Why not considering excellent customer experience as a harmony of services? How do we make all the relevant service points serve the growth of customer satisfaction and loyalty? Especially in digital services, positive experiences directly lead to business rewards such as reduced churn and increased revenue. Understanding customers or users of services should be the starting point of developing solutions that take into account the full customer value creation process.
At the end of the day, customers want a solution that is easy to use. Service design aims at designing services that are useful, usable, and desirable from the user perspective, as well as the service provider’s perspective of efficient services. Service design also takes into account all of the user-centric ways of working and problem-solving in order to develop digital solutions and other relevant services during a service path.
Overall customer experience is a multi-dimensional path of various service points that consist of positive and negative experiences for the end-user. Service points can fail, customers may not like the marketing message, the usability of the travel agency’s website could be poor, retrieving your booking information from the trip planner site may be uncomfortable, the airline mobile application is not linked to purchase details when trying to check-in, inconvenience with customer service when asking for extra-large items on-board, and the list goes on. Does this example sound familiar if you have taken a flight recently? Even though there are many providers linked to the overall path, most likely the airline would be associated with customers’ experience.
The key to developing an overall positive customer experience is to have a thorough understanding of the user and their relevant stakeholders. Service designers utilize various service design methods such as prototyping and user profiling by involving users in their authentic work or use-environment of a particular service. Service designers are often recognized professionals in their field, helping service providers to mutually develop ideas further. This can be done by building authentic interactions with people by combining people’s tacit knowledge, thoughts, and feelings into new ideas. Often none of the service design methods are suitable solely as such but they need to be applied to the use-context to increase creative exploration.
RECORDING USER FEEDBACK AT SERVICE POINTS
One truly user-centric way to capture user/customer experience is to follow users authentic feedback in the real use-environment. Therefore, Adusso’s UXblackbox technology can help, for example, in service design and in developing customer experience of services by recording user-triggered feedback during service points. At these points understanding of the user is the most crucial for the harmony of services.
Adusso’s method could provide valuable support not only for service designers, consultants, and application developers but also for airlines, travel agencies and airport operators for their working methods and digital services development. Adusso’s technology could be utilized at different service points from the digital services perspective:
- Development of front-end user interface (UI) of websites
- Development of front-end UI of mobile applications
- Monitoring of back-end activity and user interactions
- Combining user interaction of vending machines with user interaction
To ensure the harmony of services, people should be taken into the center of the development. Other areas for user-centric development in the real use-environment is to monitor other service points, for example, “user experience” of service personnel working methods and usability of information systems used at the airport.
Previously mentioned areas are just examples of how UXblackbox supports the improvement of customer experience on websites, mobile applications, software, and hardware. In general, the best design and supporting methods should be useful to ensure harmony of services.