There’s been a little of bit of a talk lately about service (wopps i’m sorry experience) design and what it means to have multiple touch points and how this shapes a user experience.
What’s perhaps left aside here is how important the quality of those individual touch points is. As a designer and business owner, the more you have, the more you have to deal with, the less likely you’ll be able to achieve a uniformity in the quality of your service.
I’ll give you an example. Yesterday, Matt & I went all the way to North Greenwich (if you don’t live in london, well it’s far from the centre) to go to a Comet warehouse. Looking to buy a major appliance, we figured that going to the store and seeing them would be better than the useless online catalogues with tiny images that never really give you a good idea of proportions.
This place was a huge warehouse with only about 3 sales people which didn’t really matter because we were browsing at the beginning. Once we found what we were looking for, we waited around 10 minutes before someone came to see us.
The young man obviously had other fish to fry (other customers i mean) so when we started getting a little too technical, asking him about delivery, range of products, etc… he quickly suggested we go check online because the range of offer was “better” and there would be all the detaisl. He then walked off to his next customer. Annoyed, we walked off, vowing never to deal with these people again.
We ended up buying from Curry’s online when we came back home.
Lesson here: When one touch point fails, no matter how many others you may have as backup, the experience will always remain negative. There is no “win back” here.
It’s true that this is the most common mistake in designing a good service. You have to keep all the touchpoints in mind and not only those where for instance you have person-2-person interaction. The overall experience should be good.
The ultimate test is if your customer would tell his friends about his experience and recommend it to them.
The thing is that the the “people touch-point” is the one most likely to change. If you’re talking to someone who’s had a rough day, is too busy whatever… which is why a salesforce is so important / difficult to manage. You can have the best experience with someone responsive and kind and the shittiest if it’s not their day. Sometimes that’s ok though as we tend to see with cashiers at supermarkets, we allow for that people-based exeperience to be so-so without it affecting our perception or use of a service. But more often than not it isn’t.