Social media is not the answer!

Hang on, don’t disappear, I know, I know….the title might not be the biggest crowd puller but bear with me, I have a conversation I’d love to have with you and seeing as I know that most people who read my blog get here via social media I need you to stick around and add your thoughts. Please, could really do with them.

Earlier today @carlhaggerty asked the twittersphere what would their message be to senior managers about the benefits of social media and social learning. My response was an impulsive ‘they can’t afford not to’, which led to Carl asking me whether I could imagine doing my job without social media.

This got me thinking. Blame Carl.

The short answer to Carl, and what I’d like to kick off a conversation about, is that yes I can. Up until about 18mths ago I happily lived my professional life without social media, I think its fair to say that most of the people who I deal with in my professional life are unfamiliar with social media, as a sector adult social care is not known for embracing technology, a lot of the staff are overburdened, under-equipped (technologically) and to be blunt overwrought with the amount of change they are currently dealing with.

Personally social media has without doubt aided my networking; it has introduced me to new people, concepts and learning opportunities; stimulated, frustrated and illuminated in equal measure. For me social media has enabled me to reap many, many benefits. That said it has required time, equipment, mental capacity, personal commitment and a genuine, personal interest and love of people….I’m not sure it would work without those things and I’m not convinced it is the answer!

Increasingly I am reading tweets, blog posts and emails that imply or infer that if only people would use social media life would be transformed. It almost certainly would be – but who knows whether for the better or worse.

I genuinely believe that social media has a lot to offer. I also believe it is simply a tool, a vehicle, a prompt, a conversation starter, an aid….for me it helps what would otherwise happen in real life, it can lead to amazing things, but as with most things in life it can also backfire.

So in response to Carl’s brilliant question – I can imagine doing my job without social media, I am also completely convinced I do a better job as a result of using social media. I discovered lots of social media by accident, I safely played with it in my real life before touching it for work, I would have run a mile if someone had tried to insist or convince me to use it.

Maybe that’s just me, I don’t now, I’m rarely convinced by evangelism. Please keep spreading the social media love people, but please remember it is not the magical solution…in ten years time I imagine social media will take the place of email now, at least in my life – a life changing tool that at times I wish had never been invented! That said, people don’t know what they don’t know so I think our real challenge is to share the benefits, in a positive environment where no question is too stupid and support people to learn the challenges and opportunities for themselves. I’m confident that Carl will be doing exactly that this afternoon. Hope it goes well.

If anyone has any thoughts, comments or reflections, rebuttals or counter arguments I’d love to hear them. Would also love to know of your best examples of how social media has helped or hindered your professional lives … or links to similar discussions elsewhere. Thank you.

Service recovery: customer, process and employee

This is the third instalment of my experience with Virgin Media and so it might not make sense without the back story; if you’re interested in that you can read Virgin Media – the best and the worst, which details what happened over the Christmas break with my lack of broadband and the response from the @virginmedia twitter team, and you can also read my attempts to make sense of my response to that in Service recovery Virgin Media style.

This post serves two purposes, to update on the response from Virgin Media (in case anyone out there is interested) and to pick up on the really useful comments and insights that the service recovery post led to – thank you to everyone who discussed it with me on the blog and on twitter, your reflections were really useful.

Since the most recent post I’ve had a visit from a Principal Technician, Mark, who phoned in advance to arrange a convenient time, who called to let me know when he was running late and who was incredibly pleasant and (as far as I could tell) knowledgeable when he got here. He has reassured me that if we have any further problems it is due to the network and not our equipment and most importantly he left me his contact details so I could get in touch direct with him if we had any future concerns. At this point in time we’ve had continual broadband, no problems and great customer service. So I feel quite satisfied but a few comments on my last post have got me questioning whether my expectations are too low?

I do think though it is a sign that we see these kind of responses as “awesome, great or impressive”.. I think we have grown to bad Customer Service and our expectations are pretty low…[comment from @wimrampen]

I suppose I agree with Wim, my benchmark for customer service is evidently extremely low. My benchmark is born of my experience though. For example, on Friday evening I spent over an hour on the phone to Orange trying to register a sim card. After 62 minutes of a recorded message telling me my call would be answered shortly, I decided to give up and get on with my weekend and sort it when I return to work on Monday. That is the environment within which I was pleased with the personal touch from the Virgin Media twitter team. On the same post @MartijnLinssen shared his experience with Telfort, his former ISP, he quite rightly observed that seemingly Virgin Media had made the better investment in how they sought to resolve my difficulties.

Wim also warns of relying on myths, something so very true to my own approach, see this post about the need to rely on evidence in the design of services. Wim clarifies:

There is little argument about the Service Paradox, but it should also be clear that this will only work as long as it remain incidents. It is not recommended to implement a service recovery strategy as means to increase Customer loyalty.

I feel the need to take responsibility at this stage for possibly mis-representing Fabian Segelström and Jeff Howard’s post, eek. If that was the case I’m sorry. They in no way imply that Service Recovery opportunities should be created or exploited, more that their resolution leads by lucky coincidence to improved satisfaction over all. In an attempt to right this wrong misrepresentation, and in trying to understand more, I came across a journal paper, Why service recovery fails: tensions among customer, employee, and process perspectives. The findings of this literature review support my earlier hunch that this wasn’t about employee incompetence but more about a dissonance between the people working within a system and the different elements of it:

Findings – It is argued that service recovery often fails due to the unresolved tensions found between the conflicting perspectives of customer recovery, process recovery, and employee recovery. Therefore, successful service recovery requires the integration of these different perspectives. This is summarized in the following definition: “Service recovery are the integrative actions a company takes to re-establish customer satisfaction and loyalty after a service failure (customer recovery), to ensure that failure incidents encourage learning and process improvement (process recovery) and to train and reward employees for this purpose (employee recovery).”

So there you have it, it seems that Virgin Media responded well in terms of my customer recovery and I get the impression that there is some internal dialogue that should lead to process and employee recovery. I only hope so. This was also picked up in the comment left by Guy Letts, his experience was similar:

Clearly there are many individuals there who are competent and who care deeply. Actually that’s usually the case with the individuals – as you rightly point out. I used to run a large support operation and we recruited to a high standard, as many do. It’s the empowerment, the systems and the policies that are often sub-standard – and that’s down to top level leadership not just investment.

As Guy points out, the responsibility lies with top level leadership, so I hope that those who hold that role within Virgin are listening. If they are and they’d like to share that with us, and/or they’d like to discuss any of this further, I’d love to hear from them.

The Big School Lottery

This year I’ve been working on keeping a work-life balance so haven’t been working this weekend, instead I’ve been blogging, tweeting, cooking and generally chilling out. Part of that chill out has involved catching up on television that I recorded months ago, including The Big School Lottery, a BBC documentary in three parts about Birmingham Education Authority – the largest in Europe – following a number of families as 30,000 Birmingham secondary school places are allocated.

I found this programme equally fascinating and depressing, while also reminding me of some of my own experiences of school. The most striking thing is sort of obvious – it was how much the children were influenced by their parent’s. Saffiyah, had been tutored by her father for the year running up to her sitting her 11+, she was keen to go to a grammar school but very balanced about the whole situation:

Any of the schools I would have got in to would have offered me something but I think Camp Hill offered me that little bit extra.

Mohsin’s parents had moved to the UK from India seven years before and he had a lot of hopes and expectation riding on him. In the second episode he found out that he had been accepted into his fourth choice of school. His parents struggled to hide their disappointment, despite the fact that he had gained a place at a grammar school, his dad was immediately pointing out that there’s room for improvement. On the first day of his secondary education a teacher tells them if they try their best no-one will complain, at a grammar school I somehow doubt things are that simple. That said his Dad’s ethos was one that I’m sure will see his child go far – he was quick to point out that success doesn’t grow on trees and it can’t be bought in the supermarket, it needs to be worked at, slowly and surely. Mohsin’s father, at the end of his first day points out that hard work always pays out in abundance, while I admire the work ethic, I’m not sure life is that simple. Mohsin offers the following reflection:

The pressure is a good and a bad thing; its good in a way because it will help me in life, and its bad in a way because it’ll be tiring and I’ll be stressed out a lot.

A tiny bit of me dies inside when I hear eleven year olds talking about being stressed out.

Miles, struggled to fit in at primary school and things don’t get off to the best start at secondary school either. Placed in a secondary school three miles from his home, he leaves late on the first day and arrives after assembly had already started, not the best impression. When asked how he was feeling Miles replies:

The three things i’m most worried about are getting lost, getting lost and getting lost.

I can’t help but feel this is a metaphor for life for Miles. He is the most gorgeously enigmatic individual, he wants to be a fashion designer, but he doesn’t really understand why he struggles to make friends. His mum is great, very stoic, “some people are kind, some people aren’t, that’s just life”. She’s right of course but its heart wrenching to watch someone try to deal with that.

Harry attended the Blue Coat Prep School and his parents were clear if he didn’t get into one of his top two choices of grammar school that they’d educate him at an Independent School. Fresh back from his first day at said grammar school he is asked by the film maker what he imagines and hopes his life will be like. His answer:

Counting money, a huge amount (?), and sitting in a pool, that’s what everybody hopes their life would be. I don’t know, I’d probably settle for something like this, maybe….middle class, family with a few children, a dog and a nice house really.

Harry is obviously a bright child and a fabulously laid back one at that. He has the confidence of a child who has never had to go without, I’m not sure whether the very notion of ‘settling’ for a middle class lifestyle belies his ambition or just speaks to his experience to date and his family view of success. In contrast, across town, Jamiah’s mother asks him how his first day went and recounts:

Somebody got detention, somebody got in trouble three times and somebody got sent home…on the first day?

Jamiah’s mum had left school without qualifications and works in Tesco, whereas her brother and sister had both gone on to university, which had left her intent on Jamiah getting a better education than her. She realises that Jamiah needs pushing and makes him commit to keeping out of trouble. Hopefully Jamiah will achieve academically but himself and Harry certainly aren’t playing on a level playing field.

Me (a few years ago)

All of this got me thinking about my own life, the choices that myself and my parents have made and my experience of them. After a fantastic primary school education with very mixed ability classes and a Partial Hearing Unit (where I spent a lot of time hanging out with the kids with hearing problems) I chose to sit the 11+, mostly because my Gran, my Mum and my Auntie had all gone to the local grammar school and I guess I fancied a chance to carry on the tradition! There was certainly no pressure to do so, at the time everyone at our primary school sat the exam as a routine way of grading academic ability and deciding on a secondary school place. I remember being equally excited and nervous about my first day at grammar school and I’ve never forgotten the first assembly. The school hall was massive compared to my primary school, it was full of girls – an odd sight if you’ve never been in single sex education, and we were sat at the front; my head mistress walked onto the stage wearing a gown and mortar board (this was the first time I’d seen one) and after wishing us a good morning proceeded to the following statement:

Morning ladies and welcome….<lots of words that I don’t remember, followed by…> now remember girls you’re the crème de la crème, the top five per cent.

To this day that expression makes me shudder. I genuinely believe that it was well meaning, I think it was meant to instil a sense of pride and confidence. However, for me, it just drove home how elitist and separatist the school was; it wasn’t just the suggestion but the headteacher’s somewhat smug delivery of it. I felt so uncomfortable with the notion that passing an exam meant we were somehow superior to others. It did, and still does, fundamentally contradict my own personal values of appreciating someone for who they are, not for their academic performance. I returned home that day indignant and demanding to leave and go to a different school, my very level headed parents were having none of it – they certainly weren’t exactly comfortable with the sentiment but neither would they let me throw away the opportunity of a grammar school education. Eventually I persuaded them to let me leave school just before my sixteenth birthday to go to college to study for my A-Levels and I never looked back, a whistle stop tour of what I’ve done since then is here. The values of the grammar school system (and my particular experience of it) was what I struggled with and to this day I’m not sure given my time again I’d chose to go to that school.

So what of this life lottery and what can parents do within this inequitable system. I guess for me the most important ingredients to success have always been a belief in self, a strong set of personal values and the support of a loving and accepting family, accompanied by a strong work ethic. Without doubt I received a good education, but I also believe I have achieved a lot in spite of the system. Since leaving school, studying education and psychology has led me to become acutely aware of the impact of self-fulfilling prophecy and the role of (teacher/parent) expectation on achievement, you can read more in Rosenthal’s classic work on this. In a nutshell, children are inclined to achieve what is expected of them, so as a parent or a teacher our expectations carry more weight than we might appreciate; if you expect a child to fail then they are likely to fail, the plus side to this however is that if a teacher or parent has expectations that a child will achieve then they are more likely to do so. My parents always asked us to just do our best, the downside of this might be not knowing when to stop or accept good enough, but the plus side was an acceptance that has allowed us all to take risks and push boundaries. For that I am very grateful.

What is service design?

I’ve been playing around with the idea of writing this post for a while, well I guess on and off for about a year! What started as a wish to understand more has, if I’m really honest, progressed into a minor irritation at the lack of clarity and then just before Christmas I had a phone conversation with Mike Baldwin where I found myself attempting to both define and defend/promote service design as a discipline. Mike was asking great questions; now I’m a little biased and think that Mike is a) one of the good guys b) intelligent and interesting and c) questioning and not ready to just accept an opinion without some substance to back it up. Mike is interested in health and value, he is also interested in research, evidence and rigour and several of our conversations have focused on health care and improving services, drawing heavily for me on my Dad’s experience of cancer, you can read more about that here!

Anyway, when I talk to Mike I realise I’m not the only person who is sceptical and looking for proof when it comes to service design. In fact maybe Mike is, like me, a service design agnostic! I’m not going to recount all of the conversation or questions that Mike and I were batting around but the starting point was pretty much as follows:

> What is service design?
> How strategic is service design?
> What functions is service design optimising? Is it a focus on efficiency, effectiveness, economic imperatives or something else?

For now I’m just going to focus on my attempts to answer the first question. Luckily for me I’d recently attended ServDes conference (you can read more of my thoughts on that here) and so probably felt as well equipped as I’d done in a long time to attempt to define service design as I’d been exposed to many different views and approaches to it. I’d also debated, discussed and extrapolated in the pub the very essence of what a service designer is, the consensus conclusion being there’s no such thing as a service designer! Those conversations had also exposed me to many of the subtleties behind the belief that defining the discipline limits its development – more of that below.

Perhaps most importantly though I had a secret weapon! I had in my possession a brand new shiny copy of This is Service Design Thinking which is available to buy now from the publishers and which I’ll blog about soon – it’s ace, go buy it. TiSDT was launched at ServDes and consequently a copy was given to each attendee at ServDes as a gift I’d already skim read most of it and devoured the opening chapter from Marc Stickdorn (Marc is one of the two editors – along with Jakob Schneider) and so I was confident he’d have the answer.

TiSDT definition chapter opens as follows:

If you would ask ten people what service design is, you would end up with eleven different answers – at least.

Service design is an interdisciplinary approach that combines different methods and tools from various disciplines. It is a new way of thinking as opposed to a new stand-alone academic discipline. Service design is an evolving approach, this is particularly apparent in the fact that, as yet, there is no common definition or clearly articulated language of service design.  [Stickdorn, 2010, 29]

Marc goes on to explain their decision not to just define service design; this is based on an acknowledgement of the need for a common language alongside the concern that by imposing a definition the discipline is in some way being constrained or limited. TiSDT offers a number of different views of what service design is with definitions from a number of institutes, industry bodies, academics and design agencies. What is then provided as a really useful starting point are five principles of service design thinking. Service design thinking is: user centred, co-creative, sequencing, evidencing and holistic.

To set my stall out I think TiSDT is great, I love my copy, I think it has a wealth of information and ideas within it and has already helped me to have confidence to introduce service design to people and defend it when questioned. It introduces a number of fields of activity that implement a range of service design thinking, these include product design, graphic design, interaction design, social design, strategic management, operations management and design ethnography. Each of these fields have a chapter where they are briefly introduced and their relationship to services specified. For me this is really useful stuff. I do however struggle with the notion that defining the discipline would somehow limit it. TiSDT includes a quote from Buchanan (2001) that implies defining design would potentially lead to lethargy or death of the topic in hand and Marc offers the same concern “A single definition of service design might constrain this evolving approach”.

**Disclaimer** At this stage I had a really useful conversation with @fergusbisset – thanks Ferg. He nudged me in the direction of reading Buchanan’s paper for myself and also warned me about opening a can of worms that had seemingly settled down. I understand from him, from some of the people I spoke with at ServDes and from Buchanan’s writing that many hours have been spent on these discussions already, therefore continue this post with a little trepidation. I’m not wanting to rake over old ground but I have yet to find the answer I’m after and have not been involved with the discussions to date, so bear with me

To me Buchanan makes a far more balanced argument than the use of the quote in the book implies. In fact he follows his statement with the following:

However, I believe that definitions are critical for advancing inquiry, and we must face that responsibility regularly in design, even if we discard a definition from time to time and introduce new ones. [Buchanan, 2001, 8]

Buchanan addresses the purpose and use of definitions, classifying them as descriptive or formal. Descriptive definitions, as pointed out by Buchanan, are incredibly useful for acknowledging the influences on a discipline – TiSDT is great at doing this, throughout the book many descriptive definitions are offered and many insights can be gained from that. As I said earlier this is incredibly useful, especially for someone without formal design training or knowledge.

Descriptive definitions also tend to carry emotional weight, they are great for describing what something is or isn’t (stating the obvious I know), but I think for those of us who are more comfortable with an academic or research approach or who are seeking a more formal definition or who simply wish to present a pragmatic, rationed argument as to why they should invest money in something, a formal definition is required. Buchanan offers the following formal definition of design:

Design is the human power of conceiving, planning, and making products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of their individual and collective purposes. [Buchanan, 2001, 9]

Buchanan situates his definition within Aristotelian causes. Human power is the agency of action, conceiving, planning and making the final cause – the end goal that design is focused on, products (in the broadest sense) are the outcomes, the formal cause and accomplishment of individual or collective purpose is the material cause, as human needs, activities and aspirations provide the subject matter. If this definition is adopted the scope of application is pretty much universal and as wide ranging as it gets – I’m absolutely convinced that this could be adapted and used as a formal definition for service design, without limiting it’s potential.

But why do I care? I think by failing to offer a formal definition, rather than limit the development of the discipline by applying unnecessary constraints and restricting creativity, my concern is that there is a risk that the discipline is being limited by its inability to communicate it’s value and worth in a way that different audiences can understand.

Where does all of this leave me, and I imagine Mike? Well we’re not designers but we are interested in the potential of service design. We have an interest in science – physical and social, economics, psychology, health and social care, research and rigour, evaluation and value. We are both also interested in ethics and how these are addressed. It was no coincidence to me that many of the concerns and questions that Mike was raising in our conversation were ones I’ve questioned myself many times before:  how do we know if service design is ethical and/or safe? how can we identify a good service design practitioner? is service design essentially just marketing? is service design essentially just ethnography? is it about aesthetics or something more? what is the relationship between service designer, client and end user? what evidence are policy makers using to decide on the role that service design can/should play? is there clear evidence that it works? how does service design represent uncertainty? what is value and how do we know if service design will bring good value for our organisations?

As I said at the start of this post, I feel that there is a value in looking at the design of services. I feel more confident now to try and articulate that value – in no small part with thanks to ServDes, TiSDT and conversations and questions with and from many people especially @fergusbisset @segelstrom @designthinkers @grahamhill @adamstjohn @rufflemuffin @mrstickdorn @iterations and of course @mikey3982. I would however still like to see a formal definition that I can readily wheel out when someone asks, even if in time it becomes outdated or unhelpful. For now I have the beautiful This is Service Design Thinking that not only contains a wealth of information but also dazzles anyone who looks at it by it’s layout and design….thereby convincing them of the value in and of itself; maybe that’s it, maybe @jakoblies work on TiSDT and the resulting beautiful aesthetically appealing design is actually all that is required, I guess time will tell, they certainly help

I’m sure that I’ll come back to these thoughts as I continue to try and incorporate elements of design and thinking around designing services into my own professional work, so I’d really welcome your thoughts, reflections and any definitions that you find particularly useful. Thank you for taking the time to read this epic post.

Service recovery Virgin Media style

Last night I blogged about my experience of Virgin Media over the Christmas break, you can read the full story here, but in a nutshell my broadband connection kept failing, the information I was given was incomplete and/or incorrect and I was bloody frustrated at missing the online shopping opportunities presented by the Christmas sales! I was also very pleasantly surprised at the brilliant customer service I got from the staff on the Virgin Media twitter team.

Today I’ve been very surprised and impressed at the response, which has included:

* The lovely Virgin Media twitter tweam sent me a thank you for my post and let me know it’d been passed on to other people to try help learn the lessons

* Alex posted a comment on my blog post acknowledging that it had been read and lessons would be learnt

* Two people who I follow on twitter who work for VM got in touch with me personally to apologise on behalf of their company – this was a really lovely touch, they had both offered to help out before and I was impressed with their pride and sense of disappointment that VM had delivered such a mixed service

* Then this afternoon I got a phonecall from the local Field Manager, he explained what had been done the last time a technician came out and that they’d checked the signal levels today and offered for a Principal Technician to come out and run a health check on the circuit (all sounds very New Years Health Kick to me) externally and internally to our property. Bob explained that the Principal Technicians have more sensitive equipment and should be able to rule out whether there are any ongoing, underlying faults on the system. This has been arranged for Saturday so I don’t have to take any further time off work and they are going to ring first thing on Sat and let me know roughly what time they’ll be here – to save me waiting in.

* Alongside all of those responses from Virgin Media, I also got quite a lot of chat and banter on twitter more generally. In amongst the general chat was a link to a post about the call centre script by @Martijn Linssen – couldn’t have put it better myself so I’ll not try, I’m sure you’ll recognise the problem; Guy Letts and Martjin have also been engaging in a fascinating conversation about ‘incompetence masquerading as innovation’, you can read more here on Martijn’s blog post Social Customer Service – Proving you failed?

Photo by Gene Hunt

All of this got me thinking about what is really going right and wrong here and I thought I’d offer my thoughts to help out the VM people trying to learn the lessons!

Is it about staff incompetence? I don’t think it’s that simple. I know that VM have something very right – the people I talk to who work for them, the people who evidently manage their twitter account, even to some extent the technicians we’ve dealt with – they’ve all shown an ownership of the Virgin Media brand and it is evident that they can give great customer service – within the constraints of the system in which they work. I’m not sure if this was clear enough in my earlier post – I’ve been very impressed with (most) of the individuals who I’ve dealt with about this matter – I just think that they could have done better if they were empowered to do so, if they weren’t following a script of options, if they weren’t limited by the equipment they had available; my sense is that this is a problem with the design of the service not necessarily just poor customer service.

Does Guy’s hypothesis stand? Is this incompetence masquerading as innovation? Again I don’t think so. The technology is new, the problems are old, but the response is something different. I feel that social media allows for a different type of response, my issue was that I didn’t have enough information and that I didn’t feel like my concern was understood – the twitter tweam were able to alleviate that, even though the underlying problem has yet to be guaranteed to be resolved. Problems will always occur, services will always break down but the response is what is different here. Add to that they really were taking on board what I was grumbling about – the suggestion that they would ring on Saturday with an estimated arrival time was brilliant, leaves me a little more in control of my weekend; if only that was routinely possible.

My sense is that Virgin Media have responded brilliantly….I consider that I’m lucky in that my grumble was picked up on twitter, if it had been my non-twittering mum experiencing the same problem I’m not sure she’d have got the same response or be as happy as I am, but then I guess less people would likely hear about it. A few months ago I blogged about a small problem I’d had with the awesome Pizza Cafe Newton and their brilliant response. Fabian Segelström read that post and later used it as an example of good service recovery. So what is service recovery I hear you ask? Rather than reinvent the wheel I’ve quoted from Fabian and Jeff Howard’s blog post about it:

…research has led to four major findings on how service failure and subsequent recovery affect customers’ loyalty towards a service company:

1. Service failure has a negative effect on customer loyalty intentions.
2. Failure resolution has a positive effect on loyalty intentions.
3. Customer satisfaction with the recovery has a positive effect on loyalty intentions.
4. Outstanding recovery results in loyalty intentions which are more favorable than they would be had no failure occurred.

Whereas the three first findings could be expected, the fourth is somewhat of a surprise and has become known as the service recovery paradox. The service recovery paradox means that a customer might be more satisfied with a company although they didn’t deliver on their first attempt than if they had delivered the service without errors, if the recovery action is perceived as very good.

Fabian points out that current estimates are that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to retain one; at this point in time I feel that Virgin Media have done all they can to resolve my problem – with the responses I’ve received today I feel like they 1) care and 2) might get to the bottom of it, so I guess at this point in time I am one of those rather random customers whose loyalty intentions might improve as a result of the failure I’ve experienced. For now at least. I think it’s about investment, illogical as it feels to put up with a deficient service, attempts at service recovery mean that I now feel like we’re in this together, it’s no longer my problem it’s *our* problem, in fact this feels like a joint investment between me and the best bits of Virgin Media.

Ultimately the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, if the problem continues and it can’t be found out why then I will have to look to move to another service provider, but at this moment in time my broadband is tickety boo and my loyalty to Virgin Media unquestioned. So again, thank you Virgin Media and thanks to Martijn, Guy and Wim for stretching my thinking on this one. Thanks also to Fabian and Jeff for doing the research leg work – nothing like some evidence informed thinking about the design of services.

Virgin Media – the best and the worst

Like most people I was really looking forward to my Christmas break away from work, a chance to chill out a bit, unwind, step away from the to-do list and just generally recuperate. Life has been a little hectic of late and I was really looking forward to spending some down time, getting up late, slouching on the sofa, surfing the interwebs, chatting on twitter, online sale shopping – I’m sure you can picture the scene.

Photo by preoccupations

Unfortunately for me Virgin Media had other ideas. Early in December our broadband connection stopped working, a phonecall to a Virgin call centre in India meant being talked through various tests – turn the modem on and off, reboot things, cross you fingers, wish on a star – you know the drill. No joy meant that a technician was booked to come out and fix it. This required someone to be home to let the technician in and they couldn’t come until the day after next. To be fair to Virgin at this stage they refunded the three days that we were without service. By some miraculous trick the interwebs magically mended itself the day that the technician came along so he had nothing to do but leave his mobile number for any further problems in the next fortnight. So far so good.

So when the broadband connection went down again the week of Christmas I wasn’t too concerned and just assumed that the Virgin Media fairy would wave her magic wand and all would be well in the world. However this wasn’t the case, I couldn’t get time off work at such short notice so couldn’t take the first available appointment and agreed to wait in for the technician on Dec 28th – even I wouldn’t begrudge the VM technicians a holiday but it did mean I couldn’t get the sale bargains I had my eye on Tuesday 28 Dec saw a different technician – who came in, replaced all the equipment (all of it, couldn’t even test it) before telling us what we already suspected that the problem was something external to us (the first time the problem occurred was very snowy, the second time the snow had started to thaw and we suspected it was something outside as nothing internal had changed), he went down the street to an external box (where there was a problem with the points), changed the connection and left reassuring us all would be well. No mobile number given this time – too busy I guess.

For a brief sojourn connectivity was restored, aimless tweeting was engaged in, sales shopping done, christmas emails exchanged, facestalker perused and blogging engaged with. It was fantastic – nothing like a period without internet to make you really appreciate it when it’s back. Only problem was that the new found love for VM was very short lived….by the next morning it was dead again.

You get the picture at this stage – phonecall to Virgin, a Scottish lady called Shona answered – she was very polite while seemingly completely unable to use any discretion – so I explained the situation and that it had happened twice already this month and that the problem was external, she followed her script – insisting that we turn everything off, follow the tests so she can tell me that the problem was external. Grrr. She was terribly sorry but we’d have to wait until the following week to see a technician as they were short staffed over Christmas. My plea to Shona was that however long we waited please could she ensure that someone came who could actually diagnose/fix the problem rather than just treat the symptom – I’m not sure she understood what I was getting at but she wouldn’t budge. So I hung up and bitched to my twittersphere (via my mobile) about the lack of value Virgin Media seemed to place in my time and the lack of concern about solving the problem.

Drumroll please, cue superhero music….in stepped the Virgin Media twitter team. This was Virgin Media at it’s best, they asked what the problem was, offered to help, asked for my details and phoned me, I wasn’t available so they phoned me back ten minutes later. The guy I spoke to was lovely, agreed that they would now ‘own’ the call which meant they could coordinate it and get it sorted. They promised to get me back online as soon as they could but more importantly they genuinely understood the inconvenience and they cared about it….well to be true I don’t know if they did care but it felt like they cared! There was no script, there was banter and empathy, a human response. All was OK, I understood them and they understood me, we could be friends. The VM twitter team worked their magic and arranged a technician to come out the next day between 8-1pm. This would be the third day we’d had to wait in for Virgin but it didn’t matter, we trusted it would get sorted.

The next day I was like an excited kid waiting for a visit from their favourite friend I was up, showered and decently human at 8am just in case the technician stopped off at ours first. 9 o’clock came and went, 10am, coffee at 11am, baked gingerbread and thought the technician could have gingerbread and tea. 12 noon came and went, 1pm….you know that feeling when you’re waiting for a date to turn up but you just know they aren’t going to come. Well yeh, that! At about half one I tweeted my disappointment, the VM twitter team were on the case, they’d try find out what had happened.

Eventually at about 3.30pm I got a phonecall from the technician who had been the time before….he agreed that it was a problem external to our home, he explained that there was no need for me to wait in, I’d wasted an entire day, he didn’t need to come into the property at all because it wasn’t a domestic problem, it was a network problem. Unfortunately the network team were out sick so there was only one guy covering all the surrounding area. I chatted with him a bit and in the course of about a five minute conversation I heard excuse after excuse – the team were out sick, Christmas meant they were too busy, the call centre put notes on but no-one reads them – when questioned on this he claimed his system didn’t allow him to read the notes of our job until it was due otherwise he’d have let me know hours ago not to wait in. He explained how his equipment doesn’t work and he can’t test certain things so he just has to replace everything, then he mentioned that apparently we’re different to the whole of the rest of the country and the call centre just don’t understand the system here. So in a nutshell I’d wasted an entire day and if I was lucky, and he could get hold of networks, and networks weren’t overwhelmed then there was a chance they’d swop out the amp in the box down the road and hey presto the magic would do its work. I took his number (once he remembered it) and he promised to call me back once he’d spoken to networks and let me know what was happening. I’m still waiting for that call. I’m guessing networks did their job and for that I’m grateful. I now have broadband and the VM twitter team were awesome and sent me a tweet to check all was sorted. I guess for now we’ll wait and see how long the solution lasts but it took three days of my life and pretty much took the shine off my Christmas down time.

I understand there are busy times at work and that people get sick and that systems don’t work brilliantly, I understand that the people in the call centre are following their scripts and can’t make autonomous decisions. I also understand that as a customer I don’t want to hear excuses, I want someone to take ownership and to relate to the inconvenience. I’m tempted to bill Virgin for three days of my time wasted resolving this but luckily the twitter team did a good enough job that I’m calm for now, because I felt listened to! My letter to Richard is still in my drafts folder, instead I wanted to shout loudly about how awesome the twitter team are and thank them for their contribution to improving my Christmas. Thank you @virginmedia.

ServDes: value, trust, transparency, ethics and shared expertise

A couple weeks ago I had the absolute pleasure of attending ServDes, the Nordic Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation. Held in beautiful Linköping in the middle of the South of Sweden (Swede’s seem intensely proud of which bit of Sweden they’re from so I thought I better clarify that), the research conference was focused on ExChanging Knowledge. Acknowledging that most publications in the field of Service Design have focused on establishing the discipline, the call for papers for ServDes was an explicit invitation to those in research and practice who wished to contribute to developing the service design knowledge base to:

“…openly discuss challenges of the field. Changing Knowledge is about investigating the fundamentals in service design and challenging the knowledge inherited from the disciplines which service design has grown out of. Exchanging Knowledge refers both to integrating knowledge from other fields and the ongoing conversation between conference participants with their various roles; consultants, students, in-house, clients and academics”

The full conference programme, linked to all the papers presented, is available on the conference website. Better still you can view videos of all the presentations on the conference Vimeo site. The conference kicked off with an unconference day; myself and Fergus Bisset hosted a room exploring Evidence Informed Practice in the Design of Services. You can read our session outline here and we’ll report the day in another blog post shortly. I really enjoyed the day, we met some fantastic people with a range of views and we had some great input from people on twitter who weren’t able to be at the conference….but more on that later.

For now I wanted to just offer a few of my highlights, thoughts and reflections. I’m sure these will develop over time and more blogs will follow but this post in itself is way overdue now so I wanted to put this out there as a starting point. I have chosen to just offer random thoughts, grouped where possible, but not linked to the conference programme in any structured way – partly because I prefer chaos, partly because I’d like (at some stage) to comment on some of the papers in more detail and partly because it all merged into one amorphous collection of thoughts in no small part influenced by the pre-servdes chats and the learning and conversations outside the conference proper. When looking through my notepad of scribbles and drawings from ServDes I found a napkin on which I’d scribbled a bullet pointed list of the key terms and phrases that seemed to emerge throughout the conference – the top four for me were value, trust, transparency and shared expertise. As good a place as any to start methinks.

Value – what a biggy. Value came up again and again, with reference to the value of service design as a discipline and of design more generally. Katarina Wetter Edman reported her (PhD??) study on value in design, you can read her paper here. She referenced Graeber’s four (anthropological) perspectives on value: the concept of doing good, value in a monetary sense, value as meaning and meaningful difference and value as action. WetterEdman’s research found that designers don’t talk about value, not as an explicit concept, the v word was rarely mentioned with a preference given to talking about emotions, contextual understanding and helping others. Within that, designers tended to focus on value in use and/or economic benefits – the real challenge of this perspective of course is that value is a value-laden and individualistic perspective (apologies for stating the bleeding obvious) and therefore how designers understand and share ‘value’ is key to success.

Value is without doubt key to judging what the outcomes of good service design are. It struck me time and again at ServDes when I asked people why they were interested in designing services or what service design is (I’ll come back to that in a later blog post), that almost everyone made reference at some point in their answer to wishing to do good or to the fact that they wanted to make a difference. I admire, respect and whole heartedly support anyone’s intention to do good or make this world a better place – however as genuine as I am in that sentiment, I am also incredibly wary of the damage that good intention’s can do when left without recourse or measure! This may all sound terribly worthy (and at some level you’d be correct to view it as such) but in few other professions would young graduates be given free reign and direct contact with people relying on services without any support, checks or balances – personally I think this is less of a concern when relating to someone’s experience of their supermarket shopping trip than raising their hopes about their ability to influence their lives, their community, their health service or something else of significance for their future.

In my opinion one feature common to both the concept of value and the intention or wish to do good is ethics. Without a consideration of ethical standards I’m unclear of how anyone can have confidence that they aren’t doing harm, or indeed that they are making a positive difference and doing good. The topic of ethics came up a few times at ServDes – probably more in the informal break and lunch conversations than in the papers, we discussed it in our EIP unconference and Sarah Drummond made reference to it in her case study presentation, building on some of our earlier conversations and some topics we’d thrashed around the night before. Sarah was reporting the Getgo Glasgow case study and drawing on her experience gained through her Masters studies, you can read her blog post about it here. Sarah’s blogpost that followed her presentation drew heavily on Don Norman’s post, Why Design Education Must Change, which deserves a blogpost in its own right to continue the conversation. Don’s post complements the unconference discussions we were having around the use of evidence in design, he states:

Science is difficult when applied to the physical and biological world. But when applied to people, the domain of the social sciences, it is especially difficult….Designers, on the whole, are quite ignorant of all this science stuff. They like to examine a problem, devise what seems to be a solution, and then announce the result for all to acclaim.

I’ll discuss this further in a later post but would like to think that the time is coming when designers will freely, openly and confidently discuss the ethical implications of their work. Which brings us on to trust and transparency. I’ve been digging around trying to learn more about service design for just over a year now; the notion of designing for services make sense to me, I am certain that service and experience of service is as, if not more, important than product – my interest is in the journey, not just the outcome, and yet I was tentative about attending ServDes. In part this was because I had followed the SDN (Service Design Network) conference in Berlin from a distance, dipping in and out on twitter, and was even more sceptical about service design at the end of it. Throughout that conference the twitter stream was predominantly self-promotion, lots of patting on the back, lots of bigging each other up, very little critique, discussion or reflection – obviously I wasn’t there but from the outside I was left underwhelmed and sceptical about the value of attending ServDes!

For those of you reading this with an understanding and unquestionable belief in service design I’m sure this may come across as quite harsh or unduly cynical, however I consider myself to be a service design agnostic – I’m just waiting for more proof! I was a little nervous about how I would find ServDes and how open people would be to discussion and debate, to questioning and challenge. It is fair to say the whole conference experience far exceeded my expectations from this regard; I met some fantastic people who seemed equally ready to have these discussions and I think some were even seeking them (that or they were all just exceedingly polite with me). I found a humility about service designers which on the whole I had not felt before – maybe that is what comes from immersing yourself in someone else’s discipline, maybe it was the effect of people being able to be honest and let their guard down (in the absence of many clients), maybe it was an environment created by the explicit focus of the conference on openly discussing challenges in the field or maybe it is just the stage in development that the discipline is at, I’m not sure which but I was blown away by how honest (some) people were about not having all the answers. For me there is a real need for trust and transparency – designers don’t have all the answers, none of us have all the answers, so the earlier we admit that the easier things are. From what I heard at ServDes there is very much a focus on multi-disciplinary working and/or gleaning tools and techniques from many different established disciplines and for this to be successful, people need to be honest. To build successful and ongoing relationships between customer and client, between designers and users, people need to trust each other and be transparent in their dealings.

Which leads on to my final reflection about shared expertise. In my experience to date in life, most progress is made working in a team, with a range of people who between them hold a broad spread of skills, abilities and approaches. I can’t imagine that successful design is any different. There is an absolutely solid evidence base about what factors help and hinder multidisciplinary working and lead to best use of shared expertise. Common challenges are around identifying a shared starting point, a common language, a way of working and creating an environment where people feel able to question the status quo and admit when they don’t have the answer. ServDes was a great success for me in this regard – the designers, marketeers, students and academics I met were all open to my alternative approach, in fact I felt very welcomed into the conference (no small achievement for someone with a below par starting point, a different professional language – evidence anyone?, and an irritatingly challenging approach to learning new stuff – which is a glossy way of saying if I don’t understand something I tend to ask too many questions); I very much hope that the conversations that were started at ServDes – both in person and through twitter – will continue to develop over the coming months.

A massive huge TACK to everyone from the Cognitive Science Dept at Linköping University who arranged ServDes; to all the volunteers and especially to Stefan, Johan (on the left) and Fabian (on the right) for the very generous Swedish welcome and the awesome conference.