Não há acasos (parte I)

Um texto sintonizado com uma das mensagens mais importantes deste blogue:

"At its heart, service design is the bridge between strategy and customer experience. It is grounded in your company’s identity, capabilities, and chosen competitive path. It is activated when you rethink, reimagine, and re-create every stage and aspect of interaction between customers and your company, regardless of what is being sold and whether a transaction actually occurs. It succeeds when you delight the customers you have chosen to serve and advance your strategic goals at the same time.
...
Great service is not a consequence of good intentions, attentive management, or a supportive culture. Service needs to be laid into the company’s keel, the way performance is built into a BMW or intuitiveness is designed into an iPad. If service isn’t built in, no amount of goodwill can deliver it reliably, and no effort can compensate for the lack of it. In fact, cause and effect are reversed: A company designed for service will naturally display the behaviors — the intention, attention, and culture — good customer experience requires."

Trechos retirados de "The Art of Customer Delight"

Um tempero

"Let's be honest, there is a lot of bad customer service out there. But it doesn't need to be bad and in fact, it can even be a little ad hoc to make it more meaningful. This is where spontaneity comes into play. Building a customer service culture that revolves around spontaneity is good for business and mostly it is about doing little things, in a random way, that can't help but create engagement with your customers.
.
I'm a firm believe that it is always the little things that are often the most important when it comes to customer service. Combine little things with spontaneity and you're onto a winner."

Pequenas coisas que resultam de uma forte cultura de serviço e de autonomia para tomar decisões na hora.

Trecho retirado de "It's Time to Embrace a Little Spontaneity With Our Customers"

Relação e interacção fazem a diferença

Primeiro, recordar aquela afirmação "Everything is a service", depois:

"It is essential to understand that services are, at the very least, relationships between providers and customers, and more generally, that they are highly complicated networks of relationships between people inside and outside the service organization.
...
Industrialization did not just lead to industrial product thinking. We argue that the industrial mode has also led to the stereotypical “faceless corporations” that are often the subject of frustration and poor experiences for service users, because the industrial mindset is usually all about efficiencies and economies of scale rather than effectiveness of the delivered service. (Moi ici: É o tal último parágrafo aqui mencionado)
...
This industrial mode is inefficient and ineffective for services. As soon as we forget that people -living, feeling, emotive human beings - are involved throughout the entire chain of events, not just at the moment of use by the customer, things go wrong. (Moi ici: A diferença entre a "vending machine" e a interacção que faz emergir a co-produção e a co-criação)
...
The successful businesses and public services of the future will foster a more equal and reciprocal relationship with their customers, one that recognizes the customer as a co-producer of the service.
...
the main things we are trying to measure are people’s relationships to the service and to each other, not efficiency metrics. Services usually involve staff to deliver them, but many are really platforms for creating interactions between other service users.
...
All types of organizations have the potential to personalize services and create huge benefits for themselves and their customers.
...
Shifting attention from the masses to the individual enables radical new opportunities, and because of this fact, service design places more emphasis on qualitative over quantitative research methods.
...
Marketing excels in understanding markets and how to reach them through the classic four Ps: price, promotion, product, and place. We are focusing on the fifth P, people, and how we work with people to inform the design of a service.
...
Statistics are not very actionable (Moi ici: Recordar os fantasmas estatísticos, a miudagem e a menina-do-olho) for designers— we need to know the underlying reasons."

 Este é o truque para tantas empresas em tantos sectores... fazerem batota. E quando tão poucos fazem batota, fazê-la tem um retorno... impressionante!

Trechos retirados de "Service Design" de Andrew Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, and Ben Reason

"performance as experience and performance as value"

"A fundamental characteristic of services is that they create value only when we use them.
...
Product-oriented organizations often fail to see the potential of using their customers to make a service more effective.
...
The biggest missed opportunity in development is that organizations don’t think about their customers as valuable, productive assets in the delivery of a service, but as anonymous consumers of products.
...
One way to understand services better— and what makes them different from products— is to examine what it is that people get from services.
...
Core service offerings can be grouped into three primary spheres: care, response, and access.
...
Healthcare is the most obvious case of a service focused on care, but many maintenance services also have care as the core value.
...
Many services enable people to use something, or a part of something, temporarily.
...
Other kinds of access services are those that give access to infrastructure over many years.
...
These services are often a fundamental part of people’s lives that are typically noticed only when they are disrupted
...
People expect the infrastructure to always be there for them. As individuals, we understand that we all have our own experiences of the specific access we have to this infrastructure -  this is the service layer that enables us to access our bit of the larger whole.
...
The third category is services that respond to people’s (often unforeseen) needs. These services are usually a mix of people and things that are able to assist us.
...
Sometimes these “response” services are anticipated and people buy the right to them in advance through insurance policies, social welfare, or simply by their choice of brand experience.
.
In many respects, response is the default understanding of what service is
...
In this sense, response services are fundamentally different from products in that they are not predesigned but created in the moment in reaction to a request...
The point of difference for any specific service is how it is delivered. We think of this as the performance of the service.
.
“Performance” is a helpful word, because it means two things: performance as experience and performance as value.
...
This “experience” aspect of performance is the delivery of the service to the service user on the “front stage."
...
The other meaning of the word “performance," equally useful to service design, is service performance as a measure of value. How well is the service performing? This measure is both outward and inward facing. Outward-facing value measurement asks how well the service is achieving the results promised to the service users
...
This value aspect of performance is the “backstage” measure of the service by the business— all the things that happen behind the scenes that help create or run the service experience for customers but that they don’t see."

Trechos retirados de "Service Design" de Andrew Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, and Ben Reason