The importance of delivering amazing customer experiences has moved firmly into the mainstream. At Engine Service Design, our role is to enable businesses to put customers at their centre to deliver great services they have to be a great service organisation: not just outside in, but inside and out.

Here are some tips on how to get there:

Have a clear ethos and principles: Having an ethos and principles aligned across the leaders works as a checklist for cohesion in delivery and brand identity and impact. The leadership team can work up simple principles and a brand identity that all agree on, which can be used as a checklist to ensure that they are representative of the organisation.

Similarly, having a customer-centric vision for the organisation as a whole, based on your principles and your targets, together with a strategy and timeline to achieve it, will help you plan and direct work and involvement. A clearly defined strategy also helps to encourage input and alignment of departments especially important when working to deliver services and great customer experiences.

A democratic approach that works up, down and across the business can help manage the tension between commercial objectives and customer experience. It will also help embed insights from frontline staff and customers across departments.

It’s well worth investing in research - gaining more understanding into your existing and potential customers, to maintain and increase loyalty and revenue. Qualitative rather than quantitative research provides richer insight into people and behaviours and is also a chance to engage in dialogue with your customers. It will produce customer stories that can be used as a key business asset to improve or redesign services and should continue over time. Insights into needs change because needs change, so you need to keep the research rolling.

This approach to sustained improvements and innovations also includes being forward thinking: sharing knowledge and assets around the team; training and supporting staff to deliver your vision; empowering them to do it well; and providing space to grow with a sense of ownership and community.

A key example of this type of approach is reflected in our work with a range of organisations that are measuring, analysing and monitoring the experiences of their customers, using Net Promoter Scores (NPS). NPS provides a platform for sustained improvement and innovation in customer experiences and, when developed in conjunction with Service Design, becomes the means by which an organisation can make sustained improvements to services, beyond just fixing the basics.

NPS spreads the accountability for the quality of customer experiences and the performance of a service across the whole organisation, providing an end-to-end view of the effectiveness of touchpoints and channels. Improving the overall NPS score, or adjusting an individual touchpoint for the better, is then used as a way to measure, incentivise and reward staff. This allows them to make changes and identify tactics to improve what is being done now.

The next level of progression sees customer satisfaction data, the bedrock of NPS, allowing an organisation to employ more agile methods, to fix what's broken, and to try out different solutions and monitor the results ensuring the right balance of cost and value to the customer.

However, it is often at this point that organisations hit a ceiling. They openly admit that, despite in-depth analysis and prolonged reporting of the performance of the customer journey, they find it very difficult to translate the information into bigger ideas. It’s hard to get beyond the quick fixes of rewards and communications that have limited sustained impact on the longer-term experiences of the customer. If only used in this way, NPS becomes a damage limitation exercise rather than a means for genuinely developing services that are valuable and differentiated.

We fill this 'translation gap' by using Engine’s systematic and creative Service Design approach, which is informed by NPS and complimented by our own qualitative understanding of what makes a great service and customer experience, and have begun to see the long-term results of our work across the utilities and transport sectors. The services and experiences we have helped to design show significant uplift in performance of the services at a touchpoint level, and sizeable increases in the overall satisfaction of customers with the services as a whole.

As Service Design becomes more widely practised, bought and developed, it’s clear to see how NPS capability coupled with Service Design can help an organisation make the transition from just measurement to a longer-term improvement that is more valuable to them and, ultimately, to their customers through producing exciting and sustained customer experiences.

Contact: Julie McManus, Knowledge Manager, Engine Creative Consultants

+44 (0)20 7064 6868, [email protected], www.enginegroup.co.uk

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