You, as entrepreneur, know best. You are an expert in your trade, you know your team and customers and are blessed with a very strong opinion about your line of business. Yet you see everything is changing and you would love to know how to profit from these changes.

In this rapidly changing world it is extremely difficult to continue to make the right choices. You need to innovate making the most of all the possibilities out there. But there are so many options and you can only spend your budget once. Every day entrepreneurs are faced to take so many choices our heads tend to spin. How do you decide what to focus on and what to invest in?

Nowadays it is extremely difficult to continue to make a difference and tell your story to the right audience in an entertaining and engaging way. There is an overload of channels where you can get your marketing message across, which channel brings you new clients? Where is your customer? Which channel is worth investing in? Where do you get the best ROI?

Service Design helps you do just that! Service Design enables you to create a toolbox of methods helping you to identify your ideal customer. It helps you to focus on offering the ultimate experience for this customer. It helps you to decide in which channel you can reach this customer. And it enables you to work together as a team, learning even more about your business and how it is perceived by your customers and team.

What’s in a name?

Service Design, Design Thinking, Customer Experience Management. They all seem quite complicated terms for methods that do not apply to us. Terms explained in business language that the average entrepreneur does not want to understand at conferences we do not attend and using examples we cannot relate to.

We have a business to run and are too busy to go to conferences where smart people are talking about these things, mentioning how it works for startups or corporates. The team is not trained to work with it. And it all sounds very theoretical, how do you actually use those methods and apply them to reach your goals?

It all seems very irrelevant to the work we are doing, the challenges we are facing, the people we are managing.

However research shows that it is indeed very much needed for Small Medium Businesses to innovate. The report (“jaarbericht van het MKB 2017”) written by the Dutch Committee for Entrepreneurship and Financing states that 60% of the Dutch GDP is generated by SMB and SMB offers to more than 70% of the Dutch employees a job. These figures seem very hopeful, however these figures are realized by 10% of all Small Medium businesses. 90% of the Dutch SMB companies do not or hardly grow. Secondly the labormarket is facing some challenges; a large group of entrepreneurs feel limited in their development because they can simply not find the right people. Others feel hiring fixed staff is too risky and the education is not matching the demand from the rapidly changing market.

The report shows that there are several developments that require immediate action, but mostly all entrepreneusr need to innovate their business- and organizationmodels in order to adapt to new possibilities and circumstances. secondly new skills are needed in employees in this digitalizing world.

Unfortunately financing of these adjustments, innovation and digitalization is not possible for every entrepreneur. A solution would be to create the skills in-house and hire an expert to guide your company though the changes. The tools used in service design and customer experience management are indeed very relevant and can help every entrepreneurs to create growth and innovation. Improving the relationship with customers enables teams to be better equipped to handle the current and future changes.

Using a unique methodology which combines customer-driven feedback underpinned with digital data analysis to create the ideal customer journey for your business. Understanding what your customer needs and how to best utilise your resources for them, allows you to elevate your customer experience creating a presence which attracts the right customers at the right time to the right place.

You, as entrepreneur, know best. You know what is good for your company, you have a vision and you know your numbers. Yet you would love to create growth and innovate your business. You would love to know who to focus on with which message. Investing in the right channel.

Service Design can do that for you.

The post Why Service Design works for all of us appeared first on Business Hustlers.

For example, last week my 4 year old had a party at her school and she was supposed to dress up in a spring or circustheme. She loves to dress up, as any 4 year old does, and I of course wanted to get her the coolest dress ever. Being a mumpreneur and all, time is well..somewhat limited so I ordered a springfairy costume online. Surely I ordered the coolest dress and flowery hairband you have ever seen but right after I paid the thing, all kinds of questions went through my mind: “will she like it?” “will her friends like it?” but mostly “will it be here in time for the party?” “and if not, what the heck am I going to do?” So, you get the state I was in, when I received an email asking for my opinion about ordering at this specific online store before the actual package was delivered! Of course all is well that ends well and luckily the package arrived shortly after this wrongly timed email, giving my 4 year old “customer” the perfect opportunity to say the dress was far too beautiful to wear to a school party…..and that she was going to wear her old fairy costume instead!

Customer Experience Management and Design Thinking are expensive words for methods that offer tools to improve your product or service taking your customer(‘s opinion) into account. By visualizing and analyzing our ideal customers (personas) we can get a better understanding of what drives them in life, we get a better understanding of what pains them and therefore what we can do to take away their pains and make them excel in what they do. Understanding them better and actually getting inside their mind and heart is more a matter of listening than speaking, it is more about receiving than sending information and it is more about asking than replying to questions. But as shown in the fairydress example it is about finding the right timing too.

The way most customer experiences are managed nowadays is more about getting feedback from the customer after the fact (e.g. a new feature has been released, a button on the website has changed or a new service has been added to the porfolio) than anticipating on the customer’s needs beforehand .

Another example, a software company builds in a new feature in their software. A good client has said that they really need this button to be added or that they need a new functionality in the reporting. So the accountmanager talks to development asking for this feature. The developer replies that he actually does not have time but if this is very important to the client; yes of course we can make time. A month later the new button or functionality is released and proudly presented to the rest of the team and clients. The client that has requested it uses this feature but no one else seems to be interested. The new feature remains therefore unused in the system. These kind of excercises that are a waste of time, energy and money on the one and are not generating any extra revenue or happy customers on the other hand, are happening a lot. People tend to be unhappy in their jobs, since they are making things that no one is even looking at and the next time a customer asks for a favor, the team will tend to decline before they even know what it is all about.

Finally it tends to be all about data. Don’t get me wrong, I love data and I am all for using data to validate assumptions or doing research. But we tend to go overboard with this marketing automation thing. People are people, we are not numbers or algorithms. We cannot be put in a box. As a “mumpreneur”, living in Amsterdam West and with a “flexible” income and dito time, I shop at different shops. Sometimes I go to Albert Heijn and Etos and other times I go for the Lidl and the Kruidvat. I love books, novels as well as business books. I read the paper, but not every day (no time) and I drive but prefer to bike whenever possible. My profile, so I noticed, is confusing for algorithms and data driven marketing. So I tend to get the wrong deals in my email or banners which is annoying.

In my humble opinion, proper customer experience management should be all about cocreating (business and customer together) the ultimate customer experience, anticipating on what is to come. This work will then result in a new design, feature or service that your customer actually wants( to pay for) and that your company actually needs and has the resources or budget for. In turn your business can focus on making improvements where it matters to both customer and business, designing the ultimate and people first cusomter experience possible.

The post Customer Experience or Customer Nightmare? appeared first on Business Hustlers.

The post How it all started appeared first on Business Hustlers.