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I’ve posted the slides from my presentation at last week’s MX Conference here in San Francisco. Titled “A House Divided: Two Perspectives on Managing the Customer Experience,” this talk is an evolution of my past efforts to pull from my prior career as a professional cook.
Here, I use my restaurant experience as a lens to interpret Glushko and Tabas’ work on getting front and back stage organizations to cooperate in delivering superior experiences. I hope you enjoy it.
Earlier today I had a delightful chat with Julie Peters, Brand Manager at Virgin USA, and speaker at our upcoming MX San Francisco 2008 conference. You can listen to our conversation (45 minutes, MP3), which addresses topics as varied as: the Virgin Brand; the importance of hiring the right people; how Virgin incubates and spins out businesses; what “innovation” means for Virgin; the challenge of delivering the Virgin experience; and plans for traveling on Virgin Galactic. She provided fascinating insight into how Virgin operates, and I hope you appreciate it.
And don’t forget, one lucky person who registers for MX San Francisco by Friday March 14, 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Time will be chosen at random to receive their choice of either one round-trip ticket wherever Virgin America flies (in honor of Julie), or a spa/massage package at the conference hotel, the Mark Hopkins.
BusinessWeek recently ran a piece titled How To Reenergize Starbucks, which addresses the return of Howard Schultz to help Starbucks reclaim its original spirit. The story solicited commentary for a stable of design+business folks, whose responses I found disappointing.
The folks at hipster coffeehouse Ritual Roasters dressed up as Starbucks Zombies for Halloween. Flickr link.
(The following is a combination of ideas/concepts from me and Brandon)
Starbucks is a company we think about at Adaptive Path, as it’s success was very much built on its experience design. We use Starbucks to explain the experience strategy tool of the Elevator Pitch:
For people who have 15 minutes to spend on themselves, Starbucks is a familiar social experience that brings comfort, reliability, and enjoyment to the everyday coffee-drinking routine.
Unlike other habits, rituals, and indulgences, Starbucks consistently delivers your day’s best break as a personal experience wherever or whenever you need it.
As such, unlike many in that BusinessWeek article, I don’t think it’s about The Coffee. Starbucks has to deliver a basically good product, but they don’t need to deliver a superlative product. And they definitely don’t need to sell $1 coffee — that sends exactly the wrong message, in that it moves Starbucks to the bottom of the pyramid, and turns them simply into a volume operation.
What they need to do is make the store experience inviting, not so much about pushing product, but about being that Third Place (not home or work) where people can get a respite.
“Welcome To The Third Place”, an image from a Starbucks in Australia. Flickr Link.
Starbucks needs to engage with The Long Wow. The need to assess their touchpoints for delivery — The retail environment (including music, smell, etc.), the staff and service protocol, the beverages/food, the packaging, the wifi, the streetscape (where and how it fits into the neighborhood), etc.
They need to reconsider their customers’ needs (which may have evolved since they first opened). What do you need at a third place other than a drink or a light snack? You might need a private place to chat (think bench in a park), a good place to read/study (think library), or a place for casual conversation (think bar). There’s still plenty of room in which to sell services or product, but it’s clearly not about feeling more like a shopping mall.
Approaches to consider:
+ Allow the stores more control over how they engage with their community. This is the Whole Foods model. Each Whole Foods store has a high degree of autonomy for fitting within their community. Whole Foods has been able to grow, yet still achieve that “transformative” quality for their customers, and I think this is key.
+ Take advantage of the fact of real estate. Apple Stores’ success hinges on recognizing that in a physical environment, you can have a remarkable set of high-touch interactions, with merchandise and other people, that can really elevate your experience. Apple uses their stores physical-ness for classes, genius bar, lengthy trials of the products, and, to a certain degree, a cool place to hang out. Starbucks could benefit from such a mindset, with things such as book clubs and other affinity groups. Starbucks could reach out to its community and serve as a hub/meeting place for such things.
+ Let employees and service designers play with the service protocol; today, you order a coffee and pick it up a few seconds later. Nothing special or unusual ever happens during the service. Employees don’t have the means to delight or surprise a customer, or just make a customer smile. Their “cheer-chain” was a poorly handled PR stunt, but it illustrates that delightful variations in service make for a good break. It just has to be genuine, which means from the initiative of staff and not from the corporate playbook.
To finish, It would be marvelous to see Starbucks manage and operate based on experiences. They should own:
And each store should know which of these experiences they support, and identify which customers are looking for which experience and support them in it.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending an hour chatting with Chip Conley, CEO of boutique hotel chain Joie de Vivre Hotels, and keynote speaker at our upcoming MX San Francisco conference (April 20-22).
You can listen to the interview (MP3). Be warned that it doesn’t have a formal introduction. It begins with us kind of mid-conversation, and just goes from there. In the interview, we talk about recession planning, service design, systematizing experience design (JDV uses a tool called “experience report cards”), team dynamics, succession planning, and all manner of things. It’s a bit free-wheeling, but I think you’ll enjoy it.
To provide some context for the interview:
Chip has just written PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow, which you can see me reading on BART here:
I hate business books. They’re typically trite, self-serving, and poorly written. At best they have one good idea that takes 10-15 pages to explain, and then another 200 pages of filler so that it warrants being sold at Barnes and Noble.
PEAK, and I’m not just saying this because he’s a speaker, is actually worth reading. I’ve been a fan of Chip’s for a while, and one reason is his honesty, forthrightness, and, as a CEO of a $200 million company that employs over 2,300 people, his willingness to engage with the emotional, squishy, unmeasurable. Actually, not just willingness–he recognizes how essential such things are to achieve long-term success. His book gets at this by way of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, which Chip translates into serving employees, customers, and investors.
When Chip talks about engaging customers, he sounds very much like an experience designer — he discusses ethnography, and the importance of satisfying unmet needs. He also has fantastic ideas for maintaining not just employee satisfaction or loyalty, but deep engagement. Ideas that I could see working for our 35-person firm as well as larger enterprises.
If, after all this, you’re hooked, don’t hesitate to register for our MX Conference (and use the promotional code BLOG for 10% off). You’ll get a chance to meet Chip, and many other interesting folks as well!
A podcast from our own Todd Wilkens from the 2007 Emergence Conference at Carnegie Mellon, discussing the end of products. Listen and enjoy!
P.S. Lots of other great podcasts there too, including the closing keynote from Dick Buchanan.
A couple weeks ago, I spoke with car-sharing service Zipcar’s CEO Scott Griffith. Scott is presenting at UX Week 2008 in August. You can listen to our conversation (40 minute MP3), or read excerpts.
Zipcar is definitely a services firm whose star is ascending, and a key element to their success is the experience design of their service. It’s right there in their mission statement: “Our user experience strives to elegantly combine the promise of the Internet with wireless communication and online communities.”
What most interested me in talking to Scott was how a CEO considers user experience in relationship to other concerns. Scott mentions that Zipcar is the first services firm that he’s aware of that follows kaizen engineering principles, which were originally developed to ensure quality management and continuous improvement for Toyota in their car manufacturing. We also discussed the balance between user experience and his primary business metric, utilization, and the importance of cars not being utilized more than 40% of the time, or it would upset customers, who wouldn’t be able to find a car.
I’d also love to *see* the customer lifecycle diagram that he talks about, where they’ve mapped a customer’s entire experience with Zipcar, from awareness of the service, through joining, to leaving (which, on average, happens at about 5 years).
I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation as much as I had having it, and please use the comments section here for any further thoughts or ideas you’d like to see Scott raise at UX Week 2008. (And register using the promotional code BLOG to get 10% off!)
Now don’t be jealous, dear readers, but I finally got to fly on Virgin America. And, yes, the reports are all true. It is very cool. From the clever safety video to the intelligent lighting system, it’s evident that Virgin America has an expansive understanding of what constitutes experience, and that they’ve thought very broadly about how to make that experience as delightful as possible for passengers.
Meet Red
Of course the cherry on top is the inflight entertainment system mounted in the headrest in front of you. It offers a range of services that read like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — food, talk, read, play, shop. This entertainment system is called Red, and when the flight crew talk about it, they call it that, “Red,” like that’s its name. They say things like “Red can do it all.” “Check Red for the prices.” “Open the pod bay doors, Red.” Oh, sorry. That’s HAL.
A Touch Screen World
You find yourself surrounded by people using these little touch screens — watching tv, chatting with other passengers, playing games, listening to music — and this is what makes it really interesting. It’s like being plunked down in the middle of an immersive market test. Different user behaviors are on display all around you. To your left, to your right, through the cracks in the seat in front of you, you see:
I was actually really intrigued by this idea of behavior models for a touch screen world, and I made a grand plan to do further undercover research on my return flight and share my new model with all of you. Alas, my plan was thwarted.
What Happens When Red Goes Offline
On the flight back, we all received a typewritten letter informing us that Red was regrettably out of commission. We would all receive a free drink and a snack for our troubles. As it turned out, they never gave out the free snack. And not having Red to play with somehow drew my attention to all the little things that detracted from the experience. The flight was an hour late. Grumble grumble. The arm rests don’t fully fold up into the seats. How are you supposed to lean into your companion and take a nap? The adjustable headrests don’t adjust. Maybe mine was just broken. And no airline magazine! What the hell? Where is my crossword puzzle? Whither my beloved, beloved sudoku?
Still Air Travel, After All
So, is Virgin America really the nightclub in the sky that some have described it to be? Um, probably not. Turns out it’s still just air travel, with all of the uncertainties and annoyances that it has always had. And my disappointing trip back home was a strong reminder of the need to provide compelling alternatives to even the most complete computer-based solutions. But overall, it’s clearly a very thoughtfully designed experience. And the world can certainly use more of those.
The shopping experience at clothing stores is much better than it used to be. The layout of the store tends to provide more open space for shoppers than it did just five years ago. Even in department stores, gone are the days of being squeezed in between the sale rack and some soulless sweater display with a half dressed mannequin. It seems there are more boutiques focused on one style or catering to a well thought out target audience than ever before. There are places for people to sit, often with those nice little tables with magazines. I’ve noticed this in nearly every U.S. city I’ve visited this year from Chicago, to DC, to Santa Fe.
Where most of these stores still sadly continue to fail is the real point of sale: the dressing room. It’s a terrible experience. The lighting is enough to compromise anyone’s self esteem. The fluorescent lighting not only makes me look bad, but the shirt or sweater that looked great on the shelf or rack, now looks different. And all too often, there isn’t anyone to help me decide if I’m about to buy something that will make me look like an idiot, stylish, savvy, or smart.
I recently learned that Anthropologie has a service where you can work with a stylist for free. (Sorry guys, no men’s clothes yet.) Having been less than inspired by my wardrobe lately, I signed up for an hour with Maria. First she sat me down and asked me several question: what did I like, what was I looking for, what colors did I hate? Then we walked through the store and she helped pick things out. We picked out probably 20 things — half of which I would never pick out on my own, but I was there to try new things.
The dressing room at Anthropologie isn’t amazing, but it’s better than most. The lighting isn’t enough to make me run, and it’s always well-staffed. This is the experience differentiator that Anthropologie offers: the support of someone that knows my likes and dislikes and how I want to improve my wardrobe. I tried everything on, ventured out and modeled it to her. Maria gave me her opinion and ideas for different things that I could do with the pants, shirts, or dresses, or as Maria referred to them ‘pieces’. While I didn’t quite feel like I was buying art, it was a lovely experience. I felt supported, confident, and even inspired.
Without the time with Maria, I wouldn’t have spent a dime at Anthropologie, but after an hour, I gladly walked up to the counter and spent a couple hundred dollars. I hope to go back a few times a year to meet with Maria. She even said I could bring old clothes from home and she’d help me work them into new outfits.
This experience struck me as an opportunity for a retail clothing store to transform how they think about their business, and specifically, how the business defines the job of the sales people. If a store made everyone that walked in the door feel like they had a stylist, I imagine that point of sale in the dressing room (hopefully with better lighting) would be a whole new opportunity.
What impressed me the most about Emergence 2007 — Carnegie Mellon School of Design’s conference on service design — was the diversity of disciplines and industries that were represented among the speakers and the attendees. Social scientists, customer service managers, community planners and designers of every kind shared experiences ranging from humanizing customer service and call centers to turning a transportation payment system into a valuable, cross-platform service.
Now it’s not these disciplines or their problem-solving approaches that are new or emergent. In fact, the familiarity of methods demonstrated in many case studies seemed to provoke a discipline-defending reaction among attendees of, “But haven’t we [product designers/architects/customer service teams] already been doing this? How is this new?” Compounding this defensiveness was the ever-felt pressure to give service design a clear definition and boundaries, as if we need to separate it from “other” disciplines like product or experience design.
But what is emerging is not so much a new discipline, as it is a cross-disciplinary awareness that:
As participants in Oliver King’s audience-engaging panel described, “The world’s problems stretch across disciplines. Service design is about facilitating multi-disciplinary communication.” To do so, we must all learn to relinquish control, as Chris Downs from live|work emphasized. The flow of designs-as-concepts has increased, spurred by the ubiquity of creative tools, and the notion of authorship has become more nebulous as designers have been empowered and linked by the collaborative web, as Core77’s Allan Chochinov cited among other “disruptive” trends.
By the end of the conference, the push to define “service design” seemed increasingly meaningless. As CMU’s Richard Buchanan concluded in his powerful closing keynote, “Did anyone find a definition of service design? I didn’t find one, and I am not bothered by that. Defining disciplines lacks value. Instead, we should ask ourselves, ‘What is the RESULT of service design? What industries does it touch? What is its deeper purpose?”
Buchanan’s conclusion was that the ultimate purpose of service design is to give people the INFORMATION and TOOLS needed to ACT — to be free to live as one would choose. Collectively (as we played hot potato with the microphone during Oliver King’s facilitated discussion), we concluded that service design is about designing for the greater good — though what that means may be sometimes be debatable.
Perhaps the meaning of service design has less to do with “customer service” or “public services” than simply: Serving. Buchanan quoted George Nelson saying something to the effect of, “Design: Don’t get too pretentious. All we do is serve. We’re not that important.” Perhaps what service design really means is giving up our rights — to flashy job titles, authorship, even to “changing the world” — so that we can come together to improve people’s lives… one service at a time.
Today’s New York Times feature on Prince belongs not in the Music section, but the Business section.
Given the themes that we address here at Adaptive Path and on the blog, what impressed me was how Prince was handling his “multi-channel experience.” He has a habit of giving away his recordings, which conventional wisdom would assume means he’s giving away his money. But in the same way that Apple controls iPod, iTunes, and the iTunes music store, Prince has achieved control over his recordings, his touring, his online presence, and the like. And in the same way Apple doesn’t make money on the iTunes Music Store but rakes it in with iPod, Prince seems to have an innate understanding of how his coordinated effort to get his music out in the world can produce far greater revenues than reliance on any one channel.
The power of Prince’s approach is summed up in this passage from the piece: “Prince’s priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it’s purchased or not. ‘Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those that want to hear it,’ his spokesman said when announcing that The Mail would include the CD.” Driven by that desire, he’s done everything he can to make that a reality, and has reaped the reward of not only significant cash, but total creative freedom.
How can your organization learn from Prince?
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