Crossing the Chasm: bringing Service Design to the mainstream market Service Design Conference 2011 – San Francisco Winner: Best Agency 2010 MRS Winner: Award for Excellenc e 2010 ESOMAR Winner: Best Case History 2009 ESOMAR Winner: Best New Agency 2008 MRS Winner: Most Wanted 2011 AURA
Crossing the Chasm: bringing Service Design to the mainstream market
Service Design Conference 2011 – San Francisco
Winner:Best
Agency2010MRS
Winner:Award for Excellenc
e 2010 ESOMAR
Winner:Best Case History
2009ESOMAR
Winner:Best New
Agency2008MRS
Winner:Most
Wanted2011
AURA
Presenter
Presentation Notes
Hello, Thanks for coming to my talk, my name is Erick, and I’m the service design lead at Truth, a strategic insight consultancy. We have offices in London, NY and Singapore, and I’m based in London. The idea of doing this talk came from a few observations I got over the years working with Service Design, especially in the early days, back when I was working at Engine - and service design wasn’t as well known as it is now, sometimes we felt it was quite challenging to get the message across to potential clients, and show that service design can add value to their businesses. �This talk also builds on some of the topics pointed out by yesterday’s keynote from Brandon Shauer.
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OK, let’s begin with a little story. Back in the 50’s, scientists started to give sweet potatoes to wild monkeys in Japan. The monkeys quite liked it, but they found the sand and dirt quite unpleasant as you would expect. One of the monkeys found out that she could wash the potatoes in a nearby stream, and taught the tricky to other monkeys within her close circle. In the comings months, more and more monkeys learned the trick, particularly the young ones. And older monkeys where not as keen to adopt this innovation. Over time, the number of monkeys that learned to wash potatoes achieved a critical mass – namely when the 100th monkey adopted this practice, the rate of adoption became really steep, and suddenly the whole community was doing the same thing. At this point, you might be asking yourself: what does this have to do with Service Design?
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Well, this story helps to understand the take up of ideas, which can be explained (and modelled) using Rogers’ diffusion of innovation model.
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What Rogers did was to explain how new technologies, or ideas spread over time. Basically he used 2 curves to explain the rate of adoption: The S curve, in pink, is the total market share over time, so basically the rate of adoption of a new idea is quite slow at the beginning, then it picks up in the middle, where you experience fast growth. Then it slows down again, mainly due to market saturation. The bell curve, in brown, shows the different types and number of people who will adopt this new idea. First a minority of innovators, then early adopters, then early majority and so forth and so on.
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To get a rough idea of the market share – the total spend on service design over years – we can use the number of service design practitioners as a proxy. In the early days, we had a just a few design consultancies, such as Engine and Live Work. In 2004 the Service Design network was founded, and from there, we can see a much faster growth over the years, until now. So for example, the first Service Design conference in Amsterdam only saw a few practitioners, and we can clearly see an increase in the number of people talking and showing examples of work in the conferences that followed, such as Berlin last year, and now in San Francisco And then on the brown curve, we can hypothesise that people buying service design were initially the innovators, and now that service design became more popular, we are also dealing with early adopters. So, according to the model, all things constant and going well, we will see an exponential growth over the next years, especially when the early and late majority begin to adopt service design.
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However, another guy called Geoffrey Moore developed an additional insight based on Rogers’ model, and it basically says: these different group of people adopt new ideas for different reasons. And these differences can cause a discontinuity in the rate of adoption. The key point about his model is that there is a barrier, which he called the chasm, between the early adopters and early majority, which can make more difficult for service design to become ‘mainstream’. It’s difficult to predict when we are going to reach this point, there is no doubt that the last two years have been quite challenging, especially in Europe and USA, but then this is also due to the current economic climate.
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Why is the chasm situated between the early adopters and early majority? These two groups of people have very different mindsets: Early adopters are visionaries, they are seeking to implement change, and are quite happy to see a discontinuity between the old and the new. These people are often passionate about the subject, and are prepared to champion the cause, even if it means facing a few obstacles. Early majority, on the other hand, are pragmatists. They are simply looking for productivity increase and what they really want is to minimise discontinuity with the current way they do things. They want evolution, not revolution. Because of these incompatibilities, early adopters do not make good reference for the early majority. And because of the early majorities concern not to disrupt their organisations, good reference is critical to their get them to buy-in a service design approach.
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SO, the big question is How to make good references for the early majority guys, so they feel confident and buy-into service design? There are a few elements that influence the take up of new disciplines...
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Six key criteria influence the take up of new ideas, and can help sell service design to the early majority guys.
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Before going through each of these points in detail, I’d like to make a remark. ��We, as service designers, often use a very customer centric approach. However, sometimes we need to remind ourselves that our clients are also customers, so very important to frame these six points around a client centric perspective.
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Relative advantage or benefit: Ultimately, the relative advantage will be measured in economic terms, but also convenience, prestige factors and satisfaction are quite important. This becomes especially relevant for early majority, as they need to base their decisions on tangible benefits that service design can provide. The problem is, being a new discipline, and quite often dealing with intangible output, it becomes quite difficult for the early majority to get good references, and make this leap of faith. The other potential issue is the understanding, or knowledge that potential buyers must have to decide to commission a project (and therefore reduce their uncertainties). To acquire this knowledge, people usually start with two basic questions:
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HOW DOES IT WORK? This consists of information necessary to use Service Design in an effective manner, within the context of the organisation. It is about demonstrating how a service design project will fit within current initiatives, and help leverage and improve current work that is being carried out. Ultimately, it’s about providing reassurance that the service design project has a perfect fit with existing work, and that it won’t create bottlenecks or extra work to translate results back to the company.
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The second question – why does it work If you are introducing a methodology that is new to the client or an approach that they are not particularly familiar with, they might not be as willing to adopt or accept this new approach. For example, a few years ago I went to pitch for a project, and we proposed a very interesting approach, doing ethnography, customer journey mapping, and all that jazz.... We didn’t get it, because the client wasn’t comfortable with this. He was more inclined to do a few focus groups type of thing... Good case studies in your creds presentation is a good way of tackling this.
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Compatibility. � In service design, the compatibility is often down to corporate culture. I’m quite sure that most of us where confronted with challenges when trying to implement, or even sell a new approach or a service concept to a client, and although the core client team bought into the idea, getting momentum and buy-in from extended audiences is quite difficult, hindering the medium and long term success of the project
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Perceived risk of purchase: often we ask our clients to do a leap of faith: especially because we often work with intangible, flufly concepts. Ultimately, service prototyping can help reduce risks half way through a project, and provide the much needed reassurance. However, it doesn’t give you any guarantees upfront.
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This is also intensified by the approach we often use as designers – diverge and converge, which means that tell our clients, look we will start by opening up, gathering insights and inspiration, form a few hypothesis and research questions.. By this time the client is thinking: ok, I’m investing 50, 100K of £, USD, Euros in this project, and you are telling me that half way through you’ll have even more questions than when we started.
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Complexity / ease of use: can clients readily implement and take the concepts we propose to market? How easy and feasible is for them to do this?
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One way to understand this in more detail is by doing an analogy with product design The reason that the whole world currently uses the QWERTY keyboard as standard is because it was initially developed to reduce key jamming in early typewriters in the 19th century. It quickly became the standard keyboard layout. Other companies tried to create alternatives, such as the DVORAK keyboard, which in theory is much more ergonomic, efficient and intuitive – but it would require you to re-learn how to type. �In the service design context, Whenever we finalise a project and deliver the final deliverables – a framework to explain how to improve a specific area of a service, a service blueprint, a storyboard bringing to concept and ideas to life – how easy would it be to directly translate these recommendations into something that people can take to market?
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Triability: This is directly related to the perception (and avoidance) of risk. And overall, SD is by nature quite good at this – mainly due to the approach that we, as designers take to projects – using prototyping early in the process to test, validate and communicate ideas. This one is an easy box to tick, but important to mention though
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Lastly, observability. Can we see it being used elsewhere? How easy is to see the results or outcomes of a Service Design project? Again, this is very much about providing this frame of reference that early majority need to adopt something new. It’s the degree to which results of a Service Design projects are visible to others – both internally and externally
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A good example of the observability factor is the adoption of solar heaters in Greece – very easy to spot, very easy to come up with the conclusion that it’s worth having one. Everyone, literally, has a solar water heater on the roof. �In a way, what we are doing here is about exposing results and benefits is greatly impacting the obervability of Service Design projects.
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Ok, looking at those six factors, let’s see how service design is performing.
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One way of analysing this is to plot a matrix, with the impact on takeup (ie. How likely are each of those factors to influence late majority to adopt service design) on the vertical axis, how Service Design is currently performing in relation to each of those factors on the horizontal axis. Please note that this is my subjective interpretation. Two things that is worth noting: triability is quite relevant, and as I mentioned, something that we as designers do quite well, so nothing to worry about here. Observability doesn’t seem to have a massive impact, but on the other hand will naturally progress to a more positive performance due to more people talking about service design, leveraged by social media.
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However, the key area to focus is on the three factors on the upper left quadrant. If we can improve how Service Design delivers against each of those factors, early majority will be much more willing to adopt or buy into service design
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So, based on this, I have three principles that can help shift those 3 factors to the right, and boost the take up of service design
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First principle: offer a multidisciplinary team. Quite a few of you are doing this already, merging service design with other practices, so you can provide a more flexible approach, which will always have something that the client team is more comfortable with. For example, the talk yesterday from the guys at continnum, where they mixed a few MBAs with designers.
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Second, speak their language
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To illustrate this I have an example of a recent project. We were developing a new service platform for technology company, and part of the project was to define a new name for it. It’s a global launch, so quite important for the client team to get a name that resonates with different cultures. So we started this by doing a few co-creation sessions...
BasicTech. High-
Tech.
RationalScience
EmotionalExploration
FluidOrganic
Name 3Name 4
Name 16
Name 12
Name 6
Name 10
Name 8Name 7
Name 20
Name 5
Name 1
Name 15
Name 14
Name 2
White space potential?
Emergent codes:
New and surprising within the category?
Name 12Name 13
Residual codes:Old and obsolete
Semiotics and linguistic analysis...
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And semiotics and linguistic analysis, to define what where the emerging areas in which this company could play. However, we knew that this research needed to be backed up with some hard data to promote more credibility with internal stakeholders, and get the necessary buy-in
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
15% 25% 35% 45% 55%
France
US
UKBrazil
UAE
Russia
India
China
% saying name is unique
Name X analysis:
High potential
Low potential / some risks in market
0% 50% 100% 150% 200%
Total
FranceRussiaChinaIndiaUAE
BrazilUKUS
Opportunity index
Bubble size = which one would sell most
...corroborated by hard data
The index is calculated simply through adding:-% Appeal-% Uniqueness-% Suitability as a name of the platform-% Who say it would sell mostThe maximum possible score is therefore 400%.
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So we conducted quantitative research in several different markets, and created an opportunity index to measure the effectiveness of each name option. And this was received very well by the client team, it provided the reassurance they needed to take the project forward. So, combining all these insights with something that people can relate to and feel comfortable with was quite important.
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Third, and probably the most important one, get to the bottom line. In my opinion, this is when people really feel comfortable when considering a service design project, you deliver all the frameworks, service blueprints, service prototypes, and on top of that, you tell your client what the ROI will be. Also, when you get to the board room, this is the language they speak. In a boardroom, compelling visuals and frameworks are nice to haves, but ultimately, they want reassurance of what the impact on the bottom line will be.
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One way of doing this is to combine quantitative approaches with design thinking, and which gives you all the nice, creative stuff, plus hard figures to back up your recommendations and strategy.
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I want to exemplify this point with a brief case study: recently we were working on a project to develop after sales services for a technology manufacturer
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After doing user research and coming up with things they wanted, we took all this information to a quantitative stage, using conjoint analysis, so we could understand which of this service bundles appealed most, and how much people would be willing to pay for it
29.2%
+17.8%
47.6%
55.0%
58.9% 62.2% 64.6%
+7.4%
+3.9%+3.3%
+2.4%
Sh
are
of p
refe
ren
ce
Defining optimum combination of service features
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Using the results, we could clearly define the optimum service package, by understand how much share of preference (or willingness to buy) each attribute would add to a very basic package.
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Also, because you include pricing in the conjoint survey, you can also determine the market penetration and optimal price level for the service packages you are building. So, you are basically providing all the information people need to be comfortable with the decisions they are making.
