Author Archives: Damian Kernahan
Below is the latest blog I just received from Seth Godin. He (as he does most days) makes an important point especially for Service based companies and provides additional reasons why Service Design can be such a potent weapon for progressive companies.It’s not JUST the steak or the phone call or the insurance cover that your customers are buying when they look to buy something from you. It’s not JUST the all the elements that make up the customer journey and everything within it. The touch-points that deliver it, the spaces where engagement with customers occurs through channels such as in-store, call centre, postal mail, or online. The ‘moment’ within each touch-point where there is an interaction and your staff or systems engage with your customers.These are all crucially important and without it, your business will not thrive and grow new and recurring revenue streams. But how do you handle … Continue reading
I really thought this was perfect sense and showed a good understanding of human behaviour or in this case challenges. Simple, elegant and effective – all things that good Service Design should be.Check the railings that the man is holding onto and resting his foot on. It’s located on a little Copenhagen traffic island where cyclists often wait, reports Copenhagenize.com.The City of Copenhagen has implemented this double railing simply as a convenience for the cyclists who stop here. A high railing to grasp with your hand and a foot railing for putting your foot up, if that’s what you fancy doing. Either way you can also use the railing to push off when the light changes.The foot rest reads: “Hi, cyclist! Rest your foot here… and thank you for cycling in the city.”It certainly is a fine example of the City understanding human behaviour and basic anthropology.Enjoy this post? Subscribe … Continue reading
It’s the Me-conomy stupid.And so sums up in just four words the feeling a lot of us have as consumers as yet again we encounter another average service experience with a company we have provided our custom, our dollars and our time, often over many years.In this article we will look at trying to understand why we so often have these average customer experiences, why services are still most often developed using an industrial product mindset and how that might be improved. We will also provide a new approach to ensure that services are more regularly designed with the end user in mind rather than as an organic process, which has little connection to the importance of the crucial revenue stream that it has been set up to deliver.It has been proven there is a huge gap between companies’ and consumers’ perceived customer experience. Bain and Co conducted a study … Continue reading
In the previous article of the Australian Innovation report (Summer 08), we spoke of customer-centric innovation being the management discipline for the new millennium and provided an inside look into a number of Australian companies that have excelled as a result of taking a customer-centred approach.In this article, we will take a step further and delve into the emerging discipline of user-centred innovation – or user-centred design, as it has come to be known – and investigate how some of Australia’s leading companies are using it to advance their growth agenda.Web designers have had a focus on usercentred design and have used it successfully as a discipline for many years and any Google search you care to undertake will be littered with web page and digital references. So what is ‘user-centred design’ and why hasn’t it taken off in the mainstream of Australian business? Why haven’t Australian businesses embraced using … Continue reading
