Design a better customer journey - a mini study series on design

Intro

During my time at the Royal College of Art, I’ve been inspired by the ‘design studies’ approach. These design studies are like case studies in business schools, and offer a conversational space focused on design practices and strategies. The aim is to inspire new ways of thinking about design direction and creating competitive advantages. With the design studies format in mind, I’ll be writing a series of mini-essays about my observations on services and customer behaviours. If you’re a design thinker like myself, or have a strategic role in shaping your product development or marketing positioning, I hope the articles might provoke and inspire thoughts of your own. At the end of the day, we all think differently. 

Special thanks to my co-author of this article: Craig Tomkins, the Head of Transport at DK&A and a member of the second cohort from RCA service design. Until this day, I still remember his ingenious designing of a mobility concept for Land Rover in his student days (almost 10 years ago!). He has kindly given so much feedback to my early thoughts and we have built up this thought piece together.  

A good journey matters as much as the final destination

My wife and I are expecting our first baby, which is due to arrive imminently. It is quite nerve-racking to be a first time parent - especially in the middle of a pandemic. The whole experience of looking for pregnancy healthcare revealed a whole new world to me as a parent-to-be. Luckily, we’ve found a really good consultant who has been supporting us on this journey. The continuity of the service and the handholding really helped us to cope with the stress and uncertainty during the pandemic. 

As a service designer, I can’t help but think of other journeys that matter so much in the services. At the RCA, service design tutor Neal Stone (previously head of design at BA) has talked about the importance of customer journeys in airlines. It was one of the key differentiators that set British Airways apart from the competition when they first launched the flatbed in business class and made the journey much better for their customers. At studio intO, we often hear from our clients how critical the customer purchase journey is for their businesses. A good purchase journey matters so much, especially when it comes to large price tag items (e.g. house, new car, investment products, etc). We should design in the same way that we think about life: a good journey matters as much as the final destination. 

I reached out to Craig Tomkins to reflect upon our experience and ask the question: what are the characteristics of a good journey? We captured our early thoughts to share with you.  

What are the characteristics of a good journey?

1. A good journey tells a story

A good journey can enable the customers to tell a story about themselves. As a story, a journey should consist of a diverse set of experiences and sequenced acts of narratives. 

a. Allow everyone to be a protagonist. At its core, we believe a good journey should enable the person to experience the service as if he or she feels like the protagonist in a story. Knowing the happy ending of the service is a given (otherwise the service would be a failed product. Sadly, some services don’t even deliver that!), but a protagonist should be able to own and make meaning from the experience. Some service examples - education services, charity services, healthcare services (pregnancy) - really have this quality. These services allow the journey to be owned by the user/protagonist and each unique individual can overlap their own meaning and narrative of transformation onto the experience. At Studio intO, we worked on a client’s VIP loyalty programme and found that many customers were eager to tell stories about how long they had been with the brand and the unique experiences it had delivered over the years.  It was as if they were each the protagonist in their own story that was being written together with the brand. At DK&A, Craig also recognised this pattern in a previous project. A woman, who had been taken to a luxury retailer’s boutique by her parents during her upbringing, was continuing the brand story that her parents began. In stories that are shared with a customer’s friends & families, the real value lies in how the service journey made them feel, rather than any ultimate outcome or deliverable. To design a better journey, we need to allow everyone to be a protagonist of the story. If you are designing a new service, how do your customers feel as a protagonist in your service? What sort of plot and tone will they want your joint story to have? 

b. Design triggers & non-linear transitions. As we can all be our own protagonist in a journey, one typical issue is presented by the fact that many journeys are nonlinear in nature; all manner of individual detours are possible. For example, when some of my students at the RCA were trying to map out the journey in a career-training service, they realised that the customer journeys were often non-linear because they were influenced by individual circumstances. One customer may take a detour during this transition across several months or even years. Instead of designing a non-linear journey for all customers, we decided to map out & design the key triggers (using a decision-making flowchart to consider different options) that allow customers to interact with the service in accordance with their own pace & directions. A great example of this in action is the recent IF award winner, Judah Armani, who designed & launched a record label in UK prisons, enabling individuals to embark on new journeys of personal & professional change. It is quite inspirational how a better journey can work when the right mechanism is thoughtfully designed. To design a good journey in any service, what are the triggers and non-linear transitions that need to be considered?

c. Resonate with a childhood memory. Memories are valuable design affordance for service design. Most often, services like education, healthcare and holidays create memories. These services deliver special moments, rare gatherings and collectable souvenirs (e.g. photos, artefacts, etc) that can trigger recall. At Studio intO, we’ve noticed that there is often a thread connecting past memories and new experiences. When we design new experiences, we need to consider the pretext of people’s life (e.g. their memories). I believe one interesting design direction is to trigger certain feelings from our old memories (e.g. feeling like a child again). Craig also brought up the power of nostalgia. Particularly when the world is an uncertain and confusing place, people want to revisit old memories and return to a safe and familiar place. By understanding the target user segments’ shared childhood memories, a journey can be designed to mimic and trigger an experience that is relevant and special. Some of the triggers, as Craig mentioned, could be fragrances (the smell of bonfires from childhood) or cartoon characters (e.g. Pokemon) that we played with as kids. What if a service can be designed to become a synonym of certain feelings from our memories? The resonance with childhood memories might be an interesting design direction to explore next. 

2. A good journey works for the first timer

The first-timer is a unique customer group for many businesses. There are first-time property buyers, first-time parents, first-time SUV owners, and so on. Being a first-timer to a new experience can be daunting. We may feel uncertain about whether we have sufficient knowledge and the skills we need to move towards the destination. Here are some important things to consider to make a good journey for first-timers:

a. Hand-hold the first-timers. A good journey should consider the first-timers’ need for hand-holding & troubleshooting along the way. Take pregnancy health services in the NHS, for example. The regular check-ins with the midwife provide the function of hand-holding (a sense of company) and troubleshooting (to remedy problems & concerns) along the pregnancy journey. This is incredibly important for first-time parents as they are experiencing dramatic life changes (both physical & mental). 

b. Communicate a clear process. In addition to hand-holding and troubleshooting, a good journey should clearly set the expectations for each step. We found it incredibly useful when our NHS consultant outlined the different pregnancy stages and gave us a timeline to understand the entire journey. The journey map itself is not only important to the service provider but also as a design artefact (“the map for our journey”) that acts as a navigation tool. A good example of such design can be found from the UK design council; an A&E journey is visualised & communicated effectively to patients in order to reduce anxiety & stress. Especially when a service timeframe can last months or even years, a clear map of process can give users clarity and a sort of way-finding system when they feel lost.

c. Share a to-do list with defined roles. A good journey allows effective collaboration between customers & service providers. In the past, many service providers typically treated their customers as ‘the hands-off guest’ and focused on serving them rather than viewing them as a ‘partner’ to collaborate with during the journey. These are two very different mindsets. The guest mindset is very common in traditional hospitality services, such as restaurants and high-end hotels. However, as many other services become more and more automated (e.g. ‘the guest’ has to do work by themselves), the successful delivery of the service requires customer participation and collaboration. For example, some mortgage services require the customer to calculate and compare options themselves. Pregnancy healthcare requires the couple to collaborate with their midwife and complete certain tasks by themselves. There is an increasing degree of collaboration in services, ranging from self-serve only to a hybrid of working together. Craig also suggests that if your customers are involved in the service, they have ‘skin in the game’ and are more likely to appreciate and ‘own’ the service outcomes as a personal achievement. Threfore, a good journey should also design the roles that the customer needs to play and provide collective to-do lists. This facilitates a sense of company, exploration and achievement. 

3. A good journey has continuity built in. 

Typically, there are multiple staff members or touchpoints in an organisation that provide services to customers. Take a healthcare journey as an example. A patient may need to meet a receptionist, a GP, consultants and many nurses along their journey. This means that the customer may need to explain their symptoms and medical history over and over again. Traditionally, a high-end luxury service would have a centralised role to look after their customers along the customer journey. This centralised role manages the relationship, ensures smooth handovers and the continuity of service experience for the customer. However, confronting the constraints (e.g. viability & feasibility issues that many businesses face) and new tech disruption (e.g. AI, apps, etc), one can’t help but reflect on the new possibilities for designing continuity in experiences. 

a. Aim for one stop for all. From the customer’s perspective, the simplicity of who they are in contact with has always been a very important consideration in design. As customers ourselves, we all remember the feeling of being transferred from one department to another department on a service helpline, and the frustration of having to repeat security answers and the nature of our problem. This happens a lot in banking services and healthcare services when the journey is designed for internal stakeholders and logistics rather than customers. In China, many major companies (especially the big internet giants) have adopted the strategy to build a ‘one stop’ for all customer needs. Services like Meituan, Alipay, and even Xiaomi (a product-service system provider) are increasingly delivering continuity between devices and the management of personal information, and are communicating in a way that makes the customer feel that ‘this is THE place that meets all of my needs’. This is exciting for businesses who have multiple product and service lines and features, but are not yet providing such a continuity of experience for their customers. 

b. Minimise falls in transition. The continuity of the journey is also impacted by falls in transitions. These could be the waiting time in services like transportation & logistics, or the gap in service standards that can occur in service partnerships like outsourced customer service helplines or repair services. The end-to-end customer journey can be greatly impacted by those gaps and transitions. Sometimes, this can become a hygiene factor that kills off all the effort put into service & brand experience design. 

c. Exceed expectations beyond the job to be done. Continuity during the customer journey also requires that we holistically consider and seek to design the ‘high point’ of the experience. This is incredibly important. Craig and I always aspire to this famous quote: ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’ When thinking about the service design target, we should look beyond the job that needs to be done and instead think about how it gets done. Virgin Atlantic did this by running an internal engagement campaign called ‘Brilliant Basics. Magic Touches.’ This focused employees on the ambition to deliver a world-famous customer experience. The success of the programme cemented the tagline as a key principle for service design projects beyond Virgin Atlantic. In CEO of Xiaomi, Leijun's, famous framework called ‘internet thinking’, exceeding expectations is one of the four core elements he attributes the success of his products & services to. In his explanation, when you actively design something beyond expectation, it creates word of mouth that will accelerate your product & service adoption by activating demand in new markets that may not even be on the radar yet. This applies to products from the Tesla brand; contagious video content, created by the brand’s fans, fuels effortless marketing and drives Tesla adoption. This is the business impact that can be driven by design targets that go beyond the job that’s there to be done. 

There are probably more characteristics than the ones listed above. As service design is a discipline that constantly evolves from its applied contexts and other knowledge domains, we’d love to hear your reflections & observations. Please give us a comment below or reach out to us on LinkedIn. 

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Acknowledgements:

I want to give special thanks to Clare Rees who has always inspired and helped me to write more and to write better!