Using customer data to personalize services - in the in-person context
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A presentation for the SEGD 2015 conference in Chicago about my master's thesis research.
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Using customer data to personalize services - in the in-person context
- 1. Andrea Fineman Carnegie Mellon Univ. School of Design Using customer data to personalize services In the in-person context
- 5. anxious traveler provides extra details to soo customer’s anxiety
- 6. Some background John Zimmerman Associate Prof. in Human Computer Interaction Jodi Forlizzi Prof. in Human Computer Interaction
- 9. Services are.. • temporal • invisible purple lighting drinks on demand in-flight magazine clothing/uniform
- 11. No silver bullet! drinks on demand purple lighting
- 12. My design research process Interviews Customer Journey Map
- 13. What I learned • Worst experience: lack of information • Best experience: being rescued from a self-inflicted mistake • Rituals lead to better overall satisfaction
- 14. My service design process: Categories 1. Employee gives customer information about something new or valuable 2. Employee helps customer make a better choice 3. Acknowledgement and recovery from service breakdowns 4. Recognizing the customer’s loyalty 5. Service orientation
- 15. My service design process Continuum’s life-size foam core model of a Holiday Inn lobby VERY EXPENSIVE!
- 17. Online survey
- 19. Design Recommendations Barista automatically knows favorite order of customer who prizes speed and efficiency
- 20. Design Recommendations DON’T tell me about my favorite cereal when I’m in the clothing department!
- 21. Design Recommendations Home Depot worker stops customer from buying latex primer to go with oil-based paint
- 22. Design Recommendations Hotel receptionist tells customer about nearby services she will like
- 23. Design Recommendations Customers DON’T CARE about their usage statistics!
- 24. Design Recommendations Employees like to have customer data
- 25. Opportunities for further study 1. Employee gives customer information about something new or valuable 2. Employee helps customer make a better choice 3. Acknowledgement and recovery from service breakdowns 4. Recognizing the customer’s loyalty 5. Service orientation
- 26. Opportunities for further study • Employee gives customer information about something new or valuable popular, but only if relevant to context! • Employee helps customer make a better choice very promising, especially when preventing mistakes • Acknowledgement and recovery from service breakdowns uninspiring to customers and employees • Recognizing the customer’s loyalty described by respondents as “useless” • Service orientation very popular with customers!
- 27. Andrea Fineman @andrea_day andreafineman.com Icon credits: NAS from Noun project
Editor's Notes
- Hi everyone, I’m Andrea Fineman from Carnegie Mellon University. I just finished my master’s degree there in interaction design and today I’m going to be talking to you about my master’s thesis.
- I want to talk to you about personalization. If you think about some of the most successful online services, they all involve an element of personalization. Netflix, Amazon, and even Google search use customers’ past usage of the service to improve the experience going forward. These features are important to customers and to the companies that provide them. Maybe you remember about the Netflix Prize - in 2009, Netflix awarded a million dollars to a team that won their competition to develop an algorithm that could improve their recommendations engine by 10%.
- Now businesses that provide in-person services like stores and hotels collect a lot of data on their customers as well, through loyalty programs and other technology. But they aren’t using it to alter the service in real-time in a way that’s beneficial or interesting to the customer. Customer loyalty data is mostly used for direct marketing.
- Where there is innovation in this space is with in-store modes on cell phones, bringing technology into the physical space, but this type of innovation leaves out a major part of in-person services, which is the employee.
- I think that soon technology will make it very easy for companies to provide customer data to employees in real time so that the employee can alter their performance for each customer. It’s important for service design researchers to begin studying this type of interaction now so that it can be implemented in a way that’s beneficial and humane for the customer as well as the employee. So to recap, my research project investigates if loyalty program data can be used to help service agents such as cashiers or receptionists to personalize the experience for individual customers. The goal is to improve the customer experience as well as the employee experience. I used research methods common to interaction design research to try to figure out what kinds of personalized interactions are desirable for customers and employees, and then tested my ideas in an online survey.
- I worked on this project with my advisers, John Zimmerman and Jodi Forlizzi, who are service design experts in the department of human-computer interaction at CMU. Before graduate school, I worked in customer experience consulting for three years at Temkin Group, where I learned a lot about what companies are doing to improve customer experience, and just how much room for improvement there is on that score.
- I was interested in this topic in part because it has a lot of applications. Retail is most obvious, but the travel industry, the medical field, and the non-profit and public sector services could also see applications of this kind of personalization.
- So before I talk about my methodology, I want to mention a few things about service design and design research that are relevant to my project.
- In the field of service design, it’s emphasized that services are a product that takes place over time and doesn’t consist of any physical good being exchanged. However, the customer experience is influenced by a combination of the environment where the service takes place and the marketing materials and branding the customer is faced with.
- Therefore, services must be designed not only from the customer’s perspective, but also the employee’s perspective, and upper management’s point of view, and third-party organizations like suppliers who involved in the implementing the service. In other words, every stakeholder’s experience and involvement must be considered. Therefore, a lot of design techniques from many disciplines may be relevant to any service design problem. Service designers find it useful to understand how to use not only traditional design methods but also how to work with marketing, HR, technology and IT people as well as other designers in order to design and implement new service ideas.
- One thing I’ve learned is that in service design, there’s rarely a silver bullet that radically overhauls a service for the better. Usually, successful service design case studies center on one small improvement. It’s by adding on more and more small improvements that service organizations end up developing something that makes a difference.
- Having worked on service design projects in the past, I knew that conducting research to find out what’s desirable and useful to customers and employees is a crucial first step that’s often overlooked in the rush to implement the technology and design the details of the interactions. So, I focused heavily on understanding customer needs and attitudes through interviews with customers, employees, and experts in customer experience. In the beginning I focused on frequent business travelers so that I could compare the what I learned from airline customers and employees like flight attendants and gate agents more easily. With what I learned from the interviews, then I made a customer journey map to synthesize what I learned from my interviews.
- From this round of research I learned that: Frequent travelers’ worst experiences were the result of times they lacked access to information, or felt that information was being withheld from them. Some of the interviewees’ most positive experiences were times they had made mistakes that were clearly their own fault, and employees of the airport helped them. Customers who have travel rituals they enjoy (e.g., visiting a particular shoe shine station, visiting a specific restaurant) seem to enjoy the travel process more and roll with the punches better. Support for such rituals is virtually non-existent today.
- Using what I learned, I came up with a few categories of service features to design around: Category 1: Employee gives customer information about something new or valuable related to the store (i.e., new information relevant to customer’s interests, new products, information that previously was not relevant to customer, but now is) Category 2: Employee helps customer make a better choice. This includes avoiding customer mistakes Category 3: Acknowledgement and recovery from service breakdowns Category 4: Recognizing the customer’s loyalty. This includes giving the customer information related to their own past experiences, like quantified self type stuff, as well as thanking the customer and showing recognition Category 5: Service orientation. This means changing the service based on the customer’s interaction preferences, whether they like to be really efficient or prefer to socialize with the worker
- New service concepts are really hard to test! You have to find a way to depict the scenario, either through a video, a storyboard, or acting out the service with customers, either in an artificial way, or pilot-testing the ideas on unsuspecting customers in actual stores. Even huge companies don’t always have the resources to pilot-test concepts and gather data on what happens. You might remember when Continuum built out a whole life-size Holiday Inn lobby out of foam core in a warehouse in Boston. This isn’t always possible for a lot of companies.
- A common way we test design concepts is a method called speed dating, where we show storyboards depicting a new service concept to potential users. Here are some examples of sheets we hand out during speed dating sessions, which are a little like focus groups. The purpose of speed dating is to see whether the user thinks that the problem being solved is something they relate to. Part of the goal of the storyboards is to push the limits of what users consider to be acceptable.
- I wanted to get plenty of responses from a wide variety of people, both customers and people who work as customer-facing employees, and I knew I didn’t have time to present my concepts to hundreds of people in a focus group type format. So I used an online survey to get my responses. Here’s what it looked like. ###conversationally explain this scenario. #### It had ten design scenarios which each had a customer version and an employee point of view version, and you can see all twenty of those in the paper that goes with the conference proceedings. It was actually a lot of work to figure out how to convey the scenarios in a way that would get respondents to think about the situation and not get derailed by small details that weren’t essential to the design.
- With the results of my survey I was able to develop a set of design guidelines for service designers. I’ll go through those now:
- A service that uses personal data in a way that appeals to an individual customer’s service orientation or that provides utilitarian value won’t be perceived as a privacy violation.
- Data given out of context, even if highly useful to the customer, emphasizes the store’s access to personal customer data (e.g., alerting a customer of a favorite grocery item sale while the customer is shopping in a non-grocery department). Many customers will find this out-of-context data provision intrusive.
- Customers are grateful for interactions that help them avoid a self-inflicted mistake.
- Customers and employees both would like to have access to more information. The amount of information distributed to individual customers can be determined based on a customer’s prior interactions with the service or company.
- Customers are bored by quantified-self-type data, for instance in interactions that provide them with information about their past usage
- Employees may find it useful to have personal information about customers to help them feel like better salespeople. Even if customers find the interactions enabled by that information to be mediocre, the employee gets something out it. I think that giving employees data to help them feel more competent at serving customers may be beneficial to employee job satisfaction.
- Going back to my five categories, I found that some are more promising than others for further study and implementation
- Like I mentioned before, service features that provide useful information IN CONTEXT and which cater to customers’ service orientation are the most promising areas. Furthermore, service features that have some utilitarian benefit like helping the customer avoid a mistake also tested highly with both customers and employees. And finally, providing information that merely recognizes customers’ past usage doesn’t do much for customers or employees.