/The Insights Issue

Who is the protagonist of a service?

Ask that question within the walls of most organizations and you'll get dozens of different responses. Maybe the protagonist is the process engineer who painstakingly thinks through every aspect of how a service touchpoint is designed. Or perhaps it's the head of research who meticulously optimizes a process based on insights. Could it be the customer service staff at the center of the interaction? No, it must be the service manager who oversees the business results of a service and focuses on efficient delivery that maximizes business value.

It's easy to understand why many organizations would respond this way. They operate from a provider-centric, 'build-it-and-they- will-come' point of view. They view customer interactions within the narrow context of the transaction itself, and fail to reflect beyond what happens within their domain of control. While each of these roles may be an important part of service delivery, they are ultimately just the supporting cast. When you design a service interaction with the company at the center of the experience, the result may be functionally efficient, but it will fail to deliver any kind of deeper impact because it lacks emotional meaning to anyone not on the corporate payroll. This type of design fails to consider the customer, the true hero of the story, and the circumstances that brought them to interact with your service.

Customer journey maps are how we know the customer is the star of the story. As a tool, customer journey maps are a visualization method that bring to life a customer's entire pathway in solving a problem, including all needs, actors and touchpoints (not to mention, the occasional interaction with your service). Understanding the customer journey is like hopping in to the "Total Perspective Vortex" from The Hitchhikers Guide to the galaxy. Once you're inside, you realize how truly insignificant your interaction is in the context of an individual's life. But therein lies the opportunity for insight.

These days, the best 'customer journey maps' focus on studying brand experience from a customer-centric point of view. Putting the customer at the center of the experience reveals insights about needs, frustrations, pain points, moments of truth and other emotional data that has not traditionally been captured in business process improvement initiatives. It helps us understand the holistic experience, highlighting unknown touch-points and influences that we never saw from our back-office view. As such, it can be an excellent way to uncover opportunities for the development of new products, services or experiences that will provide the emotional meaning that drives experience-based differentiation.

An example of a company that has taken the holistic customer journey into account when designing a customer experience is PharmaTrust. PharmaTrust has created a product/service combination - a remote medication dispenser which recognizes the barriers to mobility that many patients encounter when trying to refill a prescription. Think about what happens now: you can visit your local pharmacy, or you can call for a renewal, but if you are in a position of need and are not able to access your pharmacy, you're out of luck. Given that most medications are for older patients, even small inconveniences can be painful. PharmaTrust took this into account when it designed its remote access kiosk, which allows you to order and refill your prescription from where you and the kiosk are - not where your pharmacy is.

Had a pharmacy considered the customer journey in this context, it would likely have taken into account only the part of the journey that happens within their retail footprint, or within a short radius of their retail location. PharmaTrust put the process within the context of the patient's life, instead of putting the patient within the context of the process, and came up with a solution that is a cross between a pharmacy and an ATM machine.

When organizations think they are the center of the story, they seldom consider the interdependencies of their decisions on the overall customer experience. From a systems thinking perspective, changing a single touchpoint, even with the best of customer- centric intentions in mind, always has cross-functional reverberations. For example, when the marketing department at a wireless operator wants to launch a special promotion, this promotion sends shock- waves throughout the organization. It needs to be managed by billing systems, frontline training in order to communicate the offer, sales need to figure out how to effectively sell it and process it properly, the finance department needs to assess the impact on service revenues and profitability, and customer care needs to know how to answer questions about the promotion. A breakdown at any of these points may have undone the positive effects of the promotion. And that customer's story is the only one that matters. The reality is most companies don't consider these inter- dependencies, whereas understanding the customer journey can highlight them.

The strength of the map is that it's visual; it's like the difference between seeing a place, and seeing that place on a globe. The latter makes you realize that you're part of a much bigger picture. It allows you to see that there are other 'places,' and 'things' between and around those places that you may not have seen before. Now all is visible and the 'place' itself can be properly viewed in context. It's something that just can't be done on a spreadsheet.

Not considering the larger customer journey is like designing a pair of Gucci loafers for someone who is about to hike through a swamp. Taking the swamp into consideration would generate a very different, and possibly very innovative design. By visualizing the experience of the customer in a way that highlights needs, frustrations, touchpoints and influences, you gain a holistic under- standing of what it's like to be your customer, and you gain a baseline for re-engineering the process under consideration. You get to walk a mile in the customer's shoes, Gucci or otherwise.

So if you ask, "Who is the protagonist of a service," within the walls of most organizations, you'll get dozens of different responses, all of which are wrong. From the brand's perspective, the service is the star. But from the customer's perspective, there is a bigger and far more important journey taking place, and the service interaction is but one small part of it. The customer is the protagonist of a service, because the story is about them.

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Will Novosedlik is VP Brand & Design Thinking at Idea Couture, a global strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is based in Toronto, Canada.

Patrick Glinski is Head of Social Innovation at Idea Couture, a global strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is based in Toronto, Canada.