Forget about new and different: Let's innovate to get things right

I met some fascinating, funny and really smart people yesterday at BIF’s Designing your Business: Creating a Compelling Consumer Experience workshop. Presented by BIF Research Advisor Harry West and his firm, Design Continuum, I entered the day with no pre-conceived expectations, spent 7 hours immersed in a process called ‘design thinking’, and emerged at the end with a new idea of what it means to innovate.

First, some design thinking 101. According to Harry West, there are basically two competitive business strategies in the world. One, you can be different. Or, two, you can be cheap. Historically, companies have differentiated themselves on technology. Today, it’s differentiation based on lifestyle and design.

West called it non-technical differentiation and it’s what customers are starved for today. Why? Because it’s completely focused around those elusive ‘un-met’ customer needs. (I loved the Charles Eames quote West provided to define design—“Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.”)

Following a brief overview of what it means to be a design thinker, and an interesting case study of the design of P&G’s Swiffer, the folks at Design Continuum broke us into small group teams and gave us each a mission—to determine whether there’s an opportunity to create a better payment experience for a retail or food establishment.

As part of Team Blue, I set off with my able and eclectic group of compatriots for a 2-hour jaunt through the streets of rainy Providence, entering a variety of convenience stores and one pretty decent sandwich joint.

We observed, photographed and interviewed each other about our experiences buying an Rx item. Sounds simple, but don’t be fooled. This phase of design thinking is tedious, and repetitive. We learned, through our Design Continuum advisor Kory, how to be exhaustive in our observations and lines of questioning.

Armed with our user research, we returned to reflect and analyze our findings. Everything we learned from the day was mapped, sorted, segmented and framed to guide us on developing the ‘big idea’.

And we came up with some pretty decent big ideas. Ideas like a ‘smart card’ that would contain both our rewards info. and our payment info. in order to speed up the check-out process and take away the need for all those pesky FOB’s on our keychain. A few of us wanted to decouple the payment process from customer service all-together, enabling a new form of payment that wouldn’t require human interaction. (That would take place on the floor, where people really need help.) Others suggested new methods of line formation, or new bagging options.

All good ideas. But you know what, the bulk of our group kept returning to an observation we made earlier that was so basic, so fundamental, that someone said we were throwing back to the 1950s and perhaps missing the point of the exercise—customer service.

You see, the one consistent takeaway from each of our experiences, was a lack of customer service. No eye contact, total disregard for pleasantries, limited assistance when asked. Now before you think I’m going down some hokey path, none of us were asking for much—just a common connection of courtesy.

Right now, innovation in customer service means embracing new technology. Everything from ATM’s at the register, to coupons on demand, to self-service web portals. It seems to me that we’ve lost sight of what Charles Eames called the ‘particular purpose.’

So what did I learn from the design strategy innovation process? With all the talk about the importance of innovation and creating value, let’s stop the focus on the next new thing. Some things don’t need to be completely reinvented. Instead, let’s innovate to get things right. (I’m ready for a healthy debate on what that means for customer service in a self-service age.)

But as Harry West said very early in the day, “most ideas are crap. Just because you could doesn’t mean you should.”

Posted May 11, 2006 07:33 PM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink