The
Art of Customer Delight
The service
sector needs to break away from old manufacturing-oriented habits and build
great consumer experiences into every facet of its business model.
Airlines
routinely rank near the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys. But we would
wager that most customers, like us, find that the time on the plane — the “sit
back, relax, and enjoy the flight” part — is the least awful piece of their
experience. The nightmare is everything else: prices that change from minute to
minute and bear no perceivable relationship to actual cost or value, fees for
checking bags and just about any amenity, and frequent delays caused by weather
or “the late arrival of the incoming aircraft.” Airports themselves have their
own set of annoyances: check-in kiosks that are out of order or can’t read your
credit card, the queues and indignities of security, inadequate staffing;
seemingly random gate-change announcements, and the scrum at the gate.
Welcome to Surf Air, which sells flights by
subscription. For a monthly fee (currently US$1,950, plus a one-time membership
charge of $1,000), subscribers can take an unlimited number of flights anywhere
on Surf Air’s 12-city system in California and Nevada. That is a bargain for
many customers: an L.A. lawyer who needs to be in Sacramento several times a
month; a tech mogul who weekends in Lake Tahoe; consultants with clients
scattered around California; or a restaurateur with properties in different
cities. On a full-service carrier, a last-minute San Francisco–Los Angeles
round-trip can cost $450. However, the real value of Surf Air is not the price
of a flight but the experience of the carrier’s ingenious service design.
Service Design Is a Bridge
Service design is a strategic discipline that
originated in Europe and is spreading rapidly worldwide. At its core lies the
belief that services can and should be designed with as much care as products,
so your customers get the experience you want them to have every time.
At its heart, service design is the bridge
between strategy and customer experience. It is grounded in your company’s
identity, capabilities, and chosen competitive path. It is activated when you
rethink, reimagine, and re-create every stage and aspect of interaction between
customers and your company, regardless of what is being sold and whether a
transaction actually occurs. It succeeds when you delight the customers you
have chosen to serve and advance your strategic goals at the same time.
Three key ideas are embedded in the service
design philosophy:
•
Service design starts with what you, the seller, want; it is about
delivering on your promise to customers in accordance with your strategy, not
acceding to everything a customer asks.
• Service design is proactive, not reactive;
it involves choices, actions, and consequences.
• Service design creates consistency, and
consistency is no accident.
Consider how Surf Air designs its service.
Each step is mean to reduce hassle, avoid pain points, and please customers.
Because its customers are members, there is no payment to process, so booking a
flight takes just a few minutes. The company flies only Pilatus PC-12 NG
aircraft — a nine-passenger plane that has the feel of a private jet. The
choice of these planes eliminates security screening, because the U.S.
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) exempts aircraft carrying fewer
than 10 passengers. The airline works out of underutilized regional airports to
avoid the crowds and chaos of big airports like LAX and SFO.
Surf Air operates up to 90 scheduled flights
a day. Passengers need to show up only 15 minutes before flight time. Free
snacks and beverages await them in the preflight area. There are no
boarding passes, because passengers’ names are on a list, and no boarding
groups, because there are only nine seats. Luggage is picked up planeside and
delivered as passengers walk off — sometimes by the pilot or copilot, sometimes
by the minimal ground staff Surf Air has at its airports. “When our members
first come in, they are very confused,” says CEO Jeff Potter. “They’re used to
loudspeakers and bright lights and being corralled.”
The radically simplified customer journey
reduces backstage labor, too. Surf Air needs no baggage-handling system and
employs no flight attendants. Its IT system is much simpler, too — it requires
no algorithms to set fares, has no tickets to process, and connects to no
travel agents. The resulting economics are so attractive that Surf Air can
make a profit on a flight that is just 60 percent full. That compares to an
estimated 75 percent average for big network carriers. Surf Air can — and
will — fly scheduled flights with just one passenger.
But it’s not the luxury, the convenience, or
even the relative economy of Surf Air that members like most. “People
constantly point out that flying commercially between L.A. and San Francisco, a
90-minute flight, actually takes 3 to 4 hours,” says Potter. “Our surveys show
the number one thing people value is time. We like to think we’re not saving
them time — we’re giving it back to them.” Indeed, Surf Air fliers frequently
comment on what a gift those few hours are, allowing them to coach their
children’s teams, to be more involved in the life and care of an elderly
family member in another city, giving them peace of mind about a project
that needs a little more oversight than is the norm.
Nothing about Surf Air’s extraordinary
experience depends on its employees being superior human beings. Like the
people with whom you have interacted at check-in counters, TSA lines, and
gates, they are good people and try their best. But ordinary airline and
airport employees are unable to deliver great customer experiences because
their services are part of a patchwork of many different pieces and processes
rather than a coherently designed system.
Great service is not a consequence of good
intentions, attentive management, or a supportive culture. Service needs to be
laid into the company’s keel, the way performance is built into a BMW or
intuitiveness is designed into an iPad. If service isn’t built in, no amount of
goodwill can deliver it reliably, and no effort can compensate for the lack of
it. In fact, cause and effect are reversed: A company designed for service will
naturally display the behaviors — the intention, attention, and culture — good
customer experience requires.
Design a Journey
Experiences
matter. Experiences are journeys. Journeys are designed. These statements are fundamental to understanding
service design and its delivery. Experiences happen over time and, often, over
space. They are journeys, whether physical (like a flight from Dallas to
Detroit) or temporal (like a 10-year relationship with an insurance company) or
intellectual (like a consulting engagement). For customers, journeys involve
need, planning, anticipation, embarkation, the event itself, disembarkation,
and memory. Companies must analyze and design every stage of that journey,
especially every customer touch point because each is an opportunity to engage
— or alienate — a customer.
Most
companies are not designed to think this way. Service-industry operating models
— their org charts, processes, incentives — were adapted from manufacturing,
where metrics are based on the quantity and quality of finished goods rather
than the value of interactions with customers. These models are designed from
production out, not from customer back. This is especially disconcerting when
we consider that the service industry is responsible for more than three-quarters of U.S.
private-sector gross domestic product (GDP)
and about 68 percent of GDP worldwide.
The
industrial legacy is often ill suited for services in large part because
the customer is an active participant in most service transactions, as Frances
Frei and Anne Morriss point out in their book Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the
Core of Your Business (Harvard Business
Review Press, 2012). An automobile assembly plant is a massive and intricate
place, but the customer is far from the factory floor. In a hospital, during a
professional-services engagement, or in a restaurant, by contrast, the customer
is right there, letting you know what he or she expects. Consequently,
practices and lessons from product design and manufacturing cannot simply be portaged
over to service enterprises.
The ThedaCare hospital system in Wisconsin
runs primary-care clinics that handle about 450,000 patient visits each year.
Many of those patients need a blood test or other lab work. ThedaCare
redesigned the patient’s journey step by step so that blood is drawn as soon as
the patient gets to an exam room and before the doctor arrives, with the aim of
returning results before the end of the visit. Doctor and patient can discuss
the tests immediately.
The result: A better-informed and more
complete doctor–patient visit; an increased likelihood that a patient will
follow instructions; and less time wasted in missed phone calls to discuss test
results after the appointment. Because ThedaCare owns its labs, it was able to
make these service-design choices without increasing patients’ wait times.
According to ThedaCare, the net effect of the redesign has been to shorten the
duration of a visit.
It is difficult to think of a transaction
between a buyer and a seller that cannot be made more valuable to both parties
by improving its design — both within and outside the service sector. Service
design can be vital to manufacturers, government agencies, and others whose
business is not in services per se. Toyota, for example, developed an entirely
new dealer network for its premium Lexus marque, precisely because it wanted to
design and deliver a level of service that complemented the promise of the
brand.
Well-designed service succeeds on two
dimensions simultaneously: technical excellence and customer experience. In
this disciplined focus on essentials, great service design resembles great
industrial design, which seeks to achieve excellence and efficiency in the same
way. (See “The 10 Elements of Customer Delight.”) Service design sees customer
satisfaction and cost management as complementary, not contradictory. When you,
as a seller, do not have a good design, you are more likely to base decisions
on cost rather than value, because it is harder totell the difference between
spending money and investing it.
The 10
Elements of Customer Delight
When
service is designed well and delivered expertly, it is because there is
alignment among your strategic goals, your customer’s wants and needs, and what
actually happens between the two of you. That alignment is a function of 10 key
elements. Once you understand these and can assess how successful your company
is at delivering them, you can begin to take the action needed to transform.
Notice
the first five elements emphasize the customer’s side of the relationship while
the second five are mostly about you, the provider.
• Empathy:
Developing products, services, and experiences from the customer’s point of
view; taking full account of how your customers interact with you
• Expectation: Ensuring
that customers know what to expect from their interaction with you
• Emotion: Knowing
the emotions your customer brings to your relationship, and guiding customers
to a satisfied feeling about working with you
• Elegance: Providing
offerings that are clean, simple, easy to work with, and complete — nothing
superfluous, nothing omitted
• Engagement: Communicating
with customers — and allowing them to communicate with you — at every point of
contact, to understand their experience and how to improve it
• Execution: Reliably
meeting all the expectations you have set
• Engineering: Possessing
technical excellence (compared to your peers, but also to general business
standards) and eliminating waste of materials, time, and effort, so that no
extraneous effort is necessary on the part of you or your customer
• Economics: Pricing
your services appropriately, so the customer gets value for his or her money
and you make the profit you expect
• Experimentation: Building
processes for improvement and innovation into the daily work of your business;
developing capabilities to create and roll out new offerings
• Equivalence: Managing
the customer, your team, and partner organizations so that you, the service
provider, are satisfied too
These 10 elements can be used to create a
service design and delivery report card that helps you measure how successful
your company, department, or function is in creating a superior experience with
and for your customers. Once you carefully and fully assess how well your
service is delivered to your customers, you can use that assessment to set
priorities for improvement.
The Five Principles of Service Design
Every company’s strategy is unique — or
should be — so its service design should be one-of-a-kind, too. For example,
Starbucks, whose value proposition is to emulate a European café — a place to
sit, sip, and stay — should not copy Dunkin’ Donuts, which wants to get you on
your way because, after all, “America runs on Dunkin’.” Yet all good service
design should follow five basic principles, which will help you shape
service-design initiatives, evaluate proposals and programs, and, above all,
bring coherence to your service strategy.
1. The
customer is always right — provided the customer is right for you. You have to decide which customers you want, and
which you don’t. A customer who demands a level of service, a type of product,
or a price that you aren’t willing to deliver is the wrong customer for you.
Deciding which customers you are willing to engage with and what you are
willing to do for them is a powerful exercise in defining your brand.
2.
Don’t surprise and delight customers — just delight them. You delight your customers by meeting their needs
within the expectations they have for whatever you are offering, whether those
expectations are high or low. A well-designed service is predictably excellent.
If they don’t know what to expect from you, why will they seek you out? If
their expectations aren’t met, why will they stay or return?
3.
Great service should not require heroic efforts by you — or the customer. Service design and delivery should be efficient,
effective, scalable, and, if not error-proof, error-resistant. Employees should
not need to be superheroes, bend the rules, or take shortcuts to give customers
the experience you promise. Saving the customer time and money is just as
important as saving yourself money. It is easy for a customer to interact with
and do business with a well-designed company at every stage.
4.
Service design and delivery must be coherent across all platforms. Wherever you choose to play, you have to play
well. If you provide a fabulous customer experience in the store but your
website frustrates customers, you will likely lose them. The task of managing
services has become immeasurably harder as Web and mobile devices have
multiplied the number of channels, touch points, and opportunities for
interaction between companies and customers. This means more complexity, less
control, more ways to make errors, and increased competition. It also means
more ways for customers to find you and opportunities to woo, wow, and win
them.
One corollary is that partners that provide
complementary services are as much a part of the service value chain as your
own touch points, platforms, and channels. Overcoming or compensating for flaws
in your partners’ service design can be your single biggest challenge.
5.
You’re never done: Anticipate, create, innovate, iterate — and repeat. Many services companies have no formal innovation
process, and the methods, structures, and protocols for product innovation
often fail in services. But because the life cycle of a service needs to be
managed as carefully as the life cycle of a product, companies must work to
instill and support an innovative culture. Be aware that services innovation
can happen anywhere in the value chain —co-creation and innovation with actual
customers in the wild are just as valuable as research in the lab, or more so.
Winning
Customers’ Minds, Not Hearts
Ryanair,
the Dublin-based budget airline that recently transformed itself with service
design, has taken these principles to heart. Even in an industry famous for
being deaf to customer needs, Ryanair stood out. In 2007, the Economist described the airline as
“a byword for appalling customer service,” citing its “jeering rudeness towards
anyone or anything that gets in its way.” CEO Michael O’Leary even mused
publicly about charging passengers for using lavatories.
The carrier’s Hobbesian strategy of operating
flights that were not only cheap, but nasty, brutish, and short worked — until
it didn’t. Ryanair issued a profit warning in September 2013; it then saw its
net income for fiscal year 2014 fall to €522.8 million (about $585 million),
from €569.3 million in fiscal 2013, while other low-cost competitors were
thriving. Seeing the writing in the sky, in late 2013 O’Leary decided that the
company had to “stop unnecessarily pissing people off.”
The person charged with that task is Kenny
Jacobs, who joined the company as CMO in January 2014 after 13 years in food
retailing. Jacobs thought, “It is either going to be the worst or the best job
that I’ve ever had in the customer marketing space,” he told us in an
interview.
Ryanair had to stay true to its
rock-bottom-price value proposition while improving customer experience.
The airline focused on three key aspects of the journey: the digital
experience, with a more user-friendly, intuitive website; the airport
experience, with more streamlined, efficient operations; and the in-flight
experience, by allowing people to bring on luggage and offering assigned seats
(for a fee). Each addressed a major pain point in one of the three principal
phases of a trip by air; none was untrue to the airline’s low-price promise;
and the cost to the airline was minimal. Indeed, each element can save the
company effort and money.
By the end of fiscal 2015, Ryanair was
carrying 19 more passengers per flight than it had two years earlier. The
initiative has more than paid for itself. The airline is chasing not customers’
hearts, but their minds. “I don’t want customers to say, ‘I love Ryanair,’”
says Jacobs. “We want people to say, ‘This is a commoditized, functional
experience getting from Dublin to London, from London to Madrid.’”
That is the very opposite of Surf Air’s
promise, which is a private-jet experience at a relatively reasonable price. We
have bookended these two stories with a purpose — to demonstrate that service
design is an instrument of strategy, a way to connect the boardroom to the
day-to-day experiences of customers. The identity you seek to project is,
indeed, the face your customers see.
The mind-set and principles of service design
are a critical way to improve how services are managed. The result of their
industrial legacy is that services, the biggest employer and creator of wealth,
are too much managed by guess and by gosh. Company after company is
underwhelming its customers and leaving money on the table. It’s time to stop
that and take action.
by Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O’Connell
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/The-Art-of-Customer-Delight?gko=e9da8&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20170124&utm_campaign=resp
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