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Designing The Customer Service Centre Experience using customer insights to improve experiences whilst shifting channels

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The In-Centre Experience DNA Six genes that shape an experience

What creates an in-centre experience?

experience |ikˈspi(ə)rēəns|

noun an event or occurrence that leaves an impression on someone: he had a great customer experience An experience is not, in itself, a tangible thing. We are dealing with impressions, with the feelings someone has in a fleeting moment that becomes a memory they discard, or talk about. Yet a customer clearly has an experience, and that experience is influenced by six factors we call “experience genes”. These form a foundation that is constructed and designed. Each gene is an opportunity to innovate, to create a great experience and impact when dealing with services that have a powerful influence on the life of local citizens. Here, as in life, whilst we may create sets of genes for different types of customers, each real experience is individual and forged by the unpredictable. The opportunity is to put in place the foundations that create the best chance of providing a positive experience and impact, even if the overall strategy is to shift customers to other channels.

Why Innovate Around Experiences?

The spatial layout and feel of the centre

The in-centre technology I can use, or that staff use

The services that are on offer, and what they

allow me to do

What activities I can perform in-

centre

The interaction

with staff

The process I have to go through for certain

activities

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> The Experience Dilemma

Why Innovate Around Experiences? The case for change

There are many reasons why you might look at investing in in-centre experience strategy and innovation, using customer insight research as your foundation. Here are our top five:

Channel shift: we want less (or different) customers to use face to face services to support cost reduction

1

Workplace transformation: we are changing the way staff work and what they do, and want to design it around the customer

2

Consolidation of premises: we want to rationalise our estate and create more efficient usage of certain buildings

3

New engagement strategies (e.g. assisted self service): we want to change the nature of certain services

4

Changing nature of access strategy: goals of customer access are changing, we want to create customer centred solutions

5 One setting in proposed self service zone in Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Flywheel 2012

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The Experience Dilemma Are councils hitting a brick wall?

“Surely  we  don’t  want  to  make  the  

experience  too  nice,  otherwise  they’ll  

keep  coming  back?”  

COUNCIL SENIOR EXECUTIVE

Unlike retailers, who want to increase customer “dwell time” in stores to amplify the potential of a purchase, councils want to reduce dwell time as significantly as possible. This leads to an assumption that creating a great experience will reduce the effectiveness of channel shift strategies:

à We are not creating a spa, but a pitstop.

Customers are not seeking luxurious experiences, but the solutions to problems that may be significant to them. Like a pitstop, a Customer Service Centre must seek only to get the customer back on the road as quickly as possible. However, this also goes for all channels. Phone services and web must also be optimised to provide a swift, efficient experience, or customers will naturally begin to migrate to those places where there is more human interaction available.

Access Strategy

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Access Strategy Core approaches

Two different philosophies of customer service centres are beginning to emerge. With that come differences in customer expectations that may require different experience strategies.

Face to Face and Assisted Self Service occupy one or several core centres, which acts as a branded destination for service

Multiple “places” where different types of services are co-located with other offerings such as libraries, Post Offices, train stations,

or even at customers’ houses

Hubs Nodes Hybrid

CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS

Specialised staff on hand

Less convenient to

travel to

Highly efficient service

experience

Available close to

where I live

Unified experience across all services

May not have all the

support I need

A combination of hubs and nodes

I can go somewhere that will sort

all my problems

I can go somewhere convenient

This may be confusing: what can I use where?

CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS

Activities

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Activities What customers do

How can what customers currently do when they are in your centre be improved, and how can we find new ways of improving their experience? Activities describe what customers are actually doing at certain points within their experience, such as Ticketing, Queuing, Self Serving, Waiting or Consulting. They represent a major focal point for innovation, particularly when redesigning spaces. Improve the experience of that activity

Some activities are clearly opportunities to improve the customer experience. Queuing and Waiting often represent pain points in the experience which can be radically changed and improved, but all activities can see innovation. The image, top right, shows a concept for activating the waiting experience in a doctor’s surgery by providing materials that prepare the patient for their consultation better. Can customers check-in for an appointment in a seamless manner? Can we take the stress out of queuing in high volume centres? Is “arriving” a good experience? Remove redundant activities to make a more efficient experience Do customers need to queue for anything? Can we eliminate waiting completely, or for particular services or customer types? Do they ever need to see a receptionist?

Design approaches can improve the experience of existing activities, such as waiting

Interactions

Source: Fuelfor, Rethinking the Waiting Room

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Interactions How customers interact with staff

If we take away job positions and titles, what part do we really want staff to play in the service journey? Are they specialists or generalists? What new ‘roles’, such as those, right, could they play?

What is the nature of the role of the staff, and how they interact with customers? As our services evolve, so too does how we think about the role of a staff member. A traditional service centre typically saw a small number of highly specific staff roles. There was the security agent on the door. There was the receptionist to manage the arrival experience. And there was the “expert”: the agents customers were coming to see face to face. The receptionist usually sat behind a standing height station, and the agents sat behind seated consultation booths (or in very old models, behind safety screens). In every interaction with every type of staff, therefore, the customer was behind a barrier (in the case of the security guard, a psychological barrier), faced the staff member directly on in a transactional manner, and the staff member was in absolute control of the experience. This is changing significantly. Meet and greet staff – navigators - are replacing door security and reception staff, and occupy entry zones with no podiums or barriers. Floor walkers triage people waiting in queues. Guides support customers having self service experiences, standing by their side and guiding them through an experience they control. Meetings with customers happen in open plan space around round tables. Even the nature of pure face to face consultation settings is shifting away from an “us vs them” mentality. As a result, everything about the spaces customers occupy, technologies they use, and processes they undertake, need to change.

Space

Expert

Navigator

Guide

Host

Protectors Directors

Potential Staff Roles

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Sections The physical sectioning a large centre has into rooms or floors that may be organised by department or activity. Contains zones. e.g. Revenue and Benefits Section, the Face to Face section

Space How to think about the physical environment

Be careful what labels you use, and the impact they have on your thinking. Automatically calling zones “departments”, for example, presumes a form of organisation that may be a barrier to innovation.

When engaged in an activity, where do customers interact? Architects create spaces, yet it is people that make them places. The space is a container for a hive of customer and staff activity, a series of dimensions that have a profound effect on the customer experience by engaging all five senses in a way currently impossible to achieve through virtual means. It is often tempting to start a project thinking about space, and how it can be changed. This rarely produces anything innovative. By considering the design of an experience, first, this can be translated into implications on space at a variety of levels, such as the Section, the Zone, the Space and the Setting (right) that can fundamentally change the way an experience takes place. These, combined with other factors that fall within the field of interior design such as colour, materials, lighting, and issues such as the use (or misuse) of sound, affect the atmosphere of an environment. Atmosphere can be important in influencing behaviour, particularly when dealing with more volatile customers. Locating them in a space and setting designed to calm them down may make a significant impact to their experience, the staff experience, and the experience of other customers.

Technology

Zones The broad clustering of spaces around particular purposes or needs. Contains spaces. e.g. the Meet and Greet Zone, Waiting Zone

Spaces The way the zone is laid out to support different groups of activities. Contains settings. e.g. family waiting area

Settings The way furniture is organised to support an activity. Contains furniture items and technology. e.g. consultation desks, waiting seats, self service terminal

TYPOLOGY OF SPACE

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Technology Creating efficient experiences using technology

Technology is at the core of many channel shift initiatives. But what are the in-centre and online implications?  

3. In-centre technology should

be used as a learning experience If the eventual goal of the access strategy is to encourage online access from home and work, the in-centre self service experience should be used as a learning experience that educates users on the web channel.

4. The centre provides an ideal

ethnographic environment for improving web channels Web teams struggle to observe how users interact with websites in “real” service scenarios because those experiences normally happen in remote locations. Being able to shadow users going through a web experience in-centre is an ideal research opportunity for improving online user experiences.

1.  Everything that customers can

do in-centre, they need to be able to do online

The eventual goal of many channel shift strategies will be to provide an equivalent online experience to the in-centre experience that moves beyond “print and send” approaches towards fully interactive experiences. Moving towards an environment where even staff use just the website allows the council to shift from highly directed experiences to more assisted ones.

2.  Technology should be deployed to make processes more efficient Alternative technologies can make processes more efficient and should be designed around need, not availability. Self sign in, document self scanning and new approaches to handling drop-in registration can be solved using technology.

Services

Parking

Planning

Click here to renew your permit or pay your fine.

Click here to make a search or submit a new application.

Welcome to Express Service

Proposed entry screen for Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea allows the website to exist underneath but users to be directed easily towards pilot services

Putting a tactile “help button” into self service terminals that pages staff improves the experience and manages staff resources more effectively.

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Enter QMatic system

Reception desk

Services What do we offer, and how?

What customer types are not being fulfilled by your current service model? What needs do they have that the current delivery model is not meeting?

What services do we offer in-centre, and how can we improve the experience of accessing those services? Services are the core product of a customer services centre. From a customer perspective, they are coming to use a service to solve a particular need, such as registering for a parking permit, or dealing with an overpayment on their council tax. Some are bewildered by the disconnection between their needs and formal designations of service areas. Increasingly, as channel shift strategies kick in, some of the most straightforward, transactional services – for certain customer types - are moving purely online, leaving face to face facilities to deal with more complex social issues, such as customers in housing crises, in vulnerable situations, or legally requiring physical interventions. This may change the very nature of the physical environment, and the way it is designed to suit those more complex needs. For other, more transactional needs, such as dropping off forms for identification in benefits, we can challenge how they are delivered from a customer perspective, leading to changes in the customer journey and processes that create better experiences and significantly save human resources and space. See the following page, process, for a more detailed example.

Process

SERVICE / SPACE BLUEPRINT

A service/space blueprint identifies and details each individual aspect of a service, and where it occurs, from both the customer and staff perspective, front of house and back of house.

Environment

Customer Activity

Front of House Staff Activity

Back of House Staff Activity

SETTING

INTERACTION

COMMUNICATION

Systems

INTERFACE

Getting ticket

Issuing ticket

Waiting seats

Waiting

Qmatic Signage

Notifies next appointment

Trigger interface

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Process What steps customers have to go through

What processes do your customers currently have to go through, and where are the pain points in these processes? How could these be improved or removed?

How can we rethink the “traditional” series of steps we force customers to go through? The majority of service experiences take place though processes. These are the structured order of activities that customers have to do to complete a transaction or service, and can include everything from the “check-in” process for appointments to the process for particular service transactions. We often get very comfortable that this is the way it has always been done, but there may be a number of potential “pain points” in the process. This creates an opportunity to reimagine the process, which could happen in numerous alternative ways, using different technologies, taking place in different spaces, and potentially involving different types of interactions between staff and customers. When working with Croydon Council in July 2011, we identified, for example, that a high volume of customers dropped off documents for revenue and benefits, and the process this involved (top right) could take 30-40 minutes and was highly intensive from a staff perspective. The Croydon insight team identified an ideal customer experience around a 5 minute process centred around self service, and including scanning, automatic verification using risk assessment software (with human intervention for high risk profiles), and a receipt at the end of the process to provide closure.

QUEUING

01

TICKETING

02

AGENT PHOTOCOPYING

05

MEETING AGENT

04

AGENT VERIFYING

06

WAITING

03

CROYDON COUNCIL JULY 2011 DOCUMENT DROP OFF PROCESS

SELF SCAN

01

AUTO VERIFY

02

RECEIPT

03

CROYDON COUNCIL PROPOSED DOCUMENT DROP OFF PROCESS

Taking a Design Approach

ESTIMATED TIME

30-40 mins

ESTIMATED TIME

5 mins

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Taking a Design Approach What and why

We are used to the idea of designing clothes, furniture, products, buildings and websites. Our life is surrounded by things that have been designed, and those that are designed well, whether it is an iPhone or a Boeing 787, do not simply leap off a flipchart into reality, but represent robust design approaches.

The in-centre experience often encompasses many of these aspects, such as furniture or technology. Yet we are less comfortable with the idea that a customer experience, or the service proposition, can be “designed”. We can’t, in fact, design one experience that will happen in the same way for everyone. But we can use the process of designing experiences as a mechanism for innovating around the component genes of the customer experience described on page 4: services, spaces, technologies, activities, interactions and processes. By using the customer experience as a basis for design, we can innovate

around these other components to, in turn, improve the overarching customer experience. There is no one way of approaching design, yet the following process is an iterative model that will allow you to generate robust customer insights that lead to new solutions and interventions in the most low risk way possible. Starting with a research phase, each subsequent steps provides tools and approaches to create a more successful in-centre experience.

Research

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Research Understanding the customer experience

Design research is focussed on one key outcome: helping you make an informed decision. When potentially investing significant money in making a change, how do you know it is the right decision? Many great ideas – such as scan-as-you-shop in supermarkets – have fallen flat amongst customers when implemented. The aim of design research is to de-risk the innovation process.

Observe what happens during the 100 busiest minutes of the week in your centres. What are the “hottest” areas in terms of customer volume?

Quantitative Data driven, aims to

understand mass behaviour shallowly

Qualitative Story driven, aims to understand individual

behaviour deeply

The two key types of research inform each other, and together provide a robust picture to gain insights into how your customers make decisions.

Quantitative Research Tools: Surveys, management data, scale observations Use to: þ  understand customer segments and types þ  identify where problems are occurring þ  validating qualitative insights

Many organisations collect data, but few know what to do with it. More over, occasionally that data can be flawed by virtue of the way it is collected. It can make significant assumptions that undermine its validity. These assumptions are often revealed and exposed by qualitative research, which shows a picture of what is really happening, customer by customer. Yet, when collected properly, data can be a powerful mechanism for identifying broad patterns of behaviour, and where problems are generally occurring. This then allows qualitative research to focus on a much smaller window, providing better value and output. Data can be collected in a variety of ways, from general management reporting (such as cash taken or merchandise sold at specific locations), to physical or digital surveys, to social media data mining, to large scale observations of, for example, customer density at certain locations at certain times of the day.

Research, continued

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Qualitative Research Tools: Observation, Interviews, Focus Groups, Remote tracking Use to: þ  understand from the customer perspective þ  understand customer needs, behaviours, habits þ  identify pain points of the experience

Quantitative research is about telling stories. Taking an ethnographic approach – observing and studying human behaviour in real settings – is a very powerful tool for gaining an insight into the current customer experience. It focuses organisations on a small number of real life people – both staff and customers, and breaks down broad assumptions about customers to provide insights not available through brainstorming.

Active Observation Passive Observation

Covert observation and monitoring of multiple

customers with no direct interaction

In depth shadowing and in-experience interviewing of

customers specifically selected to be observed

Top 3 tips for gaining insights through ethnographic observations:

Create visual output Observations are chaotic, messy events. Breaking an experience down into component parts and visualising it graphically helps your insight team (see next section) move straight to identifying insights and ideas.

Make it real The power of ethnography is it is real, not theoretical. The output needs to capture that reality to help the insight team identify and empathise with the customers. Tell stories We learn and understand through stories that engage us and make us think, challenging our perspectives.

1

2

3

Identify key customer types to observe

Find and recruit subjects of key types

Logistics and arrangements

Pre+post interview, observation

Logistical Timescale: 2 weeks to month

Insight Level: High

Identify key customer types to observe

Identify key dates to observe

Observe multiple customers

Interview staff where possible

Logistical Timescale: 1 to 2 days

Insight Level: Medium

Use: in sensitive situations where Active Observation would be inappropriate

Use: when you want to understand reasons why customers are doing or not doing something

Insights

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Insights Understanding customer needs

Good research, visually mapped out and well presented, provides a great foundation for generating insights. These are best developed by an insight team, and used to develop a series of quick win interventions, and an understanding of customer needs for further design work.

An insight team is a small group of people who can help provide a good range of perspectives on the material presented from the research phase. This group is ideally small, around 6-10 people to be most successful, and should represent an inter-disciplinary mix of people from throughout the council or community who are open-minded about change and doing things differently. These may include a mix of: •  Senior management from different

services and across services •  Centre managers •  Front line staff •  Customers

What is an insight, anyway? We find expressing the general “facts” around customer needs, and linking them together, generate flashes of opportunity for potential ways to meet those needs. The deeper insight is into the nature of your customer, their needs, habits, turn-ons, turn-offs, expectations, preferences and behaviours. Since it is impossible to find this out for every one of your very unique, individual customers, a good approach is to develop personas representing 4-8 key types of customer that have significantly different needs to each other, and distil insights into those personas.

Strong Self Server

Developing an identity for your personas – a name, age, background and history - this creates empathy between your insight team and the persona, although it can create a barrier to sharing the work with others in your organisation.

What keeps her coming back?

What would influence her to channel

shift?

What does she expect from her experience?

What frustrates her?

What are her pre-set habits?

Design

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Design The ideal experience and design interventions

You’ve developed detailed insights into your customers and their current in-centre experience. You’ve developed some quick win solutions, but are now interested in tackling some of the more detailed issues and creating proper innovation. It’s time to design the ideal experience.

Scenarios A scenario takes a persona developed in the insight stage as a prospective customer in the future store, and sets up a reason for them to be coming to the store. It provides the context for the experience. Storyboard A technique associated with film-making, storyboards show key moments in the experience from the customer perspective. The storyboard should show what the ideal experience of the customer would be within the scenario, meeting the needs expressed within the persona. This may be done as simply as post-it notes, or as complex as a comic strip: whatever level of detail you feel is

necessary to drive the quality of result you are looking for. High Level Interventions A storyboard may tell a very different narrative to the type of experience provided at the moment, and needs to be distilled into big ideas falling under the six categories, far right. Make or Break Moments A highly visual map of the ideal experience should be produced that shows what the customer needs at this moment, and what strategy you are going to put in place to meet this need. Design Briefs Key concepts should be developed into fully fledged design briefs, ready to be prototyped and undergo detailed design where necessary.

For each customer and scenario…

..what does the ideal experience look like?

Prototype

Space

Technology

Services

Activity

Interaction

Process

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Prototype Reduce risk, increase first time success

Prototyping is about developing quick iterations of a new concept to test it will work before creating the final concept. Though it is often ignored, or seen as an easy one step operational change process that will either succeed or fail, prototyping is about lowering the risk of investing in costly solutions.

This is particularly important when creating new types of technology. Some significant consumer innovations to change customer experiences, such as Scan-As-You-Shop in supermarkets, have failed in practice due to a lack of user centred prototyping to identify how to actually encourage more first time users. Engaging both staff and customers actively in a prototyping process is an effective way of galvanizing people behind a change, increasing engagement, buy-in and adoption of new principles.

DEMAND

Prototype to determine demand and interest amongst customer base.

01 This is often called a “dirty” prototype, since the idea is to mock something up at the lowest cost possible. To the customer, things may look realistic, but systems may be manual behind the scenes at this stage.

IMPACT

Prototype to establish whether a concept creates desired business impact.

02

USABILITY

Are customers getting a great user experience?

03

This is a slightly larger test that links into a business case development. It aims to establish whether the concepts will actually create an impact, whether through improving organisational measures and KPIs, or through customer measures like satisfaction and perception.

This is a larger and much more significant process that goes through a series of iterations to ensure anyone using spaces, technologies or processes have a good user experience. This is very detailed and refined.

3 TYPES OF PROTOTYPING

Holiday Inn new lobby concept prototype, build from foam core in a warehouse prior to implementation

Implement

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Implement Get it right slowly and first time

Implementation can mean many things, depending on the nature of the solution. It could be a full scale architectural design and build, or a small scale app development on the iPhone. What is common amongst all implementation projects are the following principles:

Pilot and rollout Do not succumb to the temptation of rolling out new solutions widely until they have been properly piloted and evaluated in several, very different locations. Only then can a successful rollout be achieved. Have zero tolerance for launch failure In 2011, Chiltern Railways spent £250M on upgrading the railway line to improve train speeds, causing the line to be closed for several weeks and causing significant disruption for passengers. This was deemed acceptable until, upon reopening, passengers endured day after day of delays and heavily crowded trains due to poor timetabling. This caused more anger than the building works had. If you are going to disrupt an experience, keep testing until it works.

Engage staff in the change Staff may need retraining to ensure that they understand new initiatives. There is nothing more revealing than when staff admit they cannot use new in-store technology. They need to be inspired and motivated about the changes. Celebrate and share Successful implementations are good news, and should be shared with both staff and customers. Take staff from other stores to see new initiatives and spend time talking to their co-workers about how it could work in their own stores. Provide a rollout timeline Customers may quickly come to expect that features available in one location will also exist in others. At this stage it is important to rollout quickly, or provide a timeline as to when changes will take place.

Holiday Inn final lobby concept prototype, post implementation (Continuum)

Evaluate

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Evaluate Did it work?

Evaluation seeks to understand how any interventions have succeeded in improving the customer experience, informing further tweaking or redesigning if needed. There are similarities to Research, as various types of ethnography can be used to assess quantitatively and qualitatively whether objectives are being met, whether these are revenue or target based, or whether they are around the direct assessment of the customer experience.

Potential techniques used in this stage include: Customer Journeys Running customer journey analysis post implementation is a great way of seeing whether customers are having a better experience, and whether the changes have introduced any undesired “side effects”. Surveys Surveys can be used to directly test change in customer perceptions. They gather more data on a wider range of participants.

Utilisation Analysis Look at how many people are occupying what areas for how long during the busiest periods of trading in the week. This gives an indication as to whether customers are spending time where we want them to. Data Analysis Data can tell a great story, and whether the focus is on if the intervention has improved the customer experience, or how many people are logging onto new self service terminals, the numbers (and how they’ve changed since implementation) are a useful indicator of success.

Are they now having ideal experiences?

For each customer type

About Flywheel

Space

Technology

Services

Activity

Interaction

Process

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About Flywheel We design experiences within physical environments

Flywheel is a design consultancy that specialises in innovation and strategy around customer and staff experiences within physical environments, from shops to restaurants to theatres. We have a decade of experience working on the design of innovative environments across sectors. We believe space and technology should be designed around people, and we do that by: 1.  Identifying the diverse needs of particular customer types; 2.  Designing the ideal customer experience to meet those needs; 3.  Translating those experiences into design solutions Our founding directors: We have a range of associates that we bring in on a project by project basis. These include service and product designers, specialising in user centred design processes, as well as space planners and interior designers. We also have partnerships with other organisations, including technology consultancies, that allows us to bring the most appropriate team together.

We specialise in projects that fundamentally challenge the way environments support experiences, and thrive on challenging briefs and the opportunity of innovation. Recent projects include: •  House of Fraser: we worked with the department store

chain to evaluate two new concept stores (based around self service) from the customer perspective, and recommend changes prior to rollout.

•  Access Croydon: we worked with Croydon Council to identify an experience led spatial strategy for the design of a new public services access hub. We created a customer centred approach that radically shifted the kind of experience they were providing.

•  Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea: We identified the ideal self service experience, and strategies for converting the existing centre in terms of space, technology, signage, and brand.

•  Delfont Mackintosh Theatres: we worked with the Prince of Wales Theatre to identify the current experience of Mamma Mia customers, and how that experience could be improved in order to generate a higher spend per head. We identified over 35 concepts, half of which were no cost changes, that could increase spend per head by an additional 55%.

Tom Weaver has a background in strategic design of environments, as a former Associate Director of DEGW, and has led a variety of large scale project around innovation and space for the government and private sector. Chris Evans has a background in technology and operations. With experience of developing large scale data management systems in both large and small organisations, Chris specialises in the impact of technology on the design of physical environments.

 

The End

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Copyright © Flywheel Ltd 2012 www.flywheel.org.uk