Customer aspiration based service design

When Henry Ford was asked if customers’ desires had anything to do with his path breaking Ford Model T, he had this to say, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Understanding that latent needs of a customer, which strongly revolves around a deep seated aspiration, can sometimes be the key to a product innovation, it can also be the building block of your organization’s service design.

When a customer walks into a BMW showroom, there are certain aspirations that are attached with a decision to walk in there. From the moment she walks in, she needs to see those aspirations getting fulfilled. Right from the first greeting, to the first question on what she wants. There can’t be questions of budgets and mileage. The questions need to come from the customer and possibly you will see an aspiration being realized. Creating a service design around this understanding of a customer, needs to be all pervasive from the way the salesmen deal with her, to the way billing and post sales is handled. The aspiration remains and possibly grows along with the ownership of the product. These aspirations are not attached only to luxury brands. Even mid market brands evoke aspiration among customers who may find such brands the pinnacle of their current stature and success. Working around these thoughts becomes a challenge as they are not that straightforward, yet, they do exist and discovering them lies in observing customer behavior. Customers tend to ask certain questions, get irked by some objections and are satisfied with specific features. In all these observations, lie the answers to what your customer is aspiring to become. Use those data points to build your service roadmap and watch customers enjoy the treatment in the way their purchasing behavior changes. Therein lies your organization’s reward for going that extra mile.

Customer aspiration has always driven many innovations, from a bulb to a Tata Nano. It wasn’t rocket science that built these products. They all were conceived by men and women who belonged to completely different aspiration levels. Breaking through the clutter of customer data and models, lies the simple art of deduction, of what your customer aspires to be, once she has used your brand. Let’s get started harnessing that power!

God of small things?

A brand’s greatest service challenge may actually manifest itself before your customer even walks into your store. A million factors can contribute to changing a customer’s mind from wanting to enter your service environment. This can range from a perennial long queue to a badly located store. The impact of these factors on designing your service strategy is critical. In the process we create an acute condition called ‘unsatisfied demand’ wherein we lose a customer’s business before him ever getting fully introduced to it. So how can the scourge of unsatisfied demand be sorted out with a well crafted service design?

But before you start drilling down to find an answer, you need to understand the kind of incidents and severity of them which are causing the aforementioned, unsatisfied demand. Incidents that will talk about how customers have turned their backs on long queues and in the process a brand. Walking into an ATM with the air conditioning turned to minus 20 and receipts strewn across the floor can leave one scarred about the brand, quite literally. Your day can go quite pear shaped when you spend an hour looking for parking outside that new restaurant while your stomach goes on a disobedience movement, demanding justice and some food. A badly lit coffee shop which is neither romantic or understated but just plain cheap, makes that immense need for a coffee disappear and attraction towards a brand too. The examples are countless yet are so simple and avoidable. These are just the few details brands forget to include in their service design which lead to a very forgettable experience for a ‘could be’ first time customer.

Taking stock of this and then acting upon these situations is not as easy as it seems. Customers can get turned off by very different things and identifying them and tackling them can be the game changer with today’s unpredictable customer. Companies need to ask themselves a couple of questions to get them started down this road. When I walk into my company’s store, is there anything that inhibits my interest to enter? How can I make that first visit as comfortable as possible for my customer? In the answers to these questions, quite possibly lies the key to never losing a customer even before you get to show them what you got.  

Blueprinting the Service Design

When we experience exceptional service, we are instantly taken by the person who delivers it and give some amount of credit to the company. We talk about it to friends and family at tea parties and tell them how a certain guy changed our day with some great service. We talk about it at every opportunity and gradually the story becomes the story of the heroics of one service representative. In the process we often forget to give enough credit to the company who set the right conditions for such an act to be performed. You might just have overlooked a very well planned service design which is in play to provide you that memorable service. So let’s explore this idea a little further.

Southwest Airlines is miles ahead when it comes to a well planned service design. They have manuals and instructions for every action that seems so unique and memorable to you. Southwest has designed things in such a manner including their training formats that allows any newcomer to embed themselves in the Southwest service culture. At no point does a well detailed design take away from employing the right kind of people. But identifying the right set of people in a market where they are in incredible demand makes for a challenge of a very different kind. Building a service design that allows an employee to adapt and deliver can be the key to providing that elusive customer satisfaction your brand is expected to deliver.

A couple of questions you might want to ask yourself as companies are: Do you already have a design in place which is not adequately defined? Do your employees fully understand it and is it being audited from time to time? Are there any loopholes in your design which allows employees to under deliver? Does your service design need a revamp to manage your brand’s current expectations? A plethora of questions, but ones that need pointed answers. Answers that can help you design that memorable service experience that your customer would talk about at that next tea party.