We don’t know what we don’t know. Neither do we know what our clients and colleagues don’t know. And we often take for granted the things we do know.
So, a useful thing to do every day might be to ask:
“What do I take for granted that I know, that the people I serve don’t or may not know?
How could I best share that?
It’s a ripple in a pond, but who knows where it might end up?
My friend Harry Morrison is an actor. He’s recently started writing short, packed posts on what it’s really like to work in theatre, and guess what? It’s hard work.
I particularly liked this from today’s post:
“Even the best stand-ups have notebooks packed with all their best ‘spontaneous’ off-the-cuff quips. Their skill is in waiting for the perfect time to use them.”
There are 2 things here that a relevant for designing effective business processes:
Process, preparation, and practice (aka ‘doing the work’, aka discipline) is what makes spontaneous creativity possible.
Good Services principle no. 7: “A good service is agnostic to organisational structures”.
In other words, the way you organise your company’s resources to deliver on your Promise of Value should essentially, be invisible and irrelevant to your customers and clients.
What if you took it further, so that your team and your clients saw the same service, one from the inside, one from the outside? What if you then made those services the basis for your organisational structure?
That would make life easier for everyone, wouldn’t it?
Here’s another simple solution to the confusion I experienced the other day – don’t assume I know what all you suppliers know, and include the unit of measurement with the price.
Nicely leading in to principle no. 6: “A good service requires no prior knowledge to use”.
In this mini-series of blogs, I’m working through the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as a way of exploring how Service Design principles might apply to services that are delivered through people, rather than through online systems.
My thinking is that if you think of your people as users, you can design your operational processes as services that enable your users to deliver the business promise on your behalf. And if you follow the design principles for good services, you’ll build a scalable and resilient operation.
Back then, to principle no. 6. As Lou puts it: “There is no service that will be used just by people who have used it before.”
When someone new joins your business they don’t know what you know. They don’t know how you work, even if they have years of experience in the same field. That means that they will automatically follow their own assumptions about how things work, and default to doing things the way they know. If you have deliberately made yourself exactly the same as every one of your competitors, this is fine, but I happen to think that’s unlikely.
So the question is, how do you address this? Here are some ideas:
In other words, “Design your company, or it will be designed for you.”
As it happens, I didn’t have to wait long for a lovely illustration for yesterday’s principle: “a good service works in a way that’s familiar.”.
Last night, we made the final decision on the flooring for our new extension. A metre of coconut matting in front of the big outside doors, with the bamboo flooring starting after that and flowing through to the library.
I went online to shop around for the matting. It came in 2 widths, lots of colours (black of course!) and could be cut to size. Everywhere I looked it seemed to be around the same reasonable price of £18 – £20, yet every time I entered my desired dimensions, the price jumped to anywhere between £125 to £450. What was going on? I couldn’t work it out. So I asked a chat line.
This morning the answer came “The price is £18 for 0.25 metres – how much do you need?”.
Doh!
I was expecting to buy this flooring the way I buy every other kind of flooring – by the square metre.
I can sort of see where this convention came from (many people only need .25 or .5 of a metre for a doormat), and why with online shopping, every seller adopted it.
But I bet nobody has thought through what effect it has on sales. First, it feels like you are doing something wrong, then it feels a little bit like a rip-off, because the price you see is nowhere near the price you actually pay. I nearly gave up on the idea altogether.
The answer is simple. Make it work like everything else, then let me know how it’s different. In this case, that I can buy less than a metre if I need to.
The trick to building a business that can scale profitably and last longer than you, is to stop managing people and empower them to manage themselves.
You can support the transition from supervision to responsible autonomy with a framework that works like handrails – supportive, available when you need them, but not overly constricting. I call this framework your ‘Customer Experience Score’.
Another way to think of it, that might be useful for you, is as a set of services that your team use to deliver on what the business does. In this mini-series of blogs, I’m working through the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as a way of exploring this idea.
Principle number 5 makes a lot of sense: “a good service works in a way that’s familiar.”
But.
What exactly does ‘familiar’ mean? The way we’ve always done it? The way everyone else does it? The way a 70-year-old expects it to happen? The way an 8-year-old expects it to happen?
I think in the end, the answer is that however you deliver it, (and there may well be more than one way) it should always feel like it is being delivered by your business. even if – especially if- it also reminds them of something else. Buying from a physical shop is a familiar experience, but Apple has it’s own way of delivering that. Buying online is familiar, but as you’d expect Apple very much has it’s own way of doing that too.
Every service your users run for the people you serve should be recognisably similar to the way your business does everything. In other words it should be congruent with your business’s unique Promise of Value. That doesn’t just reinforce the Promise for customers and clients, it reinforces it for your team too. They’ll be able to tell you when something jars before your customers do.
By all means make your services rhyme with what’s already out there. But the real trick is to build familiarity with your unique way of doing things, so your business becomes an old friend people turn to instinctively.
The right kind of familiarity breeds connection.
The systems and processes we build in our businesses are geared towards the outcomes we seek. All too often, those outcomes revolve around the boss, the board, or the shareholders – making targets, preparing reports, increasing share prices. The real purpose of the business – to make and keep promises for clients – gets lost, even though this is how the internal outcomes actually get achieved.
When you build a business of any size, you need to work through others, and you need to be able to trust that they can deliver as you would, without having to stand over them. I believe the best way to achieve that is to build systems and processes that support people to manage themselves.
In this mini-series, I’m exploring how you can use Service Design ideas to help you do that, using the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as my starting point. Let me stress, this is not a re-hash of the book, but an exploration of how it fits with my ideas for turning a business into a system for making and keeping promises. The book is well worth buying for yourself!
A service is a process that helps a user to do something. Your team wants to share and deliver your promise on your behalf. That makes them users of the services you build.
Principle number 4 is simple, but surprisingly deep. “A good service enables a user to complete the outcome they set out to do.” Even if that outcome is bigger than your service.
The thing to remember here is that your service may be only a step towards the outcome the user is trying to achieve. We humans tend to arrive at a business with tactics: “I need social media support”, or “I need a large screen TV“, keeping the strategy behind it to ourselves “I want to launch a new product“, “I’m building a home cinema.“. Even a large service can be a tactic “I want an extension to my house.” could be a step on the way to “I’m growing my family“, or “I’m sorting my house out before we retire“, or “I’m building a property portfolio as my pension.“
Finding out more about the strategy behind the service your client has requested is key to unlocking more value for them and for you. You know you can help your client achieve the tactical outcome – that’s why they came to you. If you help them move even further towards their strategic objective, you’ll exceed your own promise to them And that creates loyalty and advocacy – even if you never make a sale.
Let me illustrate this with a story. Many years ago, I came across a young woman selling chocolate-related treats from a converted vintage ice-cream van. The treats were cold in summer, hot in winter. They were quirky and delightful, and me being me, I asked her if she’d considered franchising it. She had, and we agreed to discuss it. At the time, I was working with my friend Barnaby Wynter, and I knew he should be involved, so we both sat down with this young entrepreneur to talk about what she wanted to achieve and how we could help.
We talked for two, maybe three hours. We got her life story, her hopes, her dreams and her vision for a new kind of street life, centered around food, fairness and culture. All three of us agreed that franchising the ice-cream van wasn’t the right service for her. We could have done it. It would have been successful, but it wasn’t the outcome she was really looking for. I’m not sure even she knew that before we started our conversation, but she did by the end. That young woman went on to found KERB.
So what does this mean in practice for designing services to support your team?
First off, make sure you include a step right at the beginning of your Share Promise service that enables a team member to uncover a prospect’s overall objectives. This may be as simple as asking “What do you want to use it for?”, or “Why do you need that?”, or it may be a longer and deeper conversation, along the lines covered by a Dale Carnegie sales training course.
Next, cultivate ways to meet more of those discovered objectives yourself. That might mean adding new products or services to your offering, or it might mean building a network of trusted co-providers you can refer someone to. People in this network should be willing and able to return the favour when they are the point of entry for the client. In fact, if you start to recognise that a particular strategic objective is common, you could even create a consortium or eco-system of fellow businesses to deliver the whole package.
The outcome your users (your team) seek is to share your business’s promise, and to keep or exceed it for the people who sign up. That means that the services you design must be focused on the client, and the outcomes they are really looking for.
By enabling your team to enable your clients to achieve their larger objectives, your business will easily hit its targets, have interesting stuff to report to the board, and if that’s your thing, improve your share price.
Handrails, like good processes, are there to provide stability or support, and prevent injurious falls.
But the most elegant way to descend a staircase is to do so without needing the handrail; the hand lightly skimming it as you go, or if you’re really good, twirling a cane while you dance your way down.
Sometimes, its enough to know that the rail is there, like that blade of grass you cling to when descending a steep, rough hill. It’s not going to hold you up, but it gives you the psychological courage to move.
Good processes, like handrails, support an interesting journey in the right direction, they don’t force you into a single track.
How many times have you run out of page writing a notice? Or got halfway through a recipe before realising you were missing a vital ingredient? Or partway through a task before realising that you simply don’t have time to complete it?
When you build a business that works through others you have to find a way of enabling them to work autonomously and responsibly. I believe the best way to achieve that is to help people to manage themselves.
In this mini-series, I’m exploring how you can use some of the principles of Service Design to help you do that, using the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as my starting point. Let me stress, this is not a re-hash of the book, but an exploration of how it fits with my ideas for turning a business into a system for makeing and keeping promises. The book is well worth buying for yourself!
A service helps a user to do something. You want your team to share and deliver your promise on your behalf. So treat them as your users and build them services that help them to do that.
The third principle Lou gives is that ‘a service sets the expectations of the user’.
Setting expectations is about making sure that kind of thing doesn’t happen. That’s why easy-to-follow recipes start with the oven temperature, prep time and cooking time, then the list of ingredients. So you can be prepared before you start cooking.
It’s possible to do the same for services, whether they are for your clients or your team to use:
If you build this into the definition of your service, you’ll save false starts, repeated steps and interruptions, and help everyone feel more in control.
When you build a business that works through others you have to find a way of enabling them to work autonomously and responsibly.
The traditional way of doing that was to build a hierarchy of management above those doing the work, to supervise, check and adjust how things get done. The problem with that approach is that it’s unresponsive, expensive and actually makes it harder for people to work autonomously and responsibly. And if you are a small business owner trying to do all of that yourself, it can nearly kill you and the business.
The alternative is to help people to manage themselves. For that, they need a framework that supports them, but doesn’t stifle their ability to respond creatively and humanely to emergent scenarios. There are lots of familiar models and analogies for this kind of framework – a map, a blueprint, a screenplay, for example. My preferred analogy is a musical score – what I call your Customer Experience Score – that describes what has to happen and when to deliver the experience you want your clients to have when they deal with you – but leaves the how to the talented musicians you employ.
But how do you create that score?
In this mini-series, I’m exploring how you can use some of the principles of Service Design to help you create a Customer Experience Score that works well, using the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as my starting point. Let me stress, this is not a re-hash of the book, but an exploration of how it fits with my ideas for turning a business into a system for makeing and keeping promises. The book is well worth buying for yourself!
The basic idea is simple. A service helps a user to do something. You want your team to share and deliver your promise on your behalf. So treat them as your users and build them services that help them to do that.
The first principle is that ‘a service should be easy to find’ – even when you don’t know what it is.
Imagine you’re a newbie to your business. How do you find out what you’re supposed to do in your job? Where do you look? What do you look for? As a newbie, on probation, eager to impress, you want to be productive from day one. All too often that means asking someone who is already busy.
So the first thing that might help make services easy to find is to put them all in one place. You could call it an operations manual, but nowadays it’s more likely to be online, and searchable in more varied ways than a physical folder or file. What’s key is that:
How can you help your team find the service they need?
The name is a good place to start. Ask yourself: What do clients usually call this service? What do we normally call it? What do experts call it? Are those names the same? If not, what are your options?
A service should primarily be known by one name. Preferably one taken from the client’s perspective. This helps to remind everyone why this service exists – to help the client get the outcome they want – especially if it’s really part of a larger service for the client. You might call it ‘VAT reporting’, but the real service to the client might be ‘Meet Statutory Obligations’. You might call it ‘Management Accounting’, but the real service to the client is ‘Control My Business’.
This highlights another important aspect of naming. A service is an activity that helps someone do something. So it’s a good idea to name the activity to reflect what gets done when it works. This name is usually made up of two parts – a verb that describes what happens, followed by a noun that describes the thing it happens to e.g. ‘Draft VAT Return’.
This works at all levels of granularity, from the lowest level – ‘Draft VAT Return’, ‘Approve VAT Return’ or ‘File VAT Return’, up to ‘Report VAT’, ‘Meet Statutory Obligations’ and finally ‘Keep Promise’. The name should tell you exactly where you get to after you’ve completed the activity successfully. You’re there or you’re not, and if you’re not, you haven’t actually completed the activity.
By naming a service or activity in this way, you’ve also met the second principle, which is that ‘a service should clearly explain its purpose’.
Once you’ve arrived at this kind of name, you can make sure it’s findable by any of the other names you identified at the beginning.
With a clearly explained purpose and a customer-focused name, findable by familiar alternatives, you’ll help you newbies get up to productive speed much faster – by themselves. Which should make both of you much happier.