Use over consumption + access over ownership

By Alex Christian, design and experience director, Cypha

In recent times, there has been a fixation on creating ‘campaign’ style products and tools, and while this has been a great way to showcase new technology and immerse ourselves in a new age of connectivity, a lot of the time, the emphasis has been placed on the artefact rather than what is really important – the service that the product is distributing.

This has resulted in organisations building tools and products that are gimmicky, unhelpful and don’t actually make their customers’ lives any easier because the actual service it distributes, well, sucks.

As you can imagine, this shortcoming doesn’t often translate into increased loyalty and brand advocacy amongst users.

Designing and implementing services that will allow your organisation to have meaningful and ongoing conversations with customers is a challenging feat. However, organisations need to adapt a human-centred approach if they’re to stay competitive amidst the white noise of the internet, technology, social media and unlimited choice.

So how do you create services and experiences that DO solve problems for the user, while continuing to grow profits for the organisation?

The answer is to consciously and carefully design the quality of service that your organisation desires and then build products, tools and touch points that distribute it. Not the other way around.

There has been a behavioural shift from the desire to ‘own’ things, to the desire to experience great services. Giving people what they want, in a way they want it, is now the expectation, and in a competitive landscape, this means that you need a deeper understanding of what it is the customer actually wants/needs/desires, in order to gain an advantage.

Simply put, your organisation’s service needs to be compelling, through every touch-point.

This does however require spending more time understanding the real needs of your customers, your organisational behaviours (inside and out), the touch-point nuances, and from these learning’s create better, more valuable insights that fill holes in the communication fabric.

We believe in use over consumptions and access over ownership.

Essentially, we want to create experiences that increase profits, win the hearts of customers and redefine brands in a competitive global marketplace. Human-centred service design is at the heart of what we do, however, service design in its digital form is often a forgotten, and often unknown player in the world of business to customer relations.

A carefully and consciously designed service experience can have such a profound impact on the end user and be the major ingredient in some of the user’s most important subconscious and conscious decisions.

Which café will you visit in the morning? Or which bank would you choose to invest your money? These decisions are all influenced by the quality of service experience we receive, and it’s ultimately what drives users back through your doors, website, platform over and over again.

A perfect example of competing services is the rise of Uber vs traditional taxis.

Sure, the taxi services have products and tools, but their service is and always has been shit. What Uber has managed to do is deeply understand their customers’ desires to travel in a clean and reasonably priced mode of transport and build a service around these insights, then build products and tools to seamlessly distribute the service. And they have managed to build a $17 billion company in the process.

While service design is a new focus for organisations who are already struggling to stay competitive and relevant, it’s important to remember what a great service design can deliver to your organisation. You can expect to attract new customers, increase customer loyalty and streamline service operations, however, without such consideration, you run the risk of being the next taxi industry.