Archive for April, 2008
There’s an odd relationship between service recovery and customer loyalty from the Customer Experience Labs blog:
The “service recovery paradox” states that with a highly effective service recovery, a service or product failure offers a chance to achieve higher satisfaction ratings from customers than if the failure had never happened. A little bit less academically, this means that a good recovery can turn angry and frustrated customers into loyal customers. In fact it can create even more goodwill than if things had gone smoothly in the first place.
I came across a blog entry a couple weeks ago by a former waiter who recognized this paradox and routinely capitalized on it by alerting his customers to mistakes they hadn’t even noticed (after the mistakes were corrected) as a reliable way to boost his tip.
The Bank of America near my home has a new facelift. They’ve replaced the old ad hoc stanchions for queuing with more substantial metal and glass barricades, and installed new carpetting, but the most obvious change is the addition of three new widescreen TVs above the row of tellers and a huge screen at the far end of the lobby.
Stefan Thomke wrote about Bank of America’s initial experiments in this area back in 2003 in the Harvard Business Review in R&D Comes to Services:
Psychological studies have revealed that if you distract a person from a boring chore, time seems to pass much faster. So the team came up with a hypothesis to test: if you entertain people in line by putting television monitors in the “transaction zone” — above the row of tellers in a branch lobby — you will reduce perceived wait times by at least 15%.
Using television to ameliorate a long wait isn’t a new idea. Wells Fargo has been doing it for years and it’s a staple of airports and supermarket checkout lines. But Bank of America’s execution is particularly nice.
After my transaction, I decided to examine the TV programming more carefully. The TVs are silent most of the time, with light jazz playing instead. They switch between several minutes of silent advertisements for bank services (with surprisingly nice kinetic typography), silent inspirational footage (Olympic events, etc) and then a minute or so of CNN at regular volume. It’s a huge improvement compared to the incessant and inescapable drone of CNN in airport lounges everywhere.
Casual carpooling is an ad hoc service in the Bay Area that involves drivers picking up random strangers at BART stops in the East Bay and giving them a lift into the city. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. The passengers get a free ride into work and the drivers get to take advantage of the carpool lane across the Bay Bridge and avoid the toll.
What fascinates me about this service is that it’s completely emergent. There’s no overarching authority to control casual carpooling or maintain it, and no designer to orchestrate the service or its touchpoints. The participants co-create it themselves on a daily basis:
Casual carpool is flawless, sensible. In fact it is so flawless and sensible that it could never have been planned by any city planner or transportation wonk. This phenomenon is essentially an unorganized grassroots effort, organically emerging from the need to avoid the ever-more congested trip across the bridge.
Although the practice has no official leadership, a UC Berkeley programmer named Dan Kirshner started ridenow.org to help document the phenomenon. There’s a basic etiquette involved:
- Talking – Drivers generally should be the ones to initiate any conversation. No religion, politics, or sex.
- Food – Passengers should assume that food and drink are not allowed in driver’s cars.
- Music – Drivers should be considerate of passengers when listening to music, news or talk radio.
- Cell Phones – Neither drivers or passengers should carry on a conversation while commuting.
More interesting is the etiquette around picking up passengers. Groups congregate in orderly lines [PDF 916K] at several well-known spots:
People are quite mindful of the “first-come, first-served” aspect of the lines. Avoid the ire of your fellow commuters: don’t “line-jump.”
On the other hand, riders and drivers are free to wait for another driver/rider. For example, a woman may not want to get into a two-seat car with a male driver, or a woman driver may prefer to wait for a female rider. As far as we’ve seen, such choices are respected without comment or disapproval.
They frown on picking up more people than necessary to fulfill the carpool lane requirement (three occupants) or circling the block to poach riders without waiting in line.
This is also interesting:
The line does not leave a woman standing alone. If the line has three people left in it and the driver needs only two, the “line” should ensure that a woman is not left standing. Either a man forfeits his place in line so that he is left standing, or the ride is declined until another person arrives.
Casual carpooling isn’t limited to San Francisco. It’s been going on for close to thirty years in Washington D.C., and more recently in Houston, Texas [PDF 516K]. Outside the Bay Area, the service is called “slugging.” It’s a derogatory label that bus drivers came up with to describe people who confused them by waiting at bus stops for carpool pickups. Riders are the slugs and drivers are called “body snatchers.” It’s a little bizarre, but the terminology is widespread and even found its way into an official Virginia Department of Transportation report.
In both Houston and DC, the service is more complex than San Francisco, where the route and destinations are a known quantity (across the Bay Bridge into downtown). Instead, drivers announce their destinations up front, for example “Pentagon,” and the first two people in line who are going that way hop in the car.
Some drivers have signs, but it’s usually dark and you can’t see anyway… Occasionally there is a barker in line, and he repeats the destination so everyone can hear.
Each of these services emerged in proximity to mass transit and in response to the development of HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes near major cities. That catalyst was enough to prompt enterprising drivers to cruise past bus stops and ask people if they wanted a lift. The passengers are essentially ballast.
Casual carpooling is at the extreme of co-created service design. No designers required. There’s a bit of institutional support (notice the metal carpooling signs in the photos above) but just as often the service is at odds with the powers-that-be. In Berkeley, police frequently ticket drivers for parking in bus lanes and I can’t imagine BART appreciates non-passengers taking up space in their commuter lots.
These services thrive on their simplicity but there are problems that I think designers might be able to address. For instance, the return commute isn’t nearly as easy to spontaneously organize because the timing and destinations are so varied. And safety is a perennial concern. The ridenow.org and slug-lines.com sites both maintain a message board for members to share information about sketchy drivers.
It seems like I remember a ridesharing project from Ivrea about five years ago (something about wearing flashing signals on your belt) and people always seem keen to apply technology to the problem [PDF 144K]. Casual carpooling predates cellphones and the consumer web, but people are gradually discovering how this infrastructure can augment their commute.
For further reading:
San Fransisco Chronicle
BBC
Houston Chronicle
The Hill
There are a couple reports trickling in from the third annual International Service Design conference in Northumbria.
Over the last two years, the ISDN series of events has formed an exciting platform to explore the emerging field of Service Design. The very first ISDN, in March 2006, looked at Service Designers – who were these people and what were they doing? ISDN2 followed in November 2006, and explored the relationship(s) that Service Design, as a design sub-discipline, might have with business.
ISDN3 will investigate broader issues that contemporary designers face, with special focus on how designers are addressing the complex situations that arise when designing with what John Thackara of Dott 07 calls ‘real people’ – as opposed to ‘users’ – in the design process.
Here’s an overview from Letters to Australia and a more thorough write up of the sessions from the STBY blog.
Some nice observations about service recovery:
Customers were routinely far more impressed with a well-handled mistake (which they actively noticed) than with trouble-free service (which they took for granted).
In this case, it wouldn’t have been enough for Netflix simply to apologize. Because this was an outcome-based error (delayed shipment), they correctly tacked on a discount.
[via Daring Fireball]
Design for Service 