service design thinking

The employee experience needs to adapt to the employee life cycle

September 2, 2017By Mike Hohnen

The classical way to define the employee life cycle is: attract, recruit, onboard, develop, retain and transition. But that is the HR perspective, not the employee’s perspective. And as good service designers, we know that we need to consider the perspective of the ‘customer’ or user if we are going to be successful with our journey/experience design.

The life cycle will vary from industry to industry and of course from employee to employee. So good experience design would require that we do more research on this, in order to understand what it looks like in our case.

But here is what it might look like from an employee’s perspective.

Is this for me?
Attracted to a job proposition and wondering if it is for me.

Will I make it?
Entering into the application, selection, interview, and final negotiation process.

I made it!
The excitement of being chosen and starting the new job. Flooded with new impressions and ‘firsts’.The lunch canteen is amazing. Loving the attention I get as a newbie. (Or so one hopes.)

Am I good enough for this?
The first feelings of being overwhelmed. Am I good enough for this? Imposter syndrome. Do I belong here? Is this really for me? Feeling very much outside my comfort zone. Should I bail out and limit the damage?

Challenging but do-able
Feeling more secure in the saddle. Challenged and on the edge of my comfort zone, but in an exciting way. Giving the job everything that I have, and enjoying it.

Cruising – no sweat
The daily routine sets in, and most of what I do is well within my comfort zone. (Canteen is not nearly as nice as when I started.) Engagement may start to regress, through lack of challenges.

Is this it?
The first doubts start creeping in. I am always well within my (now shrinking*) comfort zone. This is no longer meaningful for me

From here there are two options: change your job or stagnate completely.

Experiences are all about managing customers’ emotions, as we have seen in previous blog posts on the subject of Service Design Thinking. The same principle applies to employee experience design. We need to understand the emotions that the employee is going through at each stage of the cycle.

When we review the above life cycle it becomes clear that the overall principle we need to look at is where people are in terms of comfort zones. Growth and development are keys to engagement and enthusiasm. But learning and growth happen just outside our comfort zone. We have the misconception that if we do the same thing for a long time we will get better and better at it. Not true. Research shows that, if anything, we stagnate or regress*. (Could you pass a driving test today? Probably not. See what I mean?) In order to get better we need to challenge ourselves and make a deliberate effort to improve. On the other hand, if we get too far outside our comfort zone we trigger fear, and then all learning and development stops as we move into “fight or flight” mode.

Engagement is essentially the product of the accumulated emotional experience. It is what we in a service profit chain terminology would call content. It is different from context (environment, salary and work conditions), which forms the basis of satisfaction but does not produce engagement. We can all have tricky and less than satisfying days, just as we can have fabulous days. But over time the key to engagement is: is this meaningful for me overall? Do I regularly find that I am at the edge my comfort zone, in a constructive and challenging way?

So the key to engagement and retention is to create an environment where the employee can safely switch back and forth between “challenging but do-able” and “cruising, no sweat” modes.

When looking at the employee life cycle in this way, it also becomes clear that as a manager you have a huge responsibility to know where your employee is in the cycle, and to do what you can to support that person in the best possible way. And that may even include helping an employee to move on to a new and more challenging position, if you have no more challenges to offer.

Your customer experience will never be better than what your employee experience was designed to deliver.

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Service Design Thinking is a fantastic toolkit for improving our customer service experiences. Mapping out customer journeys, identifying touch points and understanding different customer personas is going mainstream as everyone chases the elusive super loyal customer.

But did we get the wrong end of the stick?

Let just backtrack for a moment and ask ourselves the fundamental question: why are we so focused on the ‘experience’?

Because in order for something to qualify as service, it has to fulfill two criteria.

It needs to deliver a certain result and there needs to be a positive experience.

If you walk into your favourite coffee shop and they serve you a horrible wishy-washy cup of latte, the setting may be nice and the lady may be ultra friendly but your basic result was not delivered.

Or the other way round.

The coffee is great, but the place is filthy and noisy, the lady is rude. The result was delivered but the experience was horrible. You could just as well have made that cup of coffee at home and saved yourself quite a few bucks. When you opted for going to the coffee shop, you were looking for a service, not just a product.

Ok so far so good. Sometimes it can be sobering to get back to basics.

So assuming that you know how to deliver the result part of whatever service you offer, let’s examine the experience part. As Seth Godin says, customer service is all about changing feelings. Experiences are emotions in action. No emotions, no experience. How was your train commute to work today compared with the same day last year? Ehhh?? Most probably you can’t remember because if it was just the way it always is, there was no emotion. You have not stored it in your memory as ‘an experience’ (Technically everything is an experience but we only retain in our memory the positive and the negative ones, the rest is auto-deleted).

“The only purpose of customer service is to change feelings.”
– Seth Godin

So as you look at your customer journey and map out the touch points, it’s a good idea to also map the emotional highs and lows. You can start out by estimating them but eventually, you will need to research and confirm your assumptions.

Let’s map a simplified example of a customer journey most of us can relate to, the airport check in: Arrive at airport, check in on the touch screen, walk through security, walk to the gate, board using automated boarding card verification, greeted by stewardesses, Settle into a seat.

What are the potential emotional highs and lows that we could work on to ensure that we maximise the experience? The touch screen provides no emotion unless it is not working, so it is just a negative risk. Walking the hallways can at best be neutralised by making the walk pleasant on the eye and informative. Boarding card verification is again automated. The automated or physical parts of the journey we can work on to eliminate negative emotions but they are hard to turn into over the top emotionally positive experiences.

The the two touch points that have the potential to provide emotional highs are the security check and the welcome onboard greeting by the hostess. The critical variable in achieving this is obviously the human being involved in these two touch points. The customer experiences are in their hands and totally dependent on how they feel (Technically we call that engagement, but that is actually just a fancy word for their feelings toward the job.) If they feel anything less than enthusiastic, they will deliver the minimum required to keep the job.

But, you may say, we give them a service manual and they get the onboarding service course, they know what they are supposed to do. Yes, they know, but knowing and doing is not the same thing. They will do or not do depending on how they feel.

In order to understand what drives their emotions, we need to map their employee experience. What is it like to be an airport security agent or a flight attendant? How does their employee journey unfold on a daily basis? What are the emotional highs and lows? Do we know and what can we do to maximise the highs and eliminate or neutralise the lows? (In a Service Profit Chain context, we would call this improving internal quality.)

If you are really serious about delivering best in class customer experiences, you need to start at the other end and look at what kind of employee experience you are providing that is your foundation. Great service design pasted on top of mediocre employee experiences is like trying to paint over the rust spot on a used car.

You can download the Dream Team Checklist below and benchmark yourself!

How do you achieve the best value fit: Inside out or outside in?

July 22, 2017By Mike Hohnen

Everywhere you look, every ‘expert’ on service is telling you that the name of the game is to provide values. And that is true. No value, no business. Everytime you see a high profile brand or product tanks and disappears from the horizon, just think Nokia, Polaroid Kodak, it is basically because they lost it. From the customer perspective, they were no longer providing values.

In the drawing above, the square box represents the company’s offering. It is deliberately drawn as a square to illustrate that we often fall into the trap of having a set solution, a basic service package, our way of doing it. The polygon illustrates the uneven, ever-changing needs of our customers. So, when we overlay what we offer with what they need, we get three zones. The overlap represents the fit (A) where we meet customer needs. The better the fit, the more values we are providing. B is the part of our offering that we charge for, but what the customer does not actually need. And C is the money left lying on the table, in the sense that this is what the customer would really like, but they cannot find it with us and, therefore, either go without it (frustration) or source it from someone else.

Market leaders in a given segment easily get wrapped up in the beauties and benefits of their own products. When they do, the value fit shrinks.

Typically what happens is that they drift slowly from being the customer-centric companies that they were when they were created, and as a result of over-focus on their own attributes and brilliance, they gradually become more and more product-centric.

This is the danger that lies in the asymmetry that is at the core of the service purchase. What the customer purchases is not what the supplier thinks he is selling. When we forget that, we get lost.

In order to avoid that, we need to understand the the crucial difference between an inside-out and outside-in customer strategy

Basically you have three options:

I stay behind my own walls, convinced that what I do is great. Great service, great product. It is so great that the world will always beat a path to my door, as they have done in the past. Those who are not here with me must be idiots.As a consequence, I become a hostage of my own past patterns. I look at and understand the world through a filter that is primarily composed of what has worked previously, not realising at all that none of the tomorrow’s problems will be solved with yesterday’s solutions.

I venture to my window from time to time to look out and observe the world. Still, from the security of my own tower, I shake my head at what is going on out there and thank the Lord that I have the right solution. I may feel some concerns, or even frustrations, that out there “they” don’t get it. Maybe I should start thinking of ways to make them listen and understand, possibly turn up the advertising, or make more noise. Or maybe I should start by sending out a survey. I delude myself that I have understood the world by looking out the window.

I leave the security of my tower. I stand next to my customers and together we look at what it is that I am offering. I even try to walk in their shoes for a while and gradually I start to understand what it really means to be in their place. It scares the living daylight out of me to suddenly be in such a vulnerable position.

Only option three will enable you to maximise the value fit.

That is is why the whole philosophy of Service Design Thinking is so important. This is the toolbox that will help you transition from inside out to outside in thinking in your organisation.

What is our biggest challenge when we map our customer journeys?

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Customer Journey

The short answer to that is that we are deeply biased. Despite all our good intentions about delivering superb customer service, we time and again end up seeing the situations from our own point of view. And using that point of view, we make assumptions about what we think the customer is experiencing. But unless we actually walk in their shoes, we have no clue what they are experiencing.

I see this time and again when I give workshops that introduce Service Design to groups of service providers. In order for them to really understand what this is about, I let them try it for real. So we pretend that they are a group of city tourism planners that need to improve the tourism experience in our city. In order to do that, I let them choose a persona situation and set up their hypothesis (or assumption) for this experience.

One team of three said that navigating the Copenhagen subway is very hard if you don’t speak Danish. Another team of three had the assumption that tourists easily pick the wrong kind of restaurants and end up in the tourist traps. And other groups pick other similar situations that they felt had some problems seen from a tourist point of view. So we sent them out for a 3-hourr field study. Armed with just their iPhones, we asked them to bring back proof in the form of pictures or recorded testimonials that confirmed their basic assumption (so that we could start working on ideas for improvements).

So what happened?

None of the teams could prove their assumption to be correct, none. What they thought a tourist experience was like (here in their own home city) was nowhere near what the tourists said they experienced.

So then I had to ask them: So how many of the assumptions that you have made about how your customer experience your service do you think are accurate?

Food for thought: How can we test our own assumptions about our own service product?

The same way as we did with the tourists. We get out of the office and we observe, document and collect lots of testimonials in the actual situations (not post-experience 6-page surveys, please). With that raw data, we can now start truly talking about what we need to do to improve our various touchpoints.

If you don’t have the time or inclination to do that ground work, your next best solution is to ask a group of students (Anthropologists or service designers) and have them do the real-time observations for you.

Map out the guest journey. Record your assumptions at the critical touch points: “Our breakfast is the best in town.” or “Our meeting facilities are perfect.”; “Guests think our coffee shop has the perfect selection.” Now ask the researchers to prove you right if they can.

Don’t forget: Assumption is the mother of all f… ups.

This blog post is part of a series of answers to frequent questions that I get around the concept of the Service Profit Chain. In future’s posts, we will continue to explore other key points. If you would like the full concept served up in one go, you will find Mike’s book “Best! No need to be cheap if…” HERE.

What is the difference between service levels and service standards?

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Service levels and standards

A key part of implementing the Service Profit Chain’s thinking is to work on consistency; in order to do that, we need to have a clear understanding of what the difference is between service levels and service standards.

The easiest way to understand this is to look at a few examples.

Many independent restaurants have high levels of service. But they may not have high standards. On the other hand, McDonald’s has a relatively low level of service, but has very high service standards, while Ritz-Carlton hotels have both high levels of service and high standards of services. And the greasy spoon down the road has neither service levels nor high standards.

Service Levels.001

Standards are all about consistency. We do things in a certain way, always. Levels of service are all about how much time and effort you put into the delivery process.

Many independent restaurants and other small service businesses go out of business because they lack service standards. Their delivery is inconsistent and creates confusion in the marketplace.

Our level of service needs to fit with our overall value proposition. How much service does this customer segment need and are they willing to pay for it?

Understanding this is crucial to building loyalty.

If it is all about loyalty, does satisfaction matter?

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Consistency

It is true that in the Service Profit Chain framework, there is a huge emphasis on establishing loyalty; loyalty is the key driver of profit and growth.

Before we can even hope to establish a relationship that will lead to loyalty, we must ensure that we have a firm grip on the basics and that we can deliver on our promise every time. The keyword here is consistency, the key driver of basic satisfaction.

Consistency or lack of consistency is also one of my pet grievances. Consistency is the flip side of reliability. If as a customer I had a great experience last week, you as a service provider have implicitly promised me that I will have the same experience when I return next week.

If not, you are not only unreliable in my eyes, but you are also performing below my expectations, and we all know that meeting expectations is the first key to customer satisfaction.

This is a balancing act because, on the one hand, we would like to see creativity and initiative on the part of our teams, but on the other hand, we need to deliver a product that is as expected.

The name of the game is to generate repeat business. Customers return to get more of what they enjoyed the first time. If they don’t get that, then they could just as well have gone somewhere else.

Just think back for a moment about how many times in your life you had a great experience somewhere, and then went back only to find that what you had last time was not what you got the next time. Did you go back a third time just to make sure?

Probably not.

Where do you go frequently? Most probably to a place that is very consistent in some aspect of their service delivery that is important to you. That consistency is what brings you back.

Requiring consistency in the delivery process is universal across all types of services. It is the foundation of your success, and that applies to all service businesses, the way your insurance company processes your claim, the way the consultant interacts with you, how your auditing firm performs the audit. You return to the same supplier in all of these situations because you liked the way he or she did the work.

Together with emotions, consistency is an important element in our ability to recall one service experience more easily than others. You remember the consistently good experiences. They stand out. You have a much harder time remembering inconsistent experiences because you easily confuse them with all of the other inconsistent experiences that you have had.

Customers come back to experiences that consistently live up to their expectations. When that happens, we call it loyalty. Loyalty is built on consistency. Never forget that.

So take a good hard look at your basic processes, are they consistent?

How is customer value created? And who does it?

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Service

In a previous question, we looked at what value is to a customer, how they calculate it in their mind if they received value or not. In this post, we will look at how and by whom is the value then created?

If we go back to the basic definition of service, then we know that Service = Result – Experience.

The experience part is relatively straightforward. We need to provide a good experience at all the touch points and most reasonably successful service organisations understand that.

We can get back to how to do this in a future post. But what truly separates the great from the good is their understating of the result bit.

If I walk in to a store to purchase a hammer of a certain size and make, and I leave the store with exactly that hammer then it is relatively easy. My primary result was to purchase a hammer and that is what I did.

But what is the result that I am looking for when I have a two hour layover in an airport? Or what is the result that I am looking for when I as the CEO organises an offsite meeting for my top ten managers at a conference center? What is the result I am looking for when I check in to a hotel?

The mediocre service providers assume that it is the primary product that is the result. The bed to sleep in. A conference room with a projector etc. But that is not the point. The hotel bed is the solution to a need, and the need may be a good night sleep. The conference room is the solution to a need that could be about undisturbed workspace with no distractions.

When I say ‘could be’, it is because we can’t be sure. Most of these service needs are highly subjective and individual.

So we have two choices. We can give everybody the standard solution and hope that it covers some or most of their needs. Or we can take pride in discovering what the real result is that they are looking for and deliver a customised solution.

When I explain this during my Service Profit Chain seminars, I often hear grows of protest at this idea: “But we don’t know. How on earth should we know what the need behind a conference room booking is other than they obviously want a conference room? We have hundreds of guests each day, how are we to understand what each and everyone’s different needs are. How are we going to do that?”

It quite simple: Ask!

Initiate a conversation that tries to explore and uncover what the need is behind the request for a product. Just like your doctor does. You don’t go to your doctor and say hey could you give me a box of the blue pills, they were wonderful last time. No, your doctor will investigate, and question and use his intuition and experience in order to determine what he thinks is the real need. Once that is identified, he prescribes the best product to solve the need.

That is exactly what our best service providers do as well. What makes them outstanding at their craft is that they investigate, question and use their experience and intuition in order to understand what the real need is. Once they understand that, then they use their professional expertise and knowledge of their product to propose the best possible solution to exactly that need. And funnily enough, that always creates an exceptionally happy customer. Go figure.

If it is a complex service delivery then it requires a lot of time and effort. If it is a simple service delivery, it’s easier to do. Here is a simple example:
Two people come into our restaurant and ask for a table for two. Seated, we give them the menu and let them know we will be back shortly. We come back. They order. Food arrives. They eat, pay and bye bye. Standard solution, that was the product the client asked for. they were not unhappy you could claim.

Let’s rewind.

Two people come into our restaurant and ask for a table for two. Seated, we give them the menu and ask so have you been here before? Their answer will give us valuable information about what’s next to say (Do they need help in understanding our restaurant concept / menu or do they know it well and need help to learn about new initiatives specials etc.?)

Then, we ask casually: So you look really happy tonight are you celebrating something? With a bit of luck, we get some really valuable information back:
a) Oh no we just escaped from the kids and we are off to a movie (Meaning they are on a limited timeframe and we need to adapt to that.)
b) Yes we are actually. It’s my wife’s birthday today. (Meaning they are here for the evening and they would like it to be special somehow. Just sticking a flare in their dessert is already a much better experience than the standard solution we started with if you get my point.)

A skilled service provider will ensure that they not only have the evening they dreamed of but they will probably also spend more than they would have if we had not had this opportunity to really understand their need. The better we understand the more values we create.

And that brings me to favourite peeve. I am not mad about the expression ‘Up-sell’. It sounds like we are force feeding them more than they need. But I do encourage the service sale, which is the sale you make once you have understood that here is a deeper need than what was originally voiced by the customer. By letting them spend more on achieving their real need, you are giving them fantastic service.

So how is value created? By uncovering the true need: Understanding what is the real result they are looking for and then customising your delivery to fulfill that need in the best possible way.

This blog post is part of a series of answers to frequent questions that I get around the concept of the Service Profit Chain. In future post, we will continue to explore other key points. If you would like the full concept served up in one go, you will find Mike’s book “Best! No need to be cheap if…” HERE.

Employee experiences and why you need to focus on consequences

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Motivation
Last week, we looked at how progressive organisations are focusing on managing their employee experience as way to ensure the best possible customer experience. From a Service Profit Chain‘s point of view, this makes perfect sense.

We can create super sophisticated employee career journey maps – but we could also just look at what a day looks like on our team from an employee experience point of view. What are the emotional highs and lows in a day? So we looked at how managing positive ending has a huge influence on how the whole day is perceived.

This week, I would like to look at why managing the end of the day is just as or maybe even more important than managing the start of the day from a motivational point of view.

A reasonably accepted definition of motivation is:

“A reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way”

So that reason, we call it the activator, for doing or not doing something can come from two main sources. It can be external; somebody does something to make you act (A request, a threat, a reward etc.). Or the activation comes from within yourself; you feel an inner urge to do something.

In either case, you end up doing whatever it is. That is the behaviour part. And all behaviour has a consequence. So there is this sequence: Activator – behaviour – consequence in everything we do.

In simple terms: You feel a craving for sweets. That activates you to get up and go to the cupboard and find a bar of chocolate. The consequence is that you feel good – your sugar craving is satisfied. (And, maybe you learn that eating chocolate is a solution for killing a sweet tooth.)

So now just pause for a minute.

What do you think has the largest influence on your behaviour on a day to day basis? The activator or the consequence?

If you are like most of the people I have in my workshops, you will say the Activator – We tend to think that we do things because there is a push. But that is not entirely correct.

80% of what we do or don’t do is determined by what we think the consequences are going to be. The drive is the consequence – that triggers the activator.

Ah, but that is not true, you may be thinking because I know that the consequences of eating chocolate is that I will get fat. So why do I still do it? Because we are all wired to value short-term consequences higher than long-term consequences. On top of that, we will value consequences that are certain, more than consequences that are a possibility in the future.

At 2 o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Eve – someone suggests that we crack open a bottle of Jack Daniels. The short-term well known consequence is that it is going to feel great. The long-term possible consequence is that we are going to feel terrible tomorrow.

That is also why it is hard to get people to stop smoking. The immediate 100% certain consequence is that they will feel a kick from the nicotine, the long term possible consequence is that it may kill them.

So back to managing our daily employee experience.

What do you think has the largest influence on our motivation to go to work? How the day starts (activation) or how the day ends (consequences)?

It’s a no brainer.

If we want our team to come in tomorrow, energised and ready to rock and roll, we need to think about how we manage the ending today. What was the consequence of their efforts today?

How are they going to feel when they go home: Elated, confident, positive? Or downcast, self blaming, frustrated and angry? Whatever it is, it is going to be our starting point tomorrow.

So how do we do a better job of managing our endings?

That is the subject of my upcoming tranings: The Manager’s Toolbox – you can join us and participate with your questions on comments live. Check it out here.

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This is the 12th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series: