to 'unbeatable service and quality'. As she put it, 'employees are the key to superior service quality'

The notion of entrusting your employees with delivering a great service is a familiar one. It is a a common theme that underpins almost all of the interviews featured in 'Uncommon Practice'. Companies that have successfully created a valued brand place their employees at the heart of their operation. Employees are valued more than customers while the culture and processes reinforce a sense of pride for being part of the company. In 'Uncommon Practice' Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic accepts that Virgin is not the only airline that employs talented people, however he argues that Virgin staff feel proud of their job and of the company, as a result the take extra care in their job and make sure they deliver a service that will maintain that sense of pride.