Service roles

Being clear about your relationship with customers at each stage through familiar and consistant service roles helps users to navigate the more complex relationships with service organisations. We’ve developed 10 service characters to help design clear customer journeys - We’ve outlined three important ones below.

Everyday we surround ourselves with people who take on roles to meet our needs: doctors, estate agents, sales assistants and more. If brands want to resonate with their customers they should be prepared to take on the roles their customers seek out in their daily lives. Our research shows that these roles can be resolved down to 10 ‘generic’ service roles: Facilitator, Vendor, Guide, Host, Entertainer, Friend, Companion, Assistant, Guardian and Expert.

Service roles can be applied to every element that a customer encounters during their experience. The key is remembering that each role meets specific needs and has a job description that expresses what they do and the way they behave. Let’s look at a few examples: 

Assistants
Assistants are required when customers need to do something or find something out. They take on well-defined tasks and should be designed to be responsible, practical and efficient.

Experts
Experts are different, they’re needed when customers want specialist advice or skills to do something – think NHS Direct. They should be designed to be enquiring, accessible and reassuring. 

Guardians
Guardians are needed when customers want someone to watch out for them. Guardians are there to take care of people’s interests, ensuring customers know what they need to know. Guardians should be designed to be attentive, alert and responsible. A classic Guardian example is the family-safe net surfing provided through Net Nanny. Another example would be a traffic sign that let’s a driver know he or she is breaking the speed limit.

Mapping your customers’ service experiences against their needs reveals where and when different service roles should emerge and where they can be designed into the tangible elements that customer’s encounter. Done well, they provide a customer-centric approach to innovating service experiences.