Are you structured to deliver waste free services?

The other day, I wrote about all the Maps in Service Design. Right or wrong, there has to be a reason we like all these maps. I think the idea of doing one is attractive to most but after starting the process many people get hesitant, the questions get hard. Whether we are mapping in Lean Service Design or in Lean Marketing, I find that the mapping process brings up a few questions like…

Who do we serve?

Is the service personalized?

Is customer experience everyone’s job?

Is service thought of as a competitive advantage?

Are we looking at measures holistically?

Is the service (touchpoint) good enough to create a desire to visit us again?

It becomes clear that many of us are simply not organized, structured in a way, to be able to deliver waste‑free services or sales support to customers. Many of us have years of work-arounds established to handle even the simplest of processes. And simply stated, we are only in control of our processes when we have documented procedures (paraphrased from Masaaki Imai). With proper documentation, mapping, it really starts making us think about the restructuring of our resources to better serve the customer. Or, at least it should.

You may be interested in the Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

Each one of these maps should be based on the end to end customer experience.  Creating that end to end mapping process is a struggle for most organizations.  And to get the most out of the process, we should understand and do the mapping exercise from the perspective of the customer. However, it starts getting more complicated and more questions surface:

Who are the influencers?

Are we creating memorable experiences, stories?

Is everyone willing to take ownership of the experience?

Is service reinforcing our company’s value proposition?

Are we measuring what counts to our customers?

It's a great focusing mechanism. What has to happen is the customer and value (as considered by the customer) must be kept at the forefront of the work. The biggest struggle most organizations have is just working (improving) on that little piece that they have direct control of instead of figuring out how to create that value for the customer.

What I like to see done is have customers become involved in this activity. Its remarkable how we can just get the blinders on and think that certain things that we believe are valuable to customers are found to be the direct opposite. So, if we don't get customers involved in some of these design processes, we don't end up with as good a result as a competitor that does.

You may be interested in the Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop