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Service By Design

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By RICHARD MULLINS | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 28, 2007

Why do most customer service experiences drive you nuts? Why do call center workers keep asking for your personal information again and again? And why do many hospitals make patients walk in public wearing flimsy gowns - or worse, with their testing samples?

That's because, in each case, the company providing the service is focused on its bureaucratic needs, not the customer's experience from beginning to end.

That's a breakdown in what's called "service design," a growing area of work by U.S. companies trying to take lessons from the development of successful products, such as the iPod, and applying them to the service industry.

Shelley Evenson, professor
at Carnegie Mellon University

Such analysis can lead to changes in how a company handles everything from advertising to taking an order over the phone to product design to shipping and billing - every "touch point" providing a similar tone that generates loyalty in the customer.

"When it's all working together, as a customer, you don't notice anything wrong, and it's all just fabulous," said Shelley Evenson, an associate professor with Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design and an apostle of service design in the United States. "When it's broken, it's just unbelievably horrible for the customer, and you tell everyone you know how bad it was."

With service companies representing more than half of Florida's economy, the need to improve service design will only grow. Next week, Sarasota will host one of the nation's first major conferences in the field, pulling in experts from companies such as IDEO, Duke Energy and Sony Pictures Imageworks.

Evenson's quest to improve service design started in December 2001 in a hospital's public waiting room. Evenson's husband was undergoing tests for cancer, and a doctor walked up to her, told her to come into a consultation room and said her husband had inoperable cancer and that she had to come and help tell him. The doctor then walked Evenson back through the waiting room (as she carried a coat, bags and a computer) and walked her into the exam room, which was full of medical interns.

"We absolutely supported the medical teaching experience, but there were four interns and a surgeon, and there wasn't any room for me to even hold his hand," Evenson said. "He was on a table, and there was no space for me to be near him."
Through her husband's treatments, the couple studied how service could have been improved.

"And the kind of responsibility that was thrust on me in the last weeks of his life was incredible," she said. "I had to suddenly manage eight or nine different drugs, so I kept a spreadsheet of what he took when, and nobody provided that to me. I made it myself."

That spreadsheet could have been a resource for family members managing illnesses - something doctors and hospitals could have provided. After her husband died, Evenson dedicated her career to improving the design of service.

Common Themes

For companies, one of the first steps in applying service design is to do extensive fieldwork and map out every stage in a customer's experience from the customer's point of view, sometimes called "the customer journey."

That mapping can reveal gaps where, for instance, advertising may promote one theme or tone, yet retail staff offers something else. Then when problems arise - and they will - customer service staff treat customers differently - or worse, as problems the company would prefer avoiding. Rather brushing off complaining customers, companies could use them as a resource to determine how to provide better service.

After all, one monthly bill with unexpected charges can destroy any brand loyalty the company worked to build.
Evenson also pointed out the risk of bad news traveling faster is amplified by the Internet. Customer review Web sites are becoming key first stops for shoppers, and one bad assessment can mean significant missed revenue.

Poor Hospital Service

Hospitals and clinics are some of the worst offenders, boosters of service design said. Patients enter a hospital, then are sent from admission to preparation to treatment to discharge to billing - and at each stage have a different experience or must re-explain their situation. Patients can be needlessly separated from their families, waiting on gurneys for procedures and never quite knowing when the next step will start.

"Especially with patients who have chronic illnesses is they often feel like they're living in a world of piecework," said James Conway, senior vice president for the Boston-based nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Too often, "one doctor sends them to a hospital and then maybe a clinic, and they deal with different nurses and technicians at each step, and at each step along the way there's a handoff among the individual parts, and the communications are poor."

That's changing at a few hospitals nationwide, Conway said, especially ones that have adopted patient-centric approaches that track how patients experience every step of care and administration. In some cases, solutions are as simple as turning down the volume on equipment or mandating quiet times in the ward during afternoons.

Conway said those approaches will become more important through next year, when Medicare starts publishing online patient satisfaction surveys for nearly every health care provider.

The work pays off in higher revenue, Conway said, because hospitals become known for offering a better experience. And in almost every case, hospitals adopting better service design "have very happy chief financial officers," he said, because they drive out waste and "get it right the first time."

The Apple Example

Many boosters of service design point to Apple Inc. as a good case of service design making money.
Apple, they said, learned early in the days of digital music that customers would pay for digital downloads, but the process to find music online, download it to computers and shift it to a portable player was awkward and difficult.

iTunes software radically simplified those steps and built a way for Apple to make money off downloads.


iTunes is now one of the most widely used pieces of consumer software.

By contrast, the value of service has brought hard lessons to some of America's most popular companies.

Starbucks Corp. founder Howard Schultz this year warned that amid rapid, successful expansion worldwide, Starbucks risked "the commoditization of our brand," and stores were losing some of the customer experience that made gourmet coffee shops successful.

In a memo to top executives, Schultz wrote, "We solved a major problem in terms of speed of service and efficiency. At the same time, we overlooked the fact that we would remove much of the romance and theatre."

Another example: Upstart airline JetBlue Airways had surged to popularity in recent years by offering friendlier staff and perks such as in-flight TV for every seat. But the company's reputation suffered in February, when hundreds of passengers were left stranded in planes for hours because of a snowstorm. The episode led to JetBlue's chief executive leaving the company.

Design Conference To Focus On Service

TAMPA - Better designed service for customers is the focus of this year's Sarasota International Design Conference, an annual conference focusing on how design practices can produce good results for companies and organizations.

Speakers this year include James Rogers, chairman, president and CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest electric power companies in the United States. Rogers will speak on his vision for creating an energy-efficient economy, sustainability and decarbonizing the U.S. energy supply.

Other speakers are:

"Susan Szenasy, editor in chief of Metropolis, the New York-based magazine of architecture, culture and design.
"Tim Sarnoff, president of the film company Sony Pictures Imageworks.

"Valerie Casey, co-head of IDEO Software Experience.

"Fred Kent, founder and president of Project for Public Spaces.

The conference is from Nov. 5 to 7 at The Ritz Carlton, Sarasota and the Ringling College of Art and Design.

For information, go to http://sarasotadesignsummit.com.

- Richard Mullins

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.

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