Service Design resources and insights

At Engine Service Design, we’re constantly looking to reimagine improved services and experiences for the future. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted some incredibly important areas in education that we believe could be addressed, using service design to improve the educational journey.

We all knew that the education system had room for improvement. The COVID-19 pandemic brought this home (literally) as lockdowns forced schools to provide online solutions, for which most were seriously underequipped.

Considered “unconventional” in the early 2000s, the Chief Experience Officer (CXO), or the Chief Customer/Client Officer (CCO), are relatively new positions at a senior executive level. They were originally only considered relevant to customer-centric companies. However, in this post-COVID world, where the customer experience is the main differentiator, companies ignore this important position at their peril. Indeed, the Harvard Business Review argues that all companies should have a Chief Experience Officer.

Over the last couple of years, we have all begun to value positive experiences and connection even more than we did before. Many things we took for granted were taken away from us, forcing us to re-evaluate our priorities.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit no one could have anticipated that the changes in working practice it led to would have such a lasting impact.

Retailers deal directly with multiple customers day in, day out. A positive customer experience (CX) should be a given, but we all know this is not always the case. Some retail brands manage to set themselves apart by offering a better CX than others.

Cast your mind back just a few years and the digital customer experience some companies delivered was enough to differentiate them from their competitors.

As we found in our previous articles in this series of blogs about the employee experience, creating a positive employee experience is vital for companies who wish to attract and retain the best personnel. And designing that experience should be approached with a methodical, results-based process that looks at the experience holistically.

The importance of managing experiences properly is not a new concept. Back in 1998, Gilmore and Pine published an article in the Harvard Business Review, coining the term ‘experience economy’ and focusing on the ‘fourth economic experience’. They argued that the service economy followed the three previous stages of an economy: agrarian, goods-based, and service.

We talked about the experience economy in our previous blog and why the employee experience is so important. To create the optimum employee experience, it is first necessary to understand where the areas of friction are. Only then can a positive experience be designed that will increase productivity, improve retention rates, and enhance brand reputation.