Scottish Tourism Customer Service Conference
At the Scottish Tourism Customer Service Conference, Oliver outlined a series of key points that would help the delegates to explore and innovate the service experiences their organisations provide. In summary, the points were as follows:
11 lessons in service innovation
1. Ensure you maintain a customer-centric approach during all key decision making activities if its better for the customer, its better for the business.
2. Establish and maintain a big vision for your service - donҒt settle for dry corporate mission statements. Once established, ensure all decisions you take direct you towards your goal.
3. Dont be overly led by market research it has its place, but it can֒t tell you what you dont know, you dont know. For that you need to employ empathic design research techniques such as ethnography.
4. Establish and use a set of service values, or principles, that clearly describe the tone and focus of the service you want to provide ensure these are aligned to your vision.
5. Co-create strategy and solutions to problems. Getting all the stakeholders involved in the process of developing ideas ensures they are informed, actionable and bought into from the start, therefore mitigating any risks of failure.
6. Make your ideas visual, so theyҒre easier to communicate and help trigger thoughts, connections and suggestions from others.
7. As quickly as possible, move your ideas from paper to prototype. Rehearsing or mocking-up possible solutions elicits insights on how to make them work far faster than formal structured analysis. Prototypes neednt be expensive and they can be really fun!
8. Treat the cause and not the symptom. Often effort is wasted trying to correct a service issue at a superficial level. Take the time to stand back and figure out whats causing it, then solve that.
9. Understand your customers entire journey. If you want to find out how to improve a customers experience you need to understand what theyҒve been through to get to you, and where theyll go after both physically and emotionally. Take the time to map this, and opportunities will become evident.
10. Ensure the things you measure and incentivise are aligned to customer satisfaction. Dont put limits on the extent that people can reasonably go to, to ensure customers are happy.
11. Design magic moments. It֒s the bagpiper at sundown, the ice-cream mid flight on Virgin Atlantic or the unexpected coffee on the house from Pret that people really remember and tell their friend about. Design them in, they neednt cost a lot, but are invaluable from an experiential point of view!
