From May to November, the CRM Idol contest was held in Europe and America. The mission of this event is to find new CRM stars and help them become more famous.
The authors of the contest are recognized experts in the industry and constantly receive letters asking for a review of a particular product. When the number of requests exceeded all conceivable boundaries, there was nothing left but to streamline the requests and create a “stage” in which CRM companies would compete for the title of the best CRM system.
Now you post a convenient list of products, a “buy now” button and contacts in a prominent place. I'm glad you know the basic obvious rules, but that's not enough.
The thoughtful approach tells us to start by setting a goal.
The purpose of the store is to make a profit. And it's not just about making sales. These are paid sales and a satisfied customer (because it generates a tail for us from other sales and other customers).
Goals:
1. Paid sale.
2. Satisfied customer.
What do we have as input:
1. Goods. Not even just goods, but goods that we know where to buy, where to store and how to deliver.
2. Potential clients. And we must turn them not just into real, but into satisfied customers.
Satisfied customer is the one who will buy from us again. As a maximum - he will recommend us, at least - he will not write negative reviews about us.
Selling Process- Turning a potential customer into a satisfied one. In parallel with this, we get rid of the goods and receive money into the account. The sale starts with attracting a client and ends with the delivery of the balance sheet (any shade of grey; even the most illegal business has its own account book). It is unacceptable to forget about its initial and final stages.
Designers often call themselves problem solvers - specialists in solving problems that the customer poses to them. However, in the modern world, the idea of the problems that fall within the competence of the designer has changed a lot. Traditionally, design is associated with the creation of a visual image of objects, but today the scope of these specialists is not limited to the design of artifacts.
A few decades ago, a new concept entered the theory and practice of design - service design - a type of design that involves the creation of systems and services that meet the desires of the client. For the first time as a subject of study, service design was introduced in 1991 at the International School of Design Cologne. This was followed by the appearance of the first service design bureau - Livework in London. Now service design is studied in such world-famous schools as the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Domus Academy in Milan - in general, this is a science for those who are interested in the development and future of the profession.
About what the use of service design on a website can give a business, VIPRO service design agency tells with examples
Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding associated with the concept of service design. Offline service businesses are often associated with it - service workshops, hotel and restaurant services, etc. Although the term "service design" has already firmly entered the arsenal of online projects and today is one of the main ways to increase the competitiveness of any company on the Internet.
We at VIPRO prefer to talk about service design as a process aimed at studying the market, studying the consumer and establishing interaction between companies and customers, because high-quality service and understanding of what exactly the consumer expects have become extremely important for a successful business and the fight against competitors .
Let's look at a few examples of how service design can be applied to improve the efficiency of web projects.
Case. "Custom Shirt"
Why did a bank manager start sewing shirts
Problem
Each of us has faced difficulties in choosing clothes, this is a long, laborious process and few people like it. What to do? Purchasing custom made clothes? But this is also associated with walking through various ateliers, fitting, and it is also not a very cheap pleasure.
Solution
It is obvious - to offer customers an online service for ordering clothes. With this idea, the Internet project www.rubashkanazakaz.ru was founded. Its founder is Vasily Muntean, and in 2015 Forbes wrote about his online studio:
Atelier Vasily Muntyan became profitable on the eve of the crisis. The fall of the ruble gives him new opportunities.
Possibilities
On the project website, you can order a custom-made shirt for yourself by going through simple and convenient steps in the shirt configurator. As a result, the client receives a completely customized version of the product and has the opportunity to immediately order and pay for its tailoring online. In addition to Moscow and Perm, Muntyan has partner-customers in 10 other cities of Russia. Together they provide him with 40% of income. In 2014, Shirts to Order's revenue exceeded 30 million rubles, which is 13% more than in 2013, and Vasily Muntyan made a net profit for the first time. The increase in orders was influenced by the promotion of the site (now online studios do not surprise anyone) and improved service.
Case. "Vekamoscow"
What can an exact order calculator give the window business
Problem
On many websites of window companies you can find a window calculator - it makes it possible to approximately estimate the cost of an order. But all solutions on the market sin with a superficial approach. Window calculators do not give an accurate calculation and force the client to waste time on calls and clarifying questions. How to go beyond these limitations of typical windows calculators? And another problem - product prices often change due to currency fluctuations. Is it possible to create a system that allows you to quickly make the necessary adjustments?
Solution
We proposed to make the most accurate calculator for ordering windows for the website www.vekamoscow.ru. A detailed calculation and a large database of projects for ALL standard buildings in Moscow allows the company's customers to quickly make a choice and place an order.
Possibilities
The accurate order calculator improved three business processes - the choice of windows by the client on the company's website, the company's managers also use the online calculator when visiting the client, and through the site management system the owner can easily update prices on the site. As a result, the number of errors has decreased and business efficiency has increased.
It is important that when a company specialist arrives at the site and takes measurements, he can immediately make a calculation on the client’s tablet. When a client invites several measurers from different companies, it makes a strong impression. In this situation, the interface design should be as light as possible and work reliably on mobile devices.
For site visitors, in order not to confuse them, the interface was made as simple as possible, and for the site owner, we developed a separate interface for easy updating of prices.
Case. "AGROTEMA A"
The best digital ecosystem in the field of polyethylene film production
Problem
The customer set a large-scale task for our agency - to create a service on the company's website that not only optimizes the process of ordering products, but will also be easily scaled and can be distributed in the form of a franchise among the company's dealers.
Solution
The complex of automatic synchronization with the internal systems of the company eventually allowed to reduce the number of service personnel in the company. For customers, this automation made the work comfortable, predictable and fast.
Possibilities
The new site was developed in several stages, and each stage was implemented based on an analysis of customer needs. The result is a user-friendly and technologically advanced website aimed specifically at wholesalers. At the moment, this is the only such solution on the market. So the prospects are very promising.
Design thinking is a popular innovative approach to creating new products and services. The main features of design thinking are the identification of hidden human needs, the rapid creation of prototypes of a new product or service, and rapid testing “in the fields” until the client says “this is what I need!”.
Service design is a series of techniques aimed at creating and improving services that are focused on people and harmoniously fit into their lives.
Each of us during the day is faced with a large number of goods and the flow of information around them, we visit shopping centers and cafes, visit parks and government offices - we are surrounded by services everywhere. Do we feel comfortable when contacting a company, bank or store for this or that service - is everything clear and convenient for us? In a world saturated with products and services, only those companies that are able to create the best human-service interaction win - this is what service design is all about.
Service design is the design of points of contact between a person and a service or product. What does it mean?
Imagine that you are going to visit the pool 2 times a week. You go to the pool and get information - you need a certificate from a therapist.
The first point of contact is the administration of the pool. Depending on the pool, you can make a certificate right in the pool (if there is such a service in the pool) or you will have to contact the clinic.
The clinic is the second point of contact. You need to take courage if you go to a government clinic, because you will have to meet a lot of points of contact that can make your life not the most pleasant, but even depressing, user experience.
Thus, we get a number of obstacles in the experience of human interaction with the service, which can negatively affect the business.
Service design allows you to identify all points of contact of a person when interacting with a service or product, determine which are positive and which are negative, and offer a number of solutions that improve the experience of human interaction with this service and product.
| Service design: making everyday life more convenient and enjoyable | ||||||||
| Target |
Transfer of service design methods and tools for the design and implementation of quality services in the Russian market. Participants in practice will be able not only to learn, but also to apply the tools of service design and design services that people need. |
|||||||
| For whom? |
|
|||||||
| What do we do? |
|
|||||||
| What will I learn and what will I learn? |
Participants of the program will find great potential for applying knowledge in their activities, as well as understand how to work in a team and what is important for this. There are many opportunities for service designers, from improving the service to developing a service strategy. |
|||||||
In our country, they began to widely discuss what service design is in 2015 - and continue to do so to this day. However, full understanding is still far away. We decided to do our bit and put everything on the shelves.
Business owners periodically turn to the studio for a website redesign. At the same time, not everyone understands why a redesign is actually needed - it's just that the site is already five years old, it would be necessary to update it. And this, on the one hand, is correct: during such a period, a digital product has time to grow old and retire.
But after all, the primary task of any brand is to attract new customers and retain old ones. This means that the updated site should make people fall in love with the brand: someone for the first time, someone again - and remain faithful to it. It is unlikely that new pictures and a button in another place will be able to cope with this task. But service design can.
What is service design
The concept of service design came to us from marketing and first applied directly to products and services. As a discipline, it first appeared at the International School of Design Köln in 1991, and the definition originally looked like this:
Service design is the planning and organization of processes, people, infrastructure, in order to improve the interaction between the client and the company (service), person and process.
Already on the basis of this, it can be assumed that service design on the web is about the convenience and comfort of users. “UX about the same!” - you can object, and you will be right. But service design is wider. Here is the definition given by the founder of AIC, Sergey Popkov:
Creation and development of online services that users will truly love.
That is, it is not just about corporate sites, but about services that make life easier for users, cause emotional attachment and a desire to use them as often as possible - and as a result become an additional advantage of the brand.
One of the most striking examples of the use of service design is the Tinkoff Bank mobile application, through which you can not only send applications for any product, including even mortgages, but also buy movie tickets, for example.
At the same time, you need to understand that service design is not tied to devices: a website can be just as convenient an online service as a mobile application. Go to the site of the same "Tinkoff Bank" - it is understandable, it is pleasant to use it, you will find everything you are looking for there in less than a minute, and you can submit an application in about the same time.
All this is made possible by the principles of service design.
Service design principles
To reimagine a site and turn it into a real service, you need to adhere to the five basic principles of service design.
Client centricity. The first and most important principle is that people are at the center of service design and you need to look at the service through their eyes.
Co-creation. All interested people, including customers and employees of the company, should be involved in the creation process.
Subsequence. The complex path of the client from the beginning of interaction with the service (in our case, the service) needs to be broken down into separate processes.
visibility. It is important to visualize each step of the client in order to have a complete picture before your eyes.
Integrity. You need to understand what role the service will play in the life of the client and in what situations it will be used.
It is these principles that lay the foundation for a successful service “for people”, but it is impossible to bring them to life without tools. So let's get acquainted with the basic tools of service design.
Basic Service Design Tools
As you already know, service design comes from marketing and has a lot in common with UX design, so it's not surprising that their tools also overlap.
Personas. You have probably heard about characters - these are portraits of users, each of which represents a certain behavior model.
The character personifies a whole group of people of a certain gender, age and social status with similar values. It helps to create a design that takes into account the needs of specific users and provide processes that are focused on them.
Customer Journey Map. This tool visually demonstrates the behavior of a potential client at each stage of interaction with the service.
service blueprint. These journeys are similar to the Customer Journey Map, but differ in that they provide a more holistic view of the user-brand relationship. With their help, you can identify pain points where a potential client can merge, and optimize processes so that this does not happen.
Tools are tools, but not a single studio, even in collaboration with a customer, will be able to create a magical service that everyone would like without analytics.
Service Design + Analytics = Data-Driven Design
At a time when everyone knows what conversion is and does not agree to work without an increase in predetermined KPIs, it is impossible to simply study the brand's business processes, draw up a Customer Journey Map and hope for the best. Companies need guarantees of efficiency, and users need a working service.
This is where analytics comes to the rescue, and with it Data-Driven Design is the development of services, which is based on various studies, A / B and other tests, hypothesis testing and Big Data.
And since now not a single serious product can do without analytics, and everything is done for the sake of visitors, in our design community service design and DDD are most often equated.
The Data-Driven approach is very popular and is used not only in web design. For example, such giants as Netflix have identified with its help a color analysis of the intros of the most popular series, identified patterns and, based on Big Data, linked them to user behavior. Now, when creating a new cover, they are guided by specific data.
When creating a cover for a new TV show, Netflix is based not on the tastes of the designer, but on specific numbers. The company has data on how different cover options affect the behavior of the target audience and whether it is worth using cover personalization for different groups.
Of course, Netflix uses Big Data for more than just design. Patterns lead to better recommendations, and as a result, the company saves about $1 billion a year in customer retention.
Conclusion
For every offline company, going online has become a stressful experience - even building a basic corporate website. The transition from traditional web products to services is the next step, without which it is impossible to attract and retain customers.
Already today, 89% of companies compete with each other on the level of customer experience, and by 2020 it will become more important than price and product. And while brands will simply want a site that looks more modern than the previous one, customers will choose ecommerce and new tech startups - natural selection in today's world.
Service design:
assistant in building the business of the future
How to create products and services that people want
buy consumers
Creating a service that meets the needs of users is
convenient, competitive and customer friendly.
Not everyone is familiar with the concept of service design, although we all, without knowing it, reap its benefits every day. Being the brainchild of marketing and management, this direction of conceptual design originated at the end of the last century and is now actively used to improve the quality of work with the client and the successful interaction of the service provider with the consumer. Service design is all about organizing infrastructure, people, and communications. In addition, work is being carried out with the material aspects of providing quality service. The main objective of this conceptual design industry is to create a service that meets the needs of users or participants, is convenient, competitive and friendly to customers.
This is achieved by studying the market, studying the consumer and establishing interaction between companies and customers. Basically, the ideas and concepts of service design are presented in the form of visual visual diagrams, tables and graphs - there are a lot of different methods for presenting information in this area.
By the way, the business of the future
maybe even
so
A bit of history.
The official birthday of service design can be considered 1991, when Professor Michael Ernhoff first classified it as a design discipline. Although the first seeds were thrown into fertile ground a decade earlier, Lynn Shostack published a series of articles on marketing and management that examined the phenomenon of service design within these disciplines. Later, at the dawn of the 21st century, her ideas were picked up and began to be implemented by agencies that chose this direction as their key activity.
In 2004, the international Service Design Network was created, which included the Cologne International School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, the Polytechnic Institute of Milan, Linköping University in Sweden, as well as the private Italian academy Domus Academy. This was done in order to create an international network for scientists and specialists in the field of service design, and the fundamental concepts, goals and methods of the discipline were also defined.
Service design techniques can be applied both to improve existing services and to build new ones.
On the wave of popularity.
Over the past three decades, the economy of the entire civilized world has been affected by fundamental changes. In the not-too-distant past, commodity businesses invested in research aimed solely at improving the product itself. The funds were used for market research, promotion and product development, its optimization and innovative design. In terms of research, development and design of services, this was a huge rarity. Now times have changed, and service design is coming to the fore.
In addition, over the past few years, the public sector of the economy has experienced an unprecedented development in the world, with new investments being made in hospitals, schools, cultural institutions and security infrastructure. The number of people in the service of state institutions has also increased. Such growth is associated with vast and rapid social changes, ranging from the welfare of citizens to the psychology of modern Homo Sapiens, which, in turn, led to the reorganization of public services through service design.
Service design and product
If the bread and salt of the last century was the industry based on the production of goods, now the economy based on the provision of services rules the show. Moreover, the ubiquitous Internet is at the helm, which is an ideal platform for business and gives companies huge opportunities to reach out to a potential client, present their product or service in the best light. Quality service and understanding of what exactly the consumer expects has become incredibly important for a successful business and the fight against competitors.
The cornerstone of the post-industrial economy has become that the client is often willing to pay not so much for the product itself, but for the service. And this is where service design comes into play, the mission of which is to create an intangible connection between the service or product and the consumer through a quality service that takes into account the wishes and anticipates the expectations of the client.
Service design and users
In the field of service design, the user is a key figure. Research consists in studying the points of contact between the client and the company, predicting his reactions to certain conditions, creating scenarios for his behavior in various situations. Interactions between research participants are carefully analyzed. Oddly enough, but often the idea of good service in the companies themselves does not meet all the expectations of the client.
At the same time, full compliance with the wishes of the consumer is not always crowned with an increase in profits. To help sort out these complex relationships, service design works in partnership with both parties to make the service user-friendly, reliable, and desirable.
Effective Tools
Over the past 20 years, service design has acquired a broad base of processes and methodologies, as well as a solid foundation of theoretical knowledge. This is still a young, but already well-developed applied science. Service design develops and exists through the practical application of its ideas for the benefit of consumers and companies that care about their service.
The analytical tools used in service design are related to social studies, anthropology, ethnography, and the social construction of technology. Design tools in service design are aimed at developing a Service Blueprint plan - a scheme of interaction between the consumer and the company, which describes the nature and characteristics of the interaction of the parties. Also, one of the design tools are service scenarios (describing the interaction of the parties) and use cases that illustrate in detail the sequence of actions on the way to receive / provide services). Other methods, such as IDEF0, borrowed from quality management, are used to produce functional models of a service system and control its processes.
How does the system work?
At the very beginning, a specific problem is identified. For example, customers do not return to the company, or, in the mood to make a purchase, they leave empty-handed. Further, the collective image of the average consumer is worked out in detail. The word "detailed" refers to the complete dossier of the character, which may include not only the name, surname, age and other standard statistics, but also a short life story and even a photograph.
Then a Service Blueprint or a communication plan of the parties is drawn up, which visually represents all the actions of the client on the path to acquiring a product or service, as well as the actions of a representative of the company providing the service. In this case, the activity of the latter is divided into two graphs: the visible and underwater part of the iceberg. The places of communications are also prescribed and the change in locations is fixed. Touchpoints are highlighted (points of contact between the parties) - these are the moments when the client directly interacted with any of the manifestations of the company's service. This can be talking to staff on the phone or in person, reading brochures or receiving business cards, as well as contacting support and interacting with the repair or product return department.
Each point of contact is very important and affects the consumer's impression of the company's service, and, ultimately, the success of the parties in achieving their ultimate goal depends on each interaction. The task of the company is to sell its product or service to the client, as well as to get as many "guests" as possible, who will be happy to return for new company services. The consumer, as a rule, only needs to use the service or purchase the product, while enjoying a quality service.
How to create products
and services that want
buy consumers?
We actively use the technologies described in the book by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pignet "Building business models"
The concept proposed in this "handbook of strategists and innovators" is used by such large players in the modern market as Google and IBM. It allows you to immerse yourself in the client's business and, in accordance with his ideas and expectations, develop a unique business model for his unique selling proposition. The same authors, in collaboration with Gregory Bernarde and Alan Smith, produced an excellent guide titled Designing the Value Proposition: How to Design the Products and Services Customers Want. This book helps us better understand our customers and help them create truly compelling products and services for the end user. We use the principles described in it to develop the end-to-end processes that go into creating and testing value propositions.
We create , which clearly show the numerous ways users interact with the company's service, help to better understand the consumer, as well as identify the strengths and weaknesses of the business. Such maps are designed to identify customer interaction channels and eliminate barriers to obtaining a service or purchasing a product.
Below is a user experience map that we developed for Aeroexpress. When creating it, we were inspired by a similar Rail Europe project. It helped reduce the number of customers who left at the stage of choosing or consuming the service provided by the company due to flaws in certain interaction channels, as well as increase the number of both primary and repeat sales. The development of a user experience map covered all channels of interaction and became a strategic tool for managing the quality of services.
So, what visible benefit can service design bring to a business?
