Kate Edgar

Service Design Manager, Adaptive Path at Capital One

Wed 24 May, 2017, 14:00

Service Experience Games: Design them. Play them.

Here’s a little secret: your customer knows your business really well. Yep, they know about your siloes. They experience them every time they’re asked to repeat their personal information, and during every hand-off, every clunky API, and every communication glitch.

With business incentives tied to customer acquisition, retention, and overall satisfaction, it is no wonder that companies have bought into customer journeys and service blueprints.

These tools promise to smooth everything out, and deliver the coveted “ideal experience.”

Hahaha. Good luck with that. Fast-forward 6 months. You’ve designed whiz-bang journey maps and blueprints. But, nothing has changed? Why not?! Many companies have the best of intentions for improving customer experience, but don’t want to go through the pain of fixing their actual business.

“I thought you were designing the Service Experience. Why are you talking about changing our process? Why are you requesting new features? Why are you talking about new tools and process organisation-wide?”

<Insert epic power-struggle here.>

Listen here—you are overstepping merely by doing your job. You can’t just redesign, or even tweak, a service without fundamentally affecting the operating model, the underlying processes, and key enterprise systems. That means a lot of change and for a lot of people. Point blank: your blueprint is scary. And can you really blame them for feeling afraid?

Here’s your new motto, “Participation leads to buy-in.” Change isn’t so scary when those affected feel less like the change is happening to them and more like they are actively participating in it. In this situation, you are the service provider. The service you provide is to facilitate other people driving organisational change: team-by-team, process-by-process. This is what will move things forward.

In this half-day workshop you’ll:

Learn how to design Service Experience Games to turn power struggles into collaborative relationships. I’ll introduce you to the building blocks of game design, and show you how to put them into practice. You’ll prototype and iterate Service Experience Games in response to real-life scenarios—helping you to collaborate more effectively with all of the people (and the systems, process, and tools) that have a stake in the success of the Service Experience you are designing.

About Kate Edgar

Kate Edgar is a Service Design Manager for Adaptive Path at Capital One. Prior to Capital One, Kate brought product strategy, design, and business innovation to Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, and government institutions, some include Nike, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Samsung, and The Ministry of Health of Palau. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design, Kate’s experience has since spanned across Micronesia, East & West Africa, and Latin America, as well as across the industries of healthcare, financial services, and hospitality. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Kate also serves on the Board of Directors for Creative Reaction Lab—a creative response to social injustices in Ferguson.

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