Rachel Hinman in Conversation with Mark Jones, IDEO About Service Design

by Rachel Hinman

September 10, 2007

Rachel Hinman recently spoke with Mark Jones of IDEO about his upcoming MX East presentation Strategies for Successful Service Innovation and his work at IDEO in service design and innovation.

Rachel Hinman [RH]: Welcome, Mark. Tell us a little about the work you are doing over at IDEO.

Mark Jones [MJ]: Thank you, Rachel. I lead the service innovation group at IDEO Chicago and right now there’s a lot of attention on service design and service innovation.

RH: That was something I was curious about: People have been doing [service design] for a long time but it’s getting more attention. Are people coming to you guys and asking for specifically for service design? Or is it something you have to explain?

MJ: People are definitely coming to us. I think that many service companies are finding that their services have been commoditized and are realizing they have to differentiate themselves. Companies are realizing that they actually have to pay attention to what their customers want. Expectations are higher and the competitive landscape is much tighter than it used to be. Companies have to innovate. And so they are coming to us.

On the other hand, I’d say that many service companies have traditionally worked with management consultants, not with design consultants.

RH: What do you think is the fundamental difference in working with those different types of consultancies? Design versus management consulting.

MJ: As a design company we are trying to visualize the future from a customer point of view. We always start with what a customer needs, what the stakeholders need. I think that management consultants start with, “What are your technological constraints? What are your operational constraints? How can you leverage them?”

I think we tend to push people a little bit further than a management consultancy. We say, “Well, your customers need this and you’re not delivering — it may be quite a large stretch for you — but it’s what you have to do to compete in this space to satisfy those needs.” It sets up a different dynamic of where you are today and where you’re going.

RH: One of the things that IDEO is really known for in the design world is the process of prototyping. I’m curious how you guys in your process are able to prototype services. What are some of the things that you do?

MJ: If you use an analogy from the product world, a prototype can just be a foam block to gauge the size of a product with no buttons on it or anything else. A rough prototype answers a question. An early prototype for a service may be a group of people role-playing a new service without any technological infrastructure. Or it might be something in the middle, where you’re designing touch points for how a new service might look. Until you start an early pilot, you may not have real data behind a technological infrastructure. You may not have a real protocol but you can set up a simulated environment in a pilot situation.

We emphasize to our clients that, traditionally, service companies have worked out all the details upfront and then rolled it out. We’re trying to introduce the idea that you can start prototyping much, much earlier to work out many of the large questions. The way you do a traditional product design.

RH: Do you find that companies are pretty receptive to that type of a process?

MJ: Yes, they are. I think they quickly understand how many questions it starts answering. We expose them to the earliest prototypes and then have them generate some of the ideas. That is part of our identity at IDEO, we involve our clients and stakeholders in early prototyping through workshops and let them come up with some of the initial ideas.

RH: I’m curious if you’ve found any commonality in the projects that you’ve worked on, any challenges that you’ve faced designing across multiple touch points?

MJ: Often the touch points in a service are managed by different organizational silos: There’s a group that handles the web, a group that handles print materials, a group that handles the bricks and mortar store, a group that handles the call center, etc.

The challenge, when you’re looking for a holistic customer experience, is to see if the experience across those different touchpoints is coherent. Often one of the reasons it isn’t is because the silos aren’t talking to each other very well, or even at all. One of our roles is to help the client envision a seamless customer experience across multiple touchpoints. Then work with the organization to bridge the silos. Sometimes it means partial or total restructuring. Many of the companies we work with are realizing their old organizational structures aren’t set up for innovation.

RH: Yes, I remember that’s something I would experience when I worked at Yahoo! and other places. People would often say that the experience customers have is really not so much the experience they want but rather the representation of the organizational structure of the internal company.

MJ: Yes, I think that’s true.

RH: I’m curious, when you go in and talk to people, how do those conversations go with a company that is siloed? You recognize that in order to deliver a good customer experience for people, something may need to happen within the organization. How do you even begin to have that conversation with people? It must be challenging.

MJ: As much as possible we have them get in touch with what their customers are really experiencing — particularly higher level executives. A great first step is to have them experience the services as their customers do to understand the gaps and mismatches. They see for themselves it’s not a great experience, it’s not coherent, and it isn’t seamless across touchpoints. Clients become receptive, they say, “Gosh, if we’re going to change, we really have to think in a more holistic way.” The first step is just getting them to be empathic towards their customers. Then you can build on that and start envisioning new things.

RH: When you’re making these recommendations about service, about envisioning a service, I imagine you have to coordinate with operations and logistics. With holistic service design, it’s critical to that level of service right?

MJ: Absolutely. Our teams, on the client-side, tend to be a broad spectrum from the beginning. You have somebody from marketing, branding, analytics, technology, and maybe somebody from organizational training. The teams we work with are probably larger than a typical product design team.

RH: It sounds like your involving everyone in the process then.

MJ: Yes, we’re involving everyone in the process because of the implications of what we are doing. Our process begins with a customer focus and then follows with a business and technology focus. We really believe in getting the value proposition right first and then making sure that we can implement and deliver. You want all of the business, technology, and operations people along for the ride so they understand and believe in the value proposition and they can reflect on whether the investment is worth it. It is tremendously expensive to significantly change a service. It touches training, spaces, and technology infrastructure.

RH: I understand that you’ve been teaching a class at the Institute of Design around service design. How has that been going?

MJ: It’s been great. I’m co-teaching with Denis Weil from McDonalds. I bring the design consultancy perspective and Denis brings an operations perspective. It’s been a very nice teaching partnership. We’ve learned a lot from each other and it makes for a well-balanced course. I’ve heard the feedback from the students has been terrific.

It’s different from other courses at ID — our class starts with similar premises but then applies those premises to actionable tools. We’ve been talking about multiple service touchpoints; organizational and stakeholder complexity; and user-experience from user, client, and operations perspectives.

ID gets a mix of people who have been product designers and we ask them at the beginning of our course, “Why are you interested in this?” Their usual response is, “There isn’t a product today that doesn’t have a service component.” And then there are people coming from business or marketing backgrounds and they’re saying, “We understand that service is really critical and challenging and we want to learn more about it.”

RH: What do you find when you’re teaching students about services? Is there something that’s difficult to grasp?

MJ: In this course, we start with an existing service and really experience it: how it is good and bad. Then we start rethinking the service. The majority of projects are an overhaul of an existing service.

With a product, it’s pretty easy to think about having control of every single element; to change everything simultaneously. If it’s a new laptop, you can rework every detail down to the last degree — and that’s appropriate.

One thing students find difficult is the right level of intervention. Is a lot of change appropriate? Where is the right place to make the intervention or the change in the service? It’s not likely to change overnight. There are going to be some elements that remain consistent from a brand, operations, and customer point of view.

RH: It sounds like it’s about strategically picking what you can change to have the most impact on the experience.

MJ: Absolutely. A lot of service design is figuring out where the most bang for the buck is. What’s the right level of intervention, the right opportunity to morph or extend an offer, or the right time to introduce a new service? It’s about what will be most valuable to customers.

RH: Can you think back to some of the projects that you’ve done at IDEO that you feel are representative of the work that you’re doing?

MJ: Yes. We did some really wonderful work with a health insurance company’s call center. Ninety-nine percent of customer contact came through their 800-number and it wasn’t being leveraged properly.

We came up with this idea that instead of just answering questions, they take this as an opportunity to extend the health care conversation. If somebody calls looking for a doctor, you extend the conversation into new territory and deliver new value to customers.

Can you retrain your call center personnel? Write new kinds of scripts? Really try to understand what people might need and then proactively give it to them through the call center? Then channel people to the appropriate print or web resources to help them in new ways.

In some ways it was a counterintuitive — a call center’s mandate is to reduce call handling time — and we recommended the opposite.

RH: That is a really interesting approach: to reframe that whole idea of the call center. Mark, I want to thank you for your time. I know we are all looking forward to your presentation at MX East.

MJ: Thank you, I’m looking forward to it.

Rachel Hinman is a design strategist for Adaptive Path. Her focus is on developing insights about people and using those insights to create valuable user experiences that support business goals.