Articles, Experience Design, Featured Articles, Service Design, Strategic Innovation

Over the past five years, user generated content has exploded, filling the Internet with reams of content and bringing along with it the concept of crowd-sourcing or depending on who you ask, co-creation. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, it basically relies on the idea that two or five (or however big your audience is) heads are better than one. While this has been a boon for Madison Avenue folks who can offload the pressure of having to come up with Super Bowl commercials that have sufficient impact to justify the ludicrous airtime costs in exchange for a lifetime supply of Doritos, it is rarely the brand perception changer that some agency creatives would have you believe it to be.

The real differentiation occurs when co-creation is opened up on a product or service design level. While there are numerous examples of co-creation fuelling product design, incorporating it into service design is often exponentially more complex. Unless you are Subway with an intentionally modular product/service, it can be difficult to scale personalized service. As a result, this is where most companies draw the line in their attempts to socialize their offerings. However, it is often forgotten that there are two parties in most service relationships. By not empowering employees to co-create within the service and brand context, organizations are missing an opportunity to provide exceptional consumer experiences and cost-effectively spur organization wide innovation through ground level explorations.

The video below (ZOMG so old) is an example of the type of experiences can emerge when organizations empower their employees to creatively deliver (for the record, I am not entirely convinced this video isn’t the machination of some clever marketing people, but let’s assume it is legit). Have you ever seen faces like that during or after the pre-flight safety announcements? The passengers were provided with not only a unique experience, but a story (and a branded one at that). Those unique customer experiences cannot be driven from the top down. Even if this video had not appeared on YouTube, it would have been an inherently social experience, driving positive word of mouth.

Common Understanding of Strategic Intent
In order for employees to proactively innovate the brand experience, they need to have a clear understanding of the organization’s strategic intent, which is not the organizational goals (sell more burgers, sell more electronics, sell more coffee), but an understanding of how the organization intends to arrive at those goals. However, there is a careful balance required where enough direction is provided to ensure strategic alignment while allowing enough flexibility to adapt to scenarios. For example, take a basketball team. Assuming they understand the game, the goal is clear, score more baskets than the other team, but how do you go about that? As the coach, you could map out plays and call them out for the bench. However, this approach becomes limited when the other team makes adjustments or a play breaks down. Alternatively, you could teach players to understand spacing and movement on the floor, which would enable them to function within the system, but still react appropriately to the variables. The latter is what is required in order to successfully co-create at a service level.

Hackability
In order to empower employees to operate with strategic intent, it is necessary to allow freedom within procedure to allow for hacking. A great example of this would be a waitress confronted with a patron with severe food allergies who before making a recommendation to a patron asks several questions and leverages their understanding of the preparation of items on the menu to suggest a mash-up of two entrees (a la the McGangBang, more on that to come in a later video post).

Collaborators, Not Minions
While everybody is capable of creativity, some are certainly better than others. Those are the people you want to hire. However, you will have to be prepared to provide them with a level of autonomy sufficient to not only allow them to integrate their creativity into their function, but also to keep them engaged.

Celebration and Sharing
One of the keys to driving creativity is inspiration. Organizations need to develop platforms and mechanisms to allow examples of extraordinary service experiences to be shared, celebrated and discussed. How can a San Francisco Hilton front desk employee learn and be inspired by their counterpart in Boston? Front line employees are rarely, if ever, given the opportunity to share and discuss their experiences beyond their immediate co-workers. By allowing and incenting large scale cross-pollination, the best experience innovations will proliferate across the organization and those that are able to continually innovate will have the opportunity to be recognized as thought leaders within their function.