I ask Service Design extraordinaire Marc Stickdorn, co-author This is Service Design Thinking, a few questions how Service Design thinking has changed organizations value proposition.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Service Design Thinking
Joe: Marc, things change. It’s not about getting your message out anymore; it’s about bringing your message in. I think that’s a good description of service design, could you expand on that if you agree or not?
Marc: Definitely I do. You could think about social media and how that affects the whole society. One part is definitely about customers. The society itself is just way more informed way more empowered. Just make a test for yourself. When you go on a holiday or a trip do you just book a hotel out of catalogs or do you go online and check it and go to Trip Advisor, Hotels.com, and all the other rating platforms and take a look at what other customers say about that?
That’s what’s happening. That’s what social media empowers us to do. We have a movement in marketing, a shift in marketing from focusing on advertisement to really, truly experience this. Only if you have good, superior experiences then you have the best market you have because you have your own customers as ambassadors that just ring the messages out.
I’m working a lot in tourism here. What happens there is that all the smart hotels, the smart travel operators who bring really authentic, superior service experience to customers they probably have whole new marketing out there because they can compete with large companies now. The competition is not so much on advertising budget anymore but on the real customer experience.
If you’ve got a rating of, I don’t know, 4.5 out of five that’s what really the purchase decision for customers is and that’s happening everywhere. If you think of Amazon and online platforms where you buy stuff, you always depend on what other people say about that. I think that forces companies to think about customer experience in a whole new way, a whole new dimension.
Joe: You’re saying we’ve created a different value proposition for our companies?
Marc: Definitely, yes.
Joe: Is Service Design the methodology that can be used to understand our new value proposition.
Marc: To understand the value proposition, how customers see it, that’s always the difference. One thing is how you see yourself as a company, and one is how your customers see you. Then there’s numbers about how this differs. It is a method to understand really the customers and to understand your company from a customer perspective.
Joe: When we extend our thinking about the user experience we start thinking about open innovation and co-creation. That’s a difficult concept for many of us to grasp, but it seems to be the strength of customer experience and user experience is driving us in the next decade.
Marc: It’s often a misunderstanding of what that co-creation is. It’s also what you as a center of innovation is. You can’t just go out and ask your customers, “Hey, what do you want?” they won’t tell you because they don’t know. It’s about working together and understanding the needs. Customers can help you a lot if you work in the right way together for that.
All these methods are really, really hard to explain and also the book doesn’t help you to really understand the concept of that. You have to experience that. You have to go out and do a workshop with an agency doing good service design to really understand the method and to really understand the value of that.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Service Design Thinking
Lean Service Design Trilogy: Bring this Workshop on-site!