What I am still learning after all these years doing User-Centred Service Design
For me, one of the most satisfying outputs of Service Design is turning the ideas created on the back of the Discovery phase, into real, actionable improvements and putting them into the hands of the people who need them the most. These don’t have to be thrilling technical advances — small changes to existing ways of working can yield great value immediately. (Those amazing new technologies will of course happen — just a little further down the roadmap). So when I had the chance to do this recently I jumped on the opportunity, and learnt a few lessons along the way.
In my previous role, I ran many product and service pilots “in the field” (i.e. in customers’ homes or businesses). These were predominantly for online services with a small number of physical products. When I changed roles 6 months ago I entered into an area of industry I had no previous experience of — where online services were clearly a vital commercial channel but also where bricks-and-mortar stores and face-to-face customer service continued to be vital to offering the experience customers want. For me, running a pilot in this new context was a serious uplift in complexity, but keeping to solid principles (i.e. implementing a set of KPIs to indicate success of the pilot, and establishing a means of tracking feedback for the next iteration) gave a good grounding in the midst of this complex space.
The pilot
In summer 2022, myself and 2 other colleagues carried out extensive research on the end-to-end kitchen, bathroom and bedroom sales experience with one of the companies in our group. We had a huge list of pain points which had been articulated by customers and colleagues. So when one of our stakeholders said they already set up a pilot group I used it to test out some of the ideas we had subsequently identified. Specifically, the pilot itself featured a new approach to selling kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms and it involved testing new features for people, processes and technology. The objective of the pilot was to test a newly devised, consistent format for understanding customer needs, designing the room and presenting the design back to customers to see if it improved colleague satisfaction and sale conversions (previously there were several local work-arounds with varying levels of success).
The pilot and what I learnt
Learning point 1: It’s OK to use your pragmatism in testing ideas rather than always sticking to the textbook theoretical approach.
Strict criteria in trials can be crucial: where a baseline or test case needs be scientifically and rigorously tested against, where a theory needs to be proven in absolute terms. I’ve done this many times when working in Applied HCI Research. But for this pilot I wanted the chance to get our ideas into the stores without the time and effort of enforcing this strictness. In a setting where the market moves fast, I found it was OK to trust my more experienced colleagues in their judgement with regards to recruitment, logistics and what is practical to try within the timescales in order to get the job done. And when I started to talk to my participants directly in the course of the testing, I found it enabled me to gain a rich empathy and understanding which gave a roundness and context to my findings which outweighed the need for a strict baseline and the time and effort establishing one would have caused.
Learning point 2: Don’t assume silence to be an indicator of agreement or engagement.
Our store participants were our most vital source of feedback about the pilot — qualitatively and quantitatively. At the kick-off myself and my main stakeholder held several calls to introduce our store colleagues to the new approach and show them the supporting documents which guided them through the new format. These calls were carried out on Teams, so I subsequently made all the materials available via specific Teams channels I created per store. I asked if this was OK. No-one said it wasn’t. My positive interpretation of this was wrong. I was briefed later that often store colleagues are reluctant to give their views in a public forum, in addition I believe my colleagues were being polite and didn’t want to upset my plan. The real situation was that showroom colleagues on the front line of customer service do not use Teams channels in the same continuous way I do. As a result, interactions were minimal and I didn’t get feedback via this route and some stores told me they never saw the documentation which was hosted there, resulting in several workarounds and extra effort to resolve the situation.
Learning point 3: Principles of Change Management are as relevant to pilots as to major-scale roll-outs.
We lost of couple of stores along the way in the pilot which was a shame. Some stores were not in the right place with regards to resource and capacity to take on a pilot on top of other local constraints, however willing they were to engage and improve the way they work. The learning point I gained is very much aligned to change management (which I consider to be an extension of service design). Careful consideration of the prevailing conditions which might affect each store — local demographics affecting recruitment, time of year, economic status of the local area, cost-of living crises etc — are absolutely vital for a) the success of running a pilot and b) investing in a very wide-scale roll out of new changes. Understanding these up-front, and eliminating certain participants if this is the case along the way (rather than “sticking with the plan”), may need to be done by mutual agreement in the interests of keeping up strong relationships we will rely on in the future.
The pilot and what I got right
Talking it through:
I set up weekly feedback sessions, and the store colleagues were very happy to join calls and talk through their experiences. The whole spectrum of team leads, showroom managers, more junior colleagues, and sometimes very senior regional managers joined them. This took up a significant amount of their time so it was fantastic to have them prioritise it for this activity. These calls were like gold-dust. We carried out 45 calls over the course of the first 8 weeks of the pilot, which created a very busy Miro board of feedbacks and insights. This converted to ~50 recommended changes to the documentation, how it was communicated and the whole approach itself.
“You Said We Did”:
At week 8 I thought it was important to run a call with all the pilot stores to acknowledge the investment in their time, where I detailed all the recommendations which came from them, what the next steps for me were and what their new involvement would be going forward. The Teams channels were de-commissioned, we reverted to email for communication, and a Sharepoint site (a more familiar document-storage mechanism for the stores) was created with a web front-end, showing the newly improved documentation, in a flow-chart format (not 5 slides any more) and links to all the updated documents. It proved to unlock how best to host the documentation and reach the stores (better than the Teams channel ever did).
As at December 2022, all remaining stores have adopted the new approach!
Looking back — and forward
Throughout the pilot, I’ve been humbled by my colleagues, their deep knowledge of their role and their passion for improving the services they sell to customers, which they do day- in and day-out. I’ve met and grown relationships with store teams the length and breadth of the country and learnt so much from them directly in understanding more about them, and indirectly to help me hone my craft further. In my 26th year of practising user-centred design, it’s clear there is always more to learn. Bring it on.
