Service Innovation

In a recent report, Forrester research present data that correlates a positive customer experience to customer loyalty (link). They surveyed 4700 people and received data on about 1000 companies, regarding the link between loyalty and experience. As they say themselves: Our analysis shows that good customer experience correlates to consumers’ willingness to repurchase, reluctance to […]

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Judith was recently interviewed by the research council for their magazine “verdiskaping”, which is the Norwegian way of saying value-creation.    The article (in Norwegian) describes her earlier work with the airport express train service, which is now ranked #1 in Norway in terms of customer satisfaction. It then describes Service Design, AT-ONE and a […]

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Interesting blog post from Brian Thomson Collins (link) relating the power of design to the increasingly weak power of advertising messages. What makes it relevant and interesting for the service design community is that he repeatedly uses the term experience, and in effect, it is the experience that he argues trumps advertising. Unfortunately he uses the […]

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Razorfish have just released their consumer experience report for 2008 and it makes interesting reading. (Link) The first thing that hits you is the focus upon the importance of social networking. I read this report just after reading a BBC news article “Bosses should embrace Facebook”, (link) in which Demos report on how companies are […]

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I guess I have hammered Starbucks a lot recently, so its nice to write something positive about the prime example of the experience economy. Starbucks has a very nice wizard (link) to help you choose your coffee. A wizard is an aid that breaks a complex decision process up into simple steps, and Starbucks have […]

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I have been writing about the differences between products and services recently, and started to focus upon the aspect of time. Product and graphic designers traditionally haven’t had much practice designing for time – things that happen in sequence during service provision, or a long term relationship lasting years. The focus has been upon the […]

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I have been following the fall of Starbucks with interest, and a recent comment by John Quelch on the Harvard Business Publishing blog (link) entitled “How Starbucks’ Growth Destroyed Brand Value” caught my eye yesterday.The reason for the renewed interest in Starbucks is the recent announcement that Starbucks is to close 600 stores in the […]

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Colleen Jones at UX matters (link) writes a thoughtful view about the term engagement and relates it nicely to experience design. She gives a definition from the Advertising Research Foundation that in my view clouds the matter totally: “Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.”         In her discussion […]

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Judith has had her paper accepted for the Design Management conference in Paris in April. Her paper will focus upon design leadership and some of the terms that it has evolved from (design thinking, design management, strategic design etc).  More information about the conference (here). Judiths abstract is available by mail from her.Simon has submitted […]

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Starbucks, champion of the experience economy (link), is having to rethink its user experience. This is interesting, because in the late 1990’s Starbucks was the iconic example of how you could extract value from staging experiences rather than selling commodities. Coffee beans could only command 1-2 cents a cup, while the Starbucks experience could command up […]

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