Improvised solutions impress customers more

Throw away the script to be more authentic

Those of us who work on the stage are fortunate indeed - for we are blessed with an immediate and clear feedback system. If we work well, we are immediately rewarded with applause or laughter. If we do poorly, we are punished with silence, or jeers, or departure. (Or with another kind of laughter. Or with people throwing things. Or with people coming up on stage and trying to punch my head. But that's another story.)

The ace bit about this phenomenon is that it often lets you know precisely which bit of your experience design is working best. It's simple - if they responded well to that bit tonight, it was good. If they didn't, it needs some work. No problems there. But what does it tell us?

Now, much to our writer's chagrin, it is often the case that the biggest laugh of the night is rewarded to an "aside" - something you say which is outside the script. This can be a quick put-down to a heckler, a humorous reaction to a cellphone going off in the house, or a rapid quip in response to collapsing scenery or colleagues.

These asides are not usually the wittiest gag of the evening. To be honest, they are not usually very funny at all. They are not rooted in your character, or in the dramatic form, and they often lack depth and/or cleverness. But if they are halfway quick, and halfway decent, they get a monster laugh. Odd, isn't it?

The crucial bit is that - because these asides arise in response to a particular unplanned situation - they are obviously unscripted. And this makes them two things. They are:

1. unique
2. authentic

They are unique because the situation was a one-off, and the audience know it will never happen that way again. That laugh will not be there in tomorrow's show - it is their laugh.

They are authentic, because they obviously came from the actor himself - not from some highly paid, uncaring jokewriter. The gag was obviously invented right here and right now, by that living person standing right there.

All too often in service experiences, we feel that the employee is working to a script. And when they leave that script to improvise a solution for us, we are deeply impressed. We feel it was our personal solution - unique and authentic, invented by a real person.

So, how often do you ditch the script in your services? Or, if you are the big cheese, how do you respond when your staff throw the book away? Is there perhaps a way you can make your customers feel that every solution is authentic and unique - just for them?

improvised first aid pic from gregor_y at flickr
ditched script pic from z1784 at flickr

Experience design e-book

It's time for a small celebration...

Today, the 2,000th reader downloaded my mini-ebook, which lists some showbiz tools that anyone can use to impress customers. Thanks, folks!

If you've not taken a look yet, you can download the book here (or via the link in the left column). Just 20 pages, and it's free!

My second e-book - The Experience Director - is still in the works. Watch this space...

2000 image by Leo Reynolds at flickr

More on the experience sequence

Shuffle the notes...

My coffee-smelling post last week has attracted some attention - many thanks to all those readers and bloggers who picked up on it.

Jeff Howard - who writes the Design for Sevice blog - was kind enough to refer to my tale, adding the following terrific analogy from (you guessed it) showbusiness.

A grace note is a short, separate note that occurs immediately before a longer run of notes. If a musician were to simply launch into an extended passage, the listener might be apt to miss the effect of the first few notes and struggle to catch up. The grace note engages attention and makes the sequence more impressive. I often use the visual equivalent of this principle in interface design to delineate animations; it works exactly the same way.

(Read the full post here.)

This is a nice refinement of my coffee-pot story, where the whiff of java was often just plumb necessary to get the attention of potential customers who were lost in their own thoughts or media. In Jeff's analogy, the concert audience is presumably already attentive - but the grace note helps focus their attention on the virtuoso passage to come. It's less of a "wake up!" and more of a "ok, here we go..."

One of the main functions of customer experience design has always been to draw customer's attention to hidden values - to show them exactly how much bang they get for their buck. Perhaps we need to be using more grace notes to draw our customers' attention to virtuoso service...

piano pic from evilibby at flickr

Why laughter is good for innovation

You need to be joking II

Many thanks to regular reader Kat for passing on these excellent words from genius comedian Stephen Fry (Blackadder, Jeeves and Wooster, V for Vendetta etc), assisted at the close by Mr GK Chesterton:

"There is an argument that comedy is a greater public service than any other genre of art or culture: it heals divisions, it is a balm for hurt minds, it binds social wounds, exposes real truths about how life is really led. Comedy connects.... Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly."

(read the complete transcript here)

I've argued before that every workplace needs at least one jester - someone who is allowed tell the bitter truth with a sweet smile. Not only is a climate of laughter good for your health and your staff's motivation, it can teach you valuable stuff.

Believe it or not, poking fun at your company's structures, habits and products is a terrific way to learn a whole lot about your set up - and make plans for the future.

The key is that humor is based on truth. If comedy builds on untruths, it might be absurd but is never truly funny. Back in 1926, H.W. Fowler put together this oft-quoted table to explain the different types of gags. If you don't have super-vision, just click the image to enlarge.







The venerable H.W. argues that humor, wit and satire promote discovery, illumination and amendment (we might say improvement), and that they are based on observation, surprise and accentuation.

Two important things to note:

Firstly, there's a strong contrast there with sarcasm, invective et al, which hurt more than they help. Avoid them, unless you are trying to topple dictators this weekend.

Secondly, are not discovery, illumination and amendment just the sort of things we need in our next innovation cycle?

As an exercise, why not let your team write some gags or a wee comic sketch about your work? Show them H.W.'s chart if you like, or just let them go crazy. (You could even get a professional to help out, e.g. this guy.) Do this not as part of your annual office party, but as part of an innovation or strategy workshop.

Sit back, hold tight, and hold your tongue. Be prepared to laugh a little, and to wince in pain, and to cry. And make notes whenever you want to do one of those things - because all three of those feelings are telling you the truth.

Minijester pic by Liquid Paper at flickr

Shuffle the service to make it better

Pants first, then the shoes....

When you are designing a service or a customer experience, you sometimes have to do things in a slightly less efficient way.

In other words, you might have to work a little harder backstage to make things smooth for the customer frontstage.

Points to remember:

1. This is hard work. Sorry.
2. But it sells stuff!

I saw a wonderfully simple example of this last week.

Picture the scene: on mega-whizz German express trains they sell coffee by helpfully walking down the carriages with a tray of cups. Nice. The brown stuff is poodle-scorchingly hot, and superfast trains move oddly, so we have a guy in a blue uniform with a very careful gait and nervous expression as he teeters through the train calling out "Kaffee! Kaffee!".

Sadly, his valiant efforts are in vain, as almost nobody buys any. Ever. Everyone has their eyes down, ears phoned and is busy with their novel, highlighter pen or Great Train Journeys dvd. Our poor public servant is steadily ignored.

But if you watch the rows behind him, you will see a dramatic effect. About five seconds after he passes, people smell the java. They look up with bright caffeine-addict expressions, their hands groping in a tight back pocket for change. They lean out of their seats, ready to order and... the guy is gone.

(Actually, he is about three rows away, but it is far too uncool to call him back. So no-one does.)

The effect was proved last week, when our heroic conductor forgot something. He turned around to fetch it, and was staggered to sell his six cups off coffee within three rows. Three rows of people that he had already walked past, shouting, but who had only noticed him when their noses started speaking to their gastric juices.

Doh!

Of course, from the workflow perspective it makes a lot of sense to efficiently walk through the train just once, and waste a pretty good service.

From an experience design point of view - ie the customer's - our conductor needs to walk straight through each carriage first to let people smell that richly roasted aroma, then turn round and get selling. Thrice as much walking, but what a difference!

About a million billion years ago, a guy called Aristotle knew that the sequence of events in a story is as important as the events themselves when audiences emotions were to be excited. How does that apply to your service... from the customer's point of view?

Want to read more like this? Click here.

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Coffee&lips pic by Bitca at flickr
Coffee&window pic by charliebay at flickr