8

Experience Fulfillment: Designing the Experiential Journey

In this chapter you will dive down into experience fulfillment and get an understanding of how customers experience your products and services as a journey that comprises touchpoints and interactions along the way. You will learn how to orchestrate these touchpoints, and how experience prototyping can give you insight into the customer experience at a very early stage of the innovation process.

A recent Consumer Reports survey asked people to rate everyday annoyances on a scale from 1 to 10, with a score of 10 being “annoys you tremendously.”1 Respondents rated the failure to get a human being on a customer service line an 8.6, second only to hidden fees (8.9) and more irritating than spam email (7.5) and inaccurate meteorologists (4.3). This means the second most irritating situation in people’s everyday lives is a service touchpoint.

The Whole Made from the Parts

What experience do customers have when using your services? Most likely, it’s very different from how the company experiences itself. Studies show that many organizations believe that their customers are having great experiences, but the customers themselves do not agree. There is a huge mismatch between what you think you’re offering and what customers perceive. This is because your customers view you and your services through the multiple touchpoints that they meet along their customer journey, and your organization is not designed for this experiential way of interacting. Silos are the main culprit, as customers navigate from silo to silo, encountering different people, ways of working, terminology, and interaction styles. Advertising, word of mouth, and reviews are touchpoints they encounter before using your service. Then they use touchpoints for onboarding during first use, followed by the multiple touchpoints they encounter as they begin using the service regularly and you build a relationship. If they are unlucky, then they might encounter errors too, and customer service touchpoints to help them recover from those errors.

What Are Touchpoints?

Touchpoints are the points of contact between the service provider and the customer. The majority of touchpoints are tangible, and many are interactive. The collective experience of all touchpoints forms the customer’s view of the service. Different touchpoints are in focus at each stage of the service journey, and some are more critical to the customer experience than others.

Notice that we use the term touchpoints rather than channels. There are several reasons for this. First, channels are a company-centric way of looking at interactions with customers. The term touchpoints includes the customer from their own perspective. Second, channels implies broadcast: a one-way, one-to-all communication. The experience-centric organization is more interested in interactions and relationships than broadcasting a message, so the channel metaphor doesn’t work. Third, channels implies a limited number of prescribed communication means without overlap, in the same way you click from channel to channel on the TV. In reality, there are multiple touchpoints, even down to the smell of freshly baked bread in a supermarket. Finally, customers jump from one touchpoint to the other without even thinking about it. Thinking of channels gives a linear impression and colors the design process. Thinking of touchpoints , however, pushes you to see the service through the customer’s eyes, which can often be quite messy.

If you view your company in this way, you will see it in fragments, glimpsed through multiple touchpoints along a journey, and you will maybe react with, “This isn’t us; we are much more than this!” But this is how customers see your company—through multiple small windows (your touchpoints)—and they piece the whole picture together themselves based on those glimpses (along with word of mouth, cultural understanding, etc.). It’s necessary to view your company and your offering through your touchpoints, then, simply because that’s how your customers see you.

Each time a person relates to or interacts with a touchpoint, they have a service encounter. This delivers an experience (good or bad) and adds something to the person’s relationship with the service and the service provider. The sum of all experiences from touchpoint interactions colors their opinion of the service, and of you as a company.

Customers don’t think of how these touchpoints are coordinated, and they don’t care; they just expect them to work and give value. They hop from one touchpoint to another without considering which department was responsible for designing and maintaining it. Customers expect a positive and consistent experience no matter how they access your service, and all of your incredible branding work has primed them with expectations of a particular kind of experience. If your touchpoints aren’t up to the job, you will create a mismatch between expectation and experience, and that means disappointed customers (and as we know, disappointed customers tell others about their disappointment).

If you are serious about delighting your customers, then you can’t avoid spending some time working on the orchestration of your touchpoints (see Figure 7-1). That means looking at your service as a whole, and creating multiple touchpoints that work together along the customer journey. It’s no good having one exceptional touchpoint if you have neglected the others—you have to provide consistent and excellent service delivery through them all. This reinforces your brand and ensures consistently high levels of satisfaction, efficiency, and loyalty. It will result in a positive cycle, where customers tell other customers, and the brand and experience are aligned.

Figure 8-1. Touchpoint cards help teams consider which touchpoints may be relevant to a project, and are available on the companion website (www.experience-centric.com).

You can evoke specific feelings in a person during a service encounter by thoughtfully designing and coordinating your touchpoints. By taking a holistic view, you can define total experiences and map these to individual service encounters. This is the zooming in and zooming out approach described in Chapter 4: designing both the sum of the parts and the individual parts themselves.

Improving Your Touchpoints

In this section, we will look at how you can innovate your touchpoints to improve service offerings, user experiences, and customer value.

Start with the Experience and Work Backward

The overriding question you have to ask yourself as an experience-centric organization is, “Which touchpoint combination do we need to fulfill the experiential promise given by the offering and the brand?” There are multiple different touchpoints that all have to align to the experience you want to give. When you focus on them in the design process, you will find that there are many more touchpoints to your service than you initially thought.

View Experiential Journeys as a Customer Experience Approach

In Chapter 6, we talked about how customers view and develop scenarios before and during their experiences. Scenarios in this context are short journeys played out in preparation for service encounters , so they’re a good way to think and describe how the customer experience unfolds. They incorporate time very well, and they allow for a great visualization of the entire service, so that you can see the whole and the parts together.

The customer journey has become a common way of describing a service over time, and the experiential journey improves on it to focus on the experience that the customer has (see Figure 8-2). In his book Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly), Jim Kalbach presents many examples of experiential journey maps, each with a different focus.

Figure 8-2. The typical contents of an experiential journey map.

The experiential journey map illustrates how the customer travels through your service, which touchpoints they meet along the way, and how they experience the journey, both as a whole, and at each point. It has a timeline base and an experiential structure, and a journey is typically divided into three main parts: before use, during use, and after use. This timeline can be at a macro level (e.g., a lifelong relationship with a bank) or a shorter time scale (e.g., a customer requesting a loan), and you should nest the micro-journey into the macro one to find out how they support each other. Common to all experiential journey maps is the separation of the before, during, and after phases, since innovations in the before and after stages can be especially important.

The main focus of the timeline is to visualize the experiential journey, noting the expected touchpoints. This allows you to show the dramatic curve of the journey and to identify significant points along the way. These can be points of peak experience and the build-up to them, or potential pain points that will need attention. In addition to the visualization of the experiential journey, the map identifies and describes the stages of the journey, specifies the desired experience for each stage, and provides supporting information.

Avoiding the Two Traps of Journey Design

I was working with a doctor on developing a better customer journey, when he proudly stated that he had done it already and had the perfect solution worked out. When I asked him to show me the journeys, it was obvious that he had fallen into the two traps of journey design:

• The journey was really his journey, not the customer’s (patient’s) journey. He had described what he did in relation to the customer, not how the customer viewed the journey.
• The journey started when the customer came into his office and it ignored everything that had happened beforehand, such as the customer visiting their own doctor before getting the referral, receiving information about the appointment, finding their way, and so on. We know that a high percentage of patients never show up to their appointments, and this failure to understand the early stages of their experiential journey might explain why.

Avoid the two main traps of journey design. Journeys always begin before your involvement, and are always described from the customer’s perspective.

The journey should always be viewed through the customer’s eyes, and needs to take into account all stages of their journey, including those before your organization enters the picture. This can include a customer researching service offerings before engaging with your service (and how you can influence that), discussing the service with friends, or being exposed to your advertising message. The pre-use phase is important because it makes you aware of how the customer starts the experience with you. The post-use phase is important too, because this is where there is huge potential for positive follow-up. We know, for example, that after using a service, customers like to review the experience in their heads, and can often have a kind of buyer’s remorse, or at least reflection (was it the right choice, what was it like, etc.). Studies show that people will often look at reviews of products and services after buying or using them, as a way to reassure themselves about their choices. It might in fact be our nature to try to add closure to the scenarios we have created and the experiences we have had, and the post-use phase offers you a great opportunity to influence that closure in a positive way.

I often find that organizations say they have already worked a lot with customer journeys, only to find out that they have really been working with process flow charts. Process flows view the world through the company’s eyes, are process-centric, and often assume a certain behavior from the customer. Process flow charts are important, but only as a means of translating an experiential journey into a blueprint for implementation. They should not be viewed as the same thing as an experiential journey.

Likewise, an experiential journey is not a blueprint for design. It is a design target, detailing the desired experience for customers as they use your service, and a means of describing a service concept from the customer’s point of view. It details the offering and allows you to check for cohesion with your experiential DNA. Further, it allows you to see the downstream implications the experience may have for experience fulfillment, enabling, and structure. The experiential journey needs further development to be a blueprint for implementation, in which the organization presents more detail, particularly around these downstream effects.

Consider Direct, Indirect, and Partner-Controlled Touchpoints

Touchpoints are often direct and “owned” by you, such as a website, a brochure, or a letter. During the past few years, however, indirect touchpoints have come into focus, since they are important influencers of customer expectations and experiences. Indirect touchpoints are not directly developed, controlled, or presented by the service provider, and can include things such as transport to an airport, or airport security. They can also be friends, family, or word of mouth, online reviews or blog/tweet comments. These are increasingly important and have to be included in touchpoint design. A breakdown from the company Accelerom shows that approximately 50% of a customer’s impressions come from direct channels, while the other 50% come from indirect channels. As the impact of social media increases, we can expect this split to move more toward indirect touchpoints. It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that almost all indirect touchpoints can be traced back to direct touchpoints originally. A good or bad experience with a service that is communicated via word of mouth was originally experienced directly through a touchpoint.

A third kind of touchpoint has also emerged: a partner-controlled touchpoint. This is increasingly common in digital services (for example, how many solutions use Google Maps these days?), but it can also be a subcontracted service provider used as part of your offering (for example, an electrical installer connecting broadband at a customer’s home, or a baggage handler for a flight). Customers consider these third-party subcontractors a part of the service, so your organization should choose them with great care. A fantastic experiential journey can be ruined by a poor subcontractor who does not understand the design you have developed for the whole experience. At the same time, a partner-controlled touchpoint offers great potential in terms of B2B (business-to-business) provision if it is used by others. If you can understand the experiential journey that your customer wishes to achieve, and you can enable it, then you can create a strong relationship with them. This points to an increasing segmentation of, and an increased experiential focus in, B2B services. As an example, I have been working with a large postal organization that is adapting its offering to improve the customer experience of ordering and receiving packages. This new focus can help provide consistent experiences from the ordering phase through shipping and tracking to delivery and unboxing. In this way, the postal organization offers an experiential advantage over its competitors when competing for contracts.

Choose Touchpoints Appropriate to Your Context

All touchpoints are equal, but some touchpoints are better at certain things than others. This might sound obvious, but each touchpoint is unique in terms of its characteristics, meaning that different touchpoints are good at different things. Some are good at short, personalized, informational messages (e.g., SMS), others are good at transactions (internet), and still others are good at adding human value (telephone).

This realization, although obvious, is quite recent, and is leading companies to review their touchpoint strategies so that they utilize each touchpoint in the best way possible. When you’re starting with the experience, it is easier to choose one preferred touchpoint over another based on its experiential characteristics. A text message, for example, has an immediacy about it, but lacks visual content and the ability to discern tone of voice. An email offers much more potential visually and content-wise, while a printed letter can give you undivided attention (although it can be very slow to compose). Choosing the right touchpoint for the experience desired therefore starts with the experience, and then works backward to find the best fit.

Keep Innovating to Stay Relevant

As technology develops, it is natural that some touchpoints will become more important for experience fulfillment than others. The rise of the smartphone app, for example, shows how the small, portable, handheld personal device has become a major touchpoint in our lives.

This also has a flip side, since some touchpoints that have fallen out of favor can now be used in different ways. The humble letter is a touchpoint crying out for a renaissance, simply due to the fact that our postboxes are empty many days of the week and yet we still have our emotional ritual pilgrimage to check the mail. This is a great opportunity for developing and nurturing a relationship with a customer, because physical mail now has an experiential weight to it and when they receive it they are likely to be alone, have time, and be able to give it their undivided attention. The same is true of the packing slips that come with the many packages customers order online. They offer fantastic potential for customer contact, simply because most packing slips are crappy; just a company-centric check-offs that something has occurred, rather than a note supporting the pleasurable act of opening a package. The CD Baby letter (see Chapter 6) shows how to take advantage of this opportunity to improve the customer’s experience of buying something.

This change in relevance over time means that you need to keep innovating in your experiential journey design, always looking for new touchpoints and perhaps bringing in some old ones. Think about it as remixing a great song.

Ways of Innovating Through Touchpoints

Touchpoints are a key component of service design and offer several possibilities for innovation, from choosing based on their qualities to orchestrating them as a whole. Next I outline the four main ways you can innovate using touchpoints. The main thing to keep in mind is “Which touchpoints will ensure customers receive the target experience we want to give as an organization?”

Understand and Exploit the Unique Qualities of Individual Touchpoints

Identify the relevant touchpoints for your service, and note the positive and negative qualities of each. The positive and negative aspects should be from an experiential journey perspective, but you can also add your company perspective to this, since each touchpoint comes with a cost, be that technology, development, integration, or maintenance. Understanding how the array of touchpoints fit together for your specific service takes you halfway to orchestrating them. This brings advantages both for your customers and for you.

Map Touchpoints over Time from the Customer Perspective

Map touchpoints along a timeline to construct several possible experiential journeys and show which touchpoints are available to the customer at each stage. As discussed earlier, this gives you a way to see your service through the customer’s eyes. From this starting point, you can gain many insights—for example, you can identify touchpoints that customers like to use, those that are painful for them (pain points), those that are rising stars, those that are dying out, and more.

Create Desirable Customer Experiences by Orchestrating Your Touchpoints

Working with touchpoints combines curation, because you are choosing touchpoints with an experiential value that fit together, and orchestration, because you are designing a collaboration between many touchpoints and their corresponding parts of the organization. In musical terms, the touchpoints are notes on a score (timeline) with a conductor (design team). The musical metaphor also extends to touchpoints in the foreground and those in the background, and how they can change over time to create strong experiences.

When you have mapped the touchpoint terrain, you are ready to start orchestrating. Do the touchpoints flow together as a whole? Do you have a common tone of voice? Are there touchpoints that are missing? Is there potential to be had from adding or removing a touchpoint? Who has responsibility for the orchestration? How do you coordinate a touchpoint strategy?

Change the Service Experience Through Touchpoint Innovation

Sometimes focusing on touchpoints for existing services leads to an incremental innovation approach: you will improve what is already there, but are unlikely to create something radically new. However, it is possible to use touchpoints as a starting point for radical innovation. There are multiple examples of how a new touchpoint has created lasting competitive advantage. Uber, for example, exploited the abilities of the smartphone to create a taxi experience that was totally different from and more desirable than the alternative.

To take a more radical approach to touchpoint innovation, you can rip up what is there and start from scratch with the question, “How can we create the experience we want to give?” This can be done in-house or together with customers, and preferably both. Companies often have a habit of using the same touchpoints over and over again, and this kind of touchpoint “lock-in” leads to underperforming services. Starting from scratch and rethinking your offerings can help you create innovative design roadmaps and concept services.

The Principle of Frequency, Sequence, and Importance

One of the key principles of design relates to how things are used over time. The principle of designing for frequency requires that you identify and focus on the touchpoints that occur most frequently for customers. The more often something is used, the more you should work at and polish it to provide the right experience. Ensuring good flow for 90% of users makes sense, but spare a thought for the times where it goes wrong, because you’ll need that little extra to recover the experiential level customers expect.

Designing for sequence means identifying and focusing on touchpoints that happen in a specific order. This can be recognizing sequences in people’s everyday lives (for example, we usually pay after we choose something in a shop or restaurant, not before) and designing the journey to follow that sequence. The other aspect is to recognize sequences of touchpoints and smooth the handover between them during an experiential journey. For example, an online order is often followed up by an email confirmation. Seeing these two touchpoints together allows you to add design cues from one to the other to aid recognition from customers.

Designing for importance means identifying key touchpoints, or steps on the journey, and focusing your efforts to design these to deliver a specific experience. Important touchpoints might be when you leave a website to pay, when you confirm an order, or when you abandon a form that you have spent considerable time filling out.

These three principles reflect how people expect things to be designed, and they are not mutually exclusive. A frequent touchpoint, for example, may also be a part of an important sequence. If you recognize these touchpoints and design with them in mind, you will cover about 75% of touchpoint experiences in a journey.

Tips and Techniques for Experience Fulfillment

In addition to the three core design principles just described, there are some other tips and techniques that will help your organization ensure it fulfills customer expectations over the course of the experiential journey.

Avoid Journeys that Reflect Your Organizational Silos

As discussed earlier in the book, the Porter value chain way of thinking was highly influential in the '90s and led to a wave of business process reengineering. This, in turn, created strong silos in organizations. Unfortunately, the value chain was more suited to products than services, and since then, silos have often been found to be more of a hindrance than a help in an organization. An experiential journey will often cross many silos, and customers can be left confused after talking to different parts of an organization over time. Beware the journey where each step is handled by a different silo. First, you can be pretty sure that it’s a structure that fits the organization better than the customer. Second, you will face handover problems between silos. And finally, KPIs will be optimized within silos, rather than encouraging cross-silo collaboration, leaving managers happy and customers frustrated. Journey designs have organizational consequences, and can influence formal and informal organizational structures such as empowerment, reward systems, selection, and training. Therefore, you need to consider your organization as an experience enabler—one that supports the customer experience—instead of trying to get the journey to fit around your organization.

Allow Handover Between Touchpoints

Although it is good to have a preferred journey through a series of touchpoints for the majority of your customers, some customers always find their own route. This means that you need to design for your preferred route, but also enable alternative routes through a journey. One organization I have been working with had a problem because different touchpoints for ordering products were a part of different silos within the company. They hired Livework, a design company, to look at the problem, and they found that it was simply not possible for an online customer to pick up a product in a physical shop, or for a person who was out shopping to order in store for home delivery (e.g., if they had too much to carry, or a product was sold out). This was primarily because there was no handover between touchpoints, and secondly because bonus payments to sellers would be lost if the sale was handed over from the physical store to the online one or vice versa.

Livework solved this problem by allowing a handover between the physical and online worlds, and renegotiating the company’s bonus structure. By redesigning the experiential journey, they ensured that customers could find their own way through it, and they enabled the organization to support this alternative, thereby increasing sales completion rates.

Consider the Experience Across Analog and Digital

Germany’s largest retail chain by revenue, dm-Drogerie Markt, restructured itself to provide a better customer experience by releasing its employees from the company’s systems, functionality, and processes.

So, instead of having one team for the online store and a separate team for the physical store, the company has both teams work together to provide a seamless experience for customers.

“We have over 1,800 stores and have an online shop as well; the idea is to provide additional services for customers and combine both channels,” said Jochen Kieninger, head of customer relationship management at dm Drogerie Markt.2

“Organizations used to think that for a local store, if the manager does not have the product and tells the customer to look for it online, he is giving the store’s income to the online store. We cannot think like that in the future.”

Be Specific About the Experiences a Customer Should Have Along the Journey

I often find project teams don’t ask themselves how the customer will feel during the journey they are working on. If there is a customer focus in a project, I often see a thumbs up or down, good or bad, placed on each step of the journey to identify potential pain points and positives. Others might go further and use a set of emoticons ranging from rage to delight so that there is some grading of the experience. In an experience-centric organization it’s necessary to be more precise and to put words to experiences as part of the journey design. Organizations that have a rich set of manager jargon but a poor vocabulary for emotions and experiences will struggle to become experience-centric and urgently need to develop this terminology. To help, Ted Matthews (guest author of Chapter 9) and I have developed a set of cards that describe possible emotions to spark nuanced discussion within a project team about the emotional experience the organization wants customers to have (see Figure 8-3). The cards can also be used at other times with customers to help them describe the emotions they have experienced during a service encounter.

Figure 8-3. Using emotion cards gives the project team a vocabulary to discuss specific emotions. These can be the emotions customers feel now as part of an existing service, and also the emotions you would like them to have in a new service. (Available at the book’s website: www.experience-centric.com.)

Using these cards helps organizations give the customer experience the attention it deserves, and develop a vocabulary for experience, which assists with alignment and infusion throughout the organization.

Check Service Recovery in Your Journeys

As services become more and more digitalized, there is a tendency for journeys to become more like flow diagrams than experiential journey maps, since everything happens within the interface. I have heard people argue that the need for journey design is diminishing because of this. This is dangerous for three reasons. First, it tempts you to take the easy route and optimize for the organization by taking a system view, rather than the customer’s view. Second, it ignores the before and after stages of the journey, which are key to any journey design. Third, and more importantly, it ignores situations of service breakdown, in which the customer needs help, often from a person. By considering service breakdown and service recovery, you are designing for flows where things do not always go as expected. Remember that customers create scenarios for what happens next, so a service breakdown is also a breakdown of their scenario. Bear this in mind, since customers are taken out of their comfort zones when their scenarios don’t work out as expected, and they can easily become stressed and start to panic, in which case they develop wilder scenarios. You have to be prepared to stay calm and handle these situations before they explode. To summarize, consider a system breakdown a customer scenario breakdown, one where your customer needs special treatment, and develop recovery journeys that they’ll remember positively.

Experience Prototyping: Fake It ’til You Break It

You can only experience an experience by experiencing it. Unfortunately, the experience only comes together when it is delivered as a completely developed service, and at that time it’s too late and too expensive to change in any major way. The challenge, then, is to provide a project team with a realistic experience so they can evaluate its experiential aspects early enough to be able to make changes. This brings us back to design thinking (see Chapter 4) and the prototyping approach often called “failing fast but forward.” By prototyping early, you discover areas that can be improved before you have spent resources on development.

There are five main ways to prototype a service experience, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. They are often used in parallel to explore different aspects of the service in question. The next sections go through the five approaches, describing how they can be used to prototype the experience you want your customers to have. The last of these, virtual and augmented reality, has excellent potential for experience prototyping; however, this is cutting-edge technology at the moment and not for the faint-hearted or thin-walleted quite yet.

The Walkthrough

The walkthrough uses a physical scale model of your service, often using LEGO or DUPLO figures in a timeline. It sounds very much like going back to kindergarten, because you take a figure and walk it through the experiential journey (see Figure 8-4). This might seem trivial, but it is incredibly useful for getting a feel for the service flow, since we naturally have an ability (probably learned in kindergarten!) to put ourselves into a story and into the characters.

Figure 8-4. The walkthrough allows you to test the service flow and identify pain points along the journey. (Source: Johan Blomkvist.)

Walkthroughs are really good at allowing you to evaluate your service journey and the logistics related to it. For example, for a restaurant visit, we could use a floor plan of the restaurant and move the figure toward the entrance. The story would continue as follows: from the main street, the customer sees the sign (Where is the sign, and what does it look like?), and walks to the restaurant. They open the door and immediately see (What do they see and how does it make them feel?). They stand and wait to be seated (How do they know that they have to stand? Where do they stand? Is there a sign? If so, what is the tone of voice?). They are greeted (Who greets them, how do they check a reservation? How are they dressed? What do they say?) before being shown to an area to hang their coats (Do we need one or many areas? Where is it? How safe is it perceived to be? How large is it?) and then to the table (What does the guide say while waiting for them to hang their coats and on the way to the table?)…

Walkthroughs are not so good at letting you experience the experience, so in this context they are a bit coarse. They are also not so helpful for giving you an idea of the brand relevance of the experience, or of the detailed interactions involving specific touchpoints. We are, after all, using models here, so it requires a leap of the imagination to experience the experience. However, walkthroughs are quick and easy to use, easily reconfigured, and work well as part of co-design processes, since everyone can take part. They are also really good at identifying and working with the logical and functional flow of a service, and ironing out disconnects that you might not find from just looking at an experiential journey map.

Enactment

We have already mentioned the similarities between experiential journeys and film, and enactment (see Figure 8-5) uses precisely this mechanism to prototype the customer experience. Enactment is a method where you act out the service, and can be anything from simple bodystorming (brainstorming using spontaneous enactment) to very staged real-life run-throughs of a service (where the designers simulate the service for real customers in real settings). As with the walkthrough, it uses your innate abilities to put yourself into a context, but this method gives you a more realistic experience of the experience.

Enactment places emphasis on the tone of voice and behaviors of people and technology, and quickly allows you to see where this breaks down. That’s one of its major benefits: it’s easy to redo the enactment and change it (in film language, “do another take”) until it works. This makes enactment perfect for quickly evaluating and perfecting personality, tone of voice, and behaviors. It is also fun, but with serious intent. Another advantage of enactment is that you can use props as alternatives to fully developed solutions. So, for example, when a customer is interacting with a tablet computer, you can use a piece of cardboard instead of the tablet to enter information, and this is realistic enough for the circumstances. You use your innate abilities to role-play (or create scenarios) to get close to experiencing the experience. But, since enactment is often used early in the design process and many touchpoints are not yet fully developed, it means that the brand experience and holistic experience are less represented. For example, if you are prototyping a customer using a new bank building, you will be able to enact customer interactions, tone of voice, and behaviors, but you won’t get the experiential effect that newly designed furniture, the interiors, the exterior of the bank, and the like will give.

Figure 8-5. Enactment allows you to quickly get a feel for a new solution, without expending a lot of resources to prototype it. Props work well in lieu of finished designs, and within a few minutes you can prototype several alternatives. (Source: author.)

Evidencing

Evidencing is one of my favorite approaches to experience prototyping because it describes the future as if it exists today, by assembling carefully faked photographs and tangible prototypes of the future service in a compelling narrative (see Figure 8-6). It gets its name from the term tangible evidence from the future, in which you are transported into a future world where the service exists. This method presents the offering and the customer experience through the experiential journey as a believable series of photographs or a stop-motion video.

Evidencing allows for a precision in terms of design detail and journey steps, giving you a good overall sense of the service experience for a new concept, right down to the detailed interactions.

Evidencing a Fake Competitor Offering to Provoke a Service Innovation

One of the best service designers I have met, Lavrans Løvlie from Livework, told me how he was having trouble getting a client to see the potential in a new online service concept. This was a client Livework had worked with a lot, and they had a high degree of trust, but this time the client was too fond of their existing offering and was reluctant to adopt the new direction. They needed a bit of a jolt to see the benefits of the new offering. So, Livework produced a slick PowerPoint presentation showing a carefully faked description and review of a fictitious new service from a competitor, , and presented it in a slightly shocked way: “Have you seen the cool new service just launched by X?”

When this was presented, the leadership suddenly paid attention, and could see all of the experiential benefits that they earlier had been unable to see, because they now perceived the offering as a threat to their own business. When they learned what Livework had done, they realized the potential of the new offering, and knew they had to be first to deliver it. This led them to immediately commission a project to explore the new direction. Sometimes, you just need to experience the experience to see its value.

Evidencing can take several forms, but often it is a series of photos that realistically represent the touchpoints along the experiential journey. This allows you to show how the customer becomes aware of the service—for example, through realistic ads or even (faked) reviews in magazines. When you create physical versions of particular items, such as a gas bill or welcome package, it makes you feel that the service actually exists. However, evidencing doesn’t let you interact with the service itself, so you cannot experience the interactions with touchpoints or the tone of voice of a service.

Graphic Experiential Evidencing

Graphic Experiential Evidencing (GEE) is an experiential extension to evidencing that uses the visual language of the comic book to accentuate the customer experience (see Figure 8-7). It was developed by Ted Matthews, the guest author for Chapter 9, who was trying to find a way of getting rich experiences across to others.

While evidencing provides a realistic representation of service encounters, GEE highlights the experiential outcome of the experiential journey. It was developed as part of a project designing experiences for a national football federation, to express the strong emotions people feel when watching a football match. Ted found comics offer a shared visual language that we can use to express these rich emotions (for more about this, have a look at Scott McCloud’s book Understanding Comics [William Morrow]). GEE focuses on the emotions and the experience and is more a call to arms for the service offering than a neutral representation. It says, “This is how it can be; this is how it ought to feel,” and in many ways forms a target for design within a team. It can then be used to specify a service offering, to explain what experience the project wants to attain.

GEE is not necessarily realistic, nor does it assist with the flow or logistics of a service. However, it highlights the experiential highs and lows, conveying the dramatic arc of a service, which makes it an important tool in the experience-centric organization.

Augmented and Virtual Reality

I am really excited about the potential of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to revolutionize experience prototyping, but at the moment this area has a lot of limitations. I have been working with two brilliant AR/VR designers, Kjetil Nordby (at AHO) and Stian Børresen (at HoloCap), who have been combining gaming engines and other technology to create realistic experience prototypes. Their work has the potential to bring the missing piece into experience prototyping, because they have found a way to bring real people into virtual spaces in real time with amazingly realistic results. I am not talking about simply representing people, but actually inserting real-time video into a virtual space so that you can greet, talk to, and interact with people in a realistic 3D space, so their behavior and tone of voice will be natural and not preprogrammed.

Earlier I mentioned that it is difficult to create a realistic prototype of a new flagship bank, since you can’t fake the building, the interior, the lighting, the employees’ behavior, and so on, without expending lots of effort and money. Well, in AR/VR you can do this in a realistic way and have people to interact with. It combines the advantages of the other approaches, but at this stage requires a lot of technological support. Sometime soon, an experience prototyping platform will be made available that allows you to input 3D models of the service environment, add a detailed library of touchpoints, and insert people into the scene so you can enact the experience in a realistic experiential way. I, for one, am looking forward to that.

The Top Experience Design Principles

In this section I present some basic design principles based on what we know about designing for experiences, emotions, and customer behavior. These principles are taken from both basic and applied research, and as with everything, there are exceptions to the rules.

As with everything, there are exceptions to all rules. Generally, it is agreed that we have to make things easy to use, but if that were a universal law, nobody would learn to play the piano or drive a car. Both require a steep learning curve, but because we expect our experience of the end result to be worthwhile, we choose to invest time in them. We also know that people generally like to be middle of the road and choose a mid-price offering, banded between low and high. However, when emotionally aroused, people sometimes break this rule, because we are gripped by an internal logic that encourages us to “go all in.” Therefore, keep in mind that these principles are helpful guides, not laws, and should be seen in their context. Sometimes breaking a rule can be better than following one, especially when you are becoming masters of experience delivery.

Involve Customers

The whole essence of this book is that you need to be able to see through your customer’s eyes. That doesn’t always mean doing what they say, and sometimes delight comes from a service provider being proactive about unmet and unseen (by the customer) needs. So, rule number 1 is to involve customers. Be curious about what they want, like, and desire before you start designing, during the design process, and after you have designed. At the same time, reflect on what your customers are saying and place it in a larger perspective.

Be Relative, Not Absolute in Your Judgments

We have difficulty relating to something unless we have a comparison to judge it by. This can apply to everything from understanding metaphors and analogies for your solution right down to the need to relate amounts and sizes to units we know. This can work to your advantage when launching something new, because you can decide what it should be compared to and use it in your design through detailed design cues. On the flip side, be careful in your price range, as your price will be judged relative to others.

Start Strong, Finish Stronger

Customers enter the service journey with expectations, and you have to immediately relate to those expectations or exceed them. This requires a strong start with expression of intent, but don’t forget to end on a high note, because people remember the end of an encounter more vividly than the start or its midpoint. In addition, make sure there is a high point somewhere along the way to create a “start–high–end” set of peaks (see the next principle).

Ensure Noticeable Peaks and Avoid Troughs

Peaks and troughs are memorable, so you need to focus on having a noticeable peak during the service journey. Obviously, avoiding a deep trough is important, but remember that service experiences are relative to expectations, so if something terrible happens during service delivery, your response in the recovery phase should be relative to expectations.

Be Benevolent

Make the customer feel that you have their best interests at heart, that you have made an effort to think about their needs, and that what you are doing is for their benefit (this is, after all, the essence of service).

Remember, Looks Can Seduce and Looks Can Kill

How things look, how people look, and how you look at people all communicate something. Always. And it is context-dependent. If you go into a mountain gear shop, you don’t expect people to wear suits; you expect ruggedness. On the other hand, if you go to a funeral parlor, you don’t expect people to wear mountain gear. This matters right down to the smallest detail—for example, it’s why packaging is important. The way the package looks tells you about what is inside. This principle is so basic you might be scratching your head about why it is included, but of course you can choose to use it to your advantage, or to your loss. The design mantra of god and the devil both being in the details is true, even for how things look.

Use the Photocopier Principle to Hide (but Structure) Complexity

I worked for Xerox in the '90s, simplifying the use of copy machines. It was during this period that the principle of hiding complexity was implemented and the machines went from being complex products for the few to simple products accessible to most users. From observing the use of machines, the company realized that people often just wanted a single copy of something, so a big green button was placed on the control panel to do just that. The complex functions were not removed, but they were placed under a flap so they’d be easy to access during those rare times they were needed. At the time, it radically changed how we related to copy machines. Hiding complexity can make the ordinary become an extraordinary ordinary experience (see Chapter 6), with the iconic Google search page being a prime example.

Give the Bad News First

This principle relates to designing experiential journeys that start strong and finish stronger. People prefer to end on a high note, so if you have any bad news, give it first, and save the good news for last. In fact, create a dramatic curve for your service that takes this tip into account, and in times of service breakdown, make sure you somehow end on a happy note.

Use All of the Senses

There seems to be a fixation on the visual in our everyday lives, but interactions with touchpoints are tangible, audible, and olfactory too. When working with a tourist experience in Thailand, Ted Matthews and I designed in a breeze for when customers were waiting for a ferry, because a breeze is an experiential touchpoint of value when you’re waiting in a hot, humid environment. Supermarkets have introduced in-store baking to give shoppers that homey feeling of freshly baked bread. And Apple understood the power of touch when innovating first the iPod, then the iPhone and iPad. Make sure to use all of the senses in your organization’s touchpoints to appeal to your customers as they progress through the experiential journey.

Put the Customer in Control of Their Choices

This is a key finding from behavioral research: if the customer feels in control, they are willing to accept uneven service or even service breakdowns. Offering alternatives is a good way of giving them control (e.g., would you prefer a or b?), or you can even provide a slider, where they can choose the level themselves. Self-service is another solution, and in online services, real-time “what-if” solutions all shift the locus of control to the customer.

IKEA is a good example of customer co-production—that is, the customer is central to the construction of the product. This gives customers an increased attachment to the final product and the service provider, especially when it comes to IKEA, which has always had a focus on the customer experience.

Avoid Procrastination

I do it and my kids do it and we all hate it, but everyone procrastinates. Therefore, try to avoid letting your customers put things off, and if it can’t be helped, keep in contact through gentle reminders. If you have already used the principle of benevolence, then your reminders will be seen as friendly and build trust.

Engage Customers and They Will Be Reluctant to Switch

Lock-in results not just from having a lot of data stored, but also from expending a lot of effort and engagement using something. People prefer to stay with something they’ve invested effort and energy into, and there is an inertia that builds over time as a result. Use this to your advantage and engage customers with relevant experiential activities, and it will reap rewards.

Heighten Emotional Arousal to Engage Customers

Our emotional state influences our behavior. Arousal makes a difference. If, for example, we are enjoying ourselves on vacation, we are willing to pay extra to buy souvenirs. We are less critical when aroused emotionally and are more willing to try things. If you design for emotional arousal, not only can you differentiate yourselves from your competitors, but you can charge a little more too.

Limit the Number of Choices, or Group into Chunks

Too much choice leaves us unable to choose anything. For example, offering 24 variants of the same kind of jam in a supermarket trial area resulted in only 3% of tasters buying jam, whereas offering only 6 variants led to 30% purchasing a jar. In a famous article from 1956, psychologist George Miller described the phenomenon of the magical number seven, noting that our information-processing skills all seem to be limited to about seven items (plus or minus two). So, if you are presenting a lot of alternatives, group them together so that people can process and relate to the options. If they have to remember options, you might have to go as low as four items.

Group Painful Processes to Get Them Over With

Grouping negative processes together gets the unpleasantness over with, while dividing them up prolongs the negative associations. The recent negativity about flying short distances is a typical example, and we can see how rail travel, which might take longer, is becoming preferred over short-haul flights. Air travel now is broken up into a series of uncomfortable steps: travel to the airport, check in, check your luggage, go through security, line up at the gate, board, find your cramped seats, and so on. Rail travel, on the other hand, takes longer, but the negative aspect is shortened, so people are often pleasantly surprised by the train journey and find it comparable.

Use Upper Bands to Help Customers Choose the Mid-Level Offerings

We tend to choose options relative to what is available, and place ourselves in a band, or range. For example, on a wine list, a particular wine might seem pricey when shown alone. However, the addition of some higher-priced wines will convince us that the same wine now is reasonable, and therefore an easier choice. Use upper bands in your organization to encourage your customers to choose the midpriced offerings.

Make the Invisible Visible

A lot of service provision is invisible—for example, cleaning and maintenance services in a hotel. Recently, a friend of mine, when working from his hotel room, dropped something that rolled under the bed. When he went to retrieve it, he found a card proudly proclaiming, “Yes, we even clean under here!” This made a great impression on him and he recounted the story many times over as a great experience. When working for a property management organization, my team and I designed small calling cards that could be attached to items that had been maintained, pointing out that the work had been done, when it had been done, and by whom. Not only did this make the invisible visible, but it improved pride among employees, as it made them visible too. Do the same in your organization to recognize employee efforts and reward those often-unsung heroes.

Use Pledging to Earn Your Customers’ Trust

Pledging, as a clearly defined activity, has a strong effect on how people behave and makes us less likely to cheat. It creates a desire to follow social norms of trustworthy behavior, including after the event. This is especially true when the pledge is ritualized (see Chapter 9) or takes place in a social context—for example, in front of others. Use pledging as a way to publicly assure your customers that your word is your bond and you are worthy of their trust.

Follow the Rules of Frequency, Sequence, and Importance

Although this seems like common sense, it is amazing how many organizations break these rules in their designs. Make frequent operations easy (remember, easy can also be memorable if you design it that way). Put activities that happen in sequence into that sequence. And make sure that important activities are given the importance they deserve, even though they might not happen frequently.

Never Mention a Near Miss

Customers react negatively when reminded that they almost achieved some benefit from a service (e.g., “We’re sold out now, but if only you had come five minutes earlier, we had plenty of them”). This indirectly criticizes the customer’s behavior by putting the blame for the missed opportunity on them. Not mentioning the near-miss, or reframing it (e.g., “There has been huge demand for this”), is a better alternative.

Show Customers They’re in Good Company

People often seek confirmation from others about our behaviors and choices. Seeing what others choose can help us make a decision ourselves and reassure us. Seeing the text “80% of our customers choose this option” will help guide your customers’ decisions and make them happier with the choices they make.

Always Combine Advice with Action and Triggers

When you’re advising people, the advice alone might not be enough to change their behavior. Thus, you should always combine it with clear, targeted action that supports the advice. In addition, you should add triggers in your experiential journey at relevant points that help prompt the desired behavior. For example, telling people they have to reduce energy consumption alone will probably not lead to much change, but adding three examples of how to do it and a “do it now” button will improve the chances of change.

Amazon uses these rules to good effect and in a clever way. Not only does it show that you are in good company when you buy something, but it also tempts you to look at some outliers, basically saying, “Hey, others are buying this, and you’d be stupid not to do the same.”