Good Services. Lou Downe

Above all other changes in technology and culture as we know it, there are three things that have influenced our understanding of services more than anything else: the invention of the postal service, the telephone and the internet.

       With the invention of the postal service, and with the growth of the newspapers, magazines and printed advertising that went along with it, we were suddenly able to access services remotely where we would have previously had to access the service in person.

       Almost overnight we were able to send away for something in a newspaper, or write to a hotel to book it in advance, instead of visiting a physical location to access that service.

       Our choice of service at this time was largely dictated by how well the marketing of that service worked, given that we weren’t able to do any research on a service before using it, unless a friend or family member had used it before.

       Multibillion dollar business Sears is a perfect example of this era, launching its mail order catalogue in 1906 in a format that was smaller than any magazine, just so it would be placed at the top of any coffee table reading pile.

       With the invention of the postal service, suddenly the thing we were trying to do was separate to the service of getting access to it in a way that it had never been before, and telephony furthered this still – now you could not only get access to products and issue direct instructions remotely, but make enquiries, ask questions and make complaints, all from the comfort of your own home (or phone box!).

       Now that more people were involved with providing services, those services needed to be standardised in a way that they could be provided consistently. The dawn of computerisation in the 1960s saw an upswell in standardised processes, forms and algorithmic decision-making that was to continue for another 30 years, until the invention of the internet as we know it.

       With the invention of the internet, the product and the service became the same thing once again, as the process of signing up, signing in and using the service all became part of one continuous journey. The direct connection between thinking about using a service and actually using it had been re-established – in a way it hadn’t been since simply rocking up to an inn and asking to sleep. So services were once more judged on functionality or the usefulness they could bring to our lives through trial and error, not simply the power of the marketing message.

       Advertising was no longer able to sell us something that we couldn’t prove worked, or wasn’t useful in the same way that it once did, and we now exist in a world where we compete on the quality of our services, not the strength of our messages.

       But the transition from one method of delivery to another hasn’t always been plain sailing. Services are so affected by the technology we use to deliver them, that they often retain the ways of working that this technology dictates, well after they have been moved to another channel, unless great effort has been taken to understand how that service should work in its new incarnation.

       When the internet happened, the majority of these pre-internet services were ‘digitised’ in order to be consumed through 21st-century channels, but otherwise remained mostly unchanged.

       For organisations that predate the internet, this has often meant operating a portfolio of services of differing vintages, each bearing the hallmarks of the era in which they were designed and that, ultimately, don’t work in the way that services native to the internet do.

       These services were designed for a world where a person was always on hand to help you to do something – be that filling in a form, choosing a product or returning something. But this is not how services work on the internet. Services that needed expert knowledge were fine in the 1920s when we experts were on hand for support in a high-street branch, but it certainly isn’t fine when a user is trying to find and navigate a service on their own.

       The internet has changed the way that we access and use services, and our expectations around doing so, even if that service is not actually used online.

       Regardless of how your service is consumed, the internet is where your users start, probably on their own and, based on global internet usage patterns, probably on a mobile device. Google (or an equivalent search engine) will be where they start, and then on to homepage to your service. The major challenge this creates is that your user will start by looking for what they think they need, not what you’ve decided they need.

       If what they find is something that doesn’t match this, or requires prior knowledge to be able to use, they will go elsewhere (if they can) or seek another way of getting support to use your service – probably over the phone. Either way, your revenue is likely to go down, or the cost of your service will go up. Pre-internet era services still account for the vast majority of the services we use, and were designed for a very different world to the one we now live in. But changing our services to be ‘of the internet’ rather than ‘on the internet’ has happened at a slower rate than the internet itself has changed. This is partially because we often don’t rely on a new technology until that technology is ubiquitous. Since we don’t have one clear definition of this, the more cautious organisations often lag well behind, waiting until the majority of their customers use a particular technology before changing their services. This means that services often keep a channel as a back-up long after the technology has ceased to be the main means of access for users, which in turn leads us to try to run the same service in multiple channels, without thinking of how that service would work natively in its new environment.

       The simple fact that our services weren’t designed for the channel they’re delivered in is one of the most common causes of service failure.

       A timeline of services

       1840s: letters

       Services first started to be accessible remotely through direct correspondence to the service provider.

       1920s: forms

       These letters of request started to become codified into ‘forms’ to improve the speed and accuracy of people responding to requests.

       1960s: forms + support

       With the first call centres becoming popular means of supporting customers, remote support started to be added to larger services, such as insurance and banking.

       1970s: process + forms + support

       With the introduction of computerised processes, the 1970s heralded a new way of seeing a service. No longer a set of instructions given to staff, computers started to make some decisions about our services for us. Making sure that records were accessible to staff meant having account numbers and an increasing number of unique IDs to identify users.

       1980s: process + forms + customer service

       The 1980s saw a rapid expansion of consultancies and methodologies to deal with the numbers of services now operating with remote support. The term ‘customer experience’ was first used to describe the growing need to make sense of the complexity of modern services. These were still mostly manual input, and the ‘form’ still dominated as the main means of interaction.

       How services work now

       Services today are composed of small component pieces joined together through data or user experience to form a seamless user journey that helps a user achieve their goal.