What makes a bad service?
When E.T the Extra Terrestrial came out in the Summer of 1982. It was a BIG DEAL. So big that it it remained the highest selling film for another 11 years until Jurassic Park knocked it off it’s perch.
At the same time Atari (the worlds largest Games producer) entered into a 3 month-long bidding war for the right to produce ET the video game. That time-frame might seem strange to our modern ears. By the time we go to the cinema these days the merchandise for the film we’re seeing is already in the shops, but this wasn’t how it worked in the 80s, and 3 months after July doesn’t give you long to produce your game in time for the Christmas.
To solve this problem Atari’s management turned to a man called Howard Scott-Warshaw, one of their best (and crucially fastest) games producers and said “Howard, you’ve got 5 weeks to make a video game”.
Poor Howard. Even if we aren’t familiar with game production, 5 weeks is instinctively not a long time to make a video game. Most modern games take 3-5 YEARS to make and even with 1980s technology aspirations 5 weeks is not long enough to produce anything good.
Howard Scott-Warshaw in his temporary home office, possibly contemplating his career choices.
Atari moved all of Howard’s equipment into his house to speed up the process, but good as Howard was, it was an impossible task.
E.T the video game wasn’t good. In fact it was so bad that Atari didn’t sell even a third of the cartridges they produced (dumping the unsold cartridges in White Sands National Park). Worse still, an already financially precarious Atari became bankrupts as a result, leading to the start of what became known as the great video game crash of the 1980s.
How did this happen? a successful company brought down in its prime, bringing a whole industry crashing down around it?!
There are lots of explanations but they all boil down to one simple reason - bad decision making.
This wasn’t the first bad video game Atari had produced, in the previous 5 years they had gone through a massive expansion of staff and brought in a huge swathe of new management, all extremely expert in retail and sales, but none with expertise in video games. As a consequence Atari created the ideal conditions where asking for something completely impossible seemed completely reasonable, with disastrous results…. Sound familiar?
Atari made this mistake because they didn’t know what the effect would be on the end product they were producing. The organisations we work with make mistakes like this all the time, in fact this is the most common reason for poor service design; that we don’t know, or think about the consequences of our actions on the services we produce.
We like to imagine that the job of designing services is filled with user-research and post-its filled with ideas, but in reality, service design is about 10% design. The rest of the 90% is spent creating the conditions for that design to happen - understanding the barriers to delivering good services, and systematically fixing them whilst we’re designing the service its self
The biggest barrier we have is that we’re often surprised by and unprepared for these challenges.
Why do we make bad services?
Good Services taught us that what we all need from services is far from unique. There are some things that almost all users need from almost all services, like being able to find it or use it without getting stuck in dead ends. But just as there are similarities in the services we need to deliver, there are similarities in the struggles we all experience delivering those services too.
At some stage almost every organisation will struggle to see services as real things that can (and should) be ‘designed’ consciously. They will struggle to organise themselves in a way that will allow them to deliver good services, and to top it off, they will battle an outdated management culture that won't see the issue with these things. This is normal.
The things our users need from our services aren’t unique, and the problems we have in delivering those services aren't either
When we experience these things they feel unique. We feel alone in our struggle, but we’re not.
These ‘challenges’ are the reality of designing services. Much as a carpenter might swear at how hard a piece of mature oak is to turn, we face a similar frustration at designing services in big, old organisations. But just like the grain of a particular wood, the environment we’re in is the material we work with. Services are made of people, sometimes those people are difficult to work with.
To help us deliver good services, we need to be able to identify the barriers to delivering good services before they happen, and to prepare ourselves and our teams to tackle them.
Of the hundreds of organisations I've worked with over the past few years, some big patterns have emerged in the problems we struggle with when designing services. So, here are the 10 reasons why organisations struggle to deliver good services,
I’ll write a more about how we tackle these in the future, so consider this the start of a series looking at the flipside of Good Services, welcome to Bad Services; a series of indefinite length in which we’ll look at why it’s so hard to deliver good services and what we can do to make that process easier.
10 causes of bad service design
1. Your services are invisible
Let’s start with the most common problem we have problem - that your organisation can't see the services it provides.
A service is something that helps someone to do something, like learning to drive or buying a car. It connects all of the individual things you need to do to get to that goal. These connections can often be hard to identify - a thankyou for your purchase email with a customer services link in it, a medical referral that allows your doctor to see your test results.
The lack of visibility of these connections means that our users are often the only ones who are aware of these links, as they are the only ones who experience them.
As a result, we often don't realise that these connections exist, or are as vital as they are, until they break and our users are left stranded.
What we end up with is a mismatch between what your organisation thinks a service is, and what your user thinks the service is.
This is by far the most common and difficult issue organisations face in designing services. It’s this lack of visibility that forms the first and biggest barrier to designing service, because we can’t design something until we acknowledge that it exists in the first place.
2. No one can remember why the service exists
Services exist to help people to do something that they either need to or want to do, but asking ourselves the question of why we provide that service can be a hard question to answer.
There’s usually a reason - we want less road deaths, more diverse people in sport, or to sell more affordable high quality swimwear. Whatever the reason is, it will usually be something that we talk about a lot at the outset of creating our service, but over time, we talk about less and less, sometimes to the extent that we forget what the original intention behind our service was.
This ‘forgetting’ of why a service exists is natural. Over time, the conversations we have about our services mature from why we’re delivering the service and what it needs to do, to how we deliver it.
But after years of staff churn, slowly, that lack of needing to talk about the purpose of the service becomes a lack of ability to do so. We have either collectively forgotten why the service exists or we feel like asking is now unacceptable because we're supposed somehow to know the answer…
Either way the end result is the same. What the service is supposed to deliver and how the service works become so detached from one another that our service doesn’t actually deliver the purpose it was intended to deliver in the first place.
3. Your organisation has a toxic relationship with your users
Although most organisations believe wholeheartedly in supporting their users. Sadly many have a relationship with them that is far from equal, or healthy.
Every industry from medicine to banking has a reason why they don’t trust their users. Each is slightly different, but tends to amount to something like ‘they don't know what they want’ or ‘what they want isn’t sensible’.
Over time we start to perpetuate myths about your users, myths like ‘they'll take anything that they can get’ or ‘they can't be trusted’.
Where these perceptions come from is often hard to pinpoint but the origin is usually a deep divide between our users and your organisation itself. This relationship perpetuates through lack of knowledge, understanding and above all empathy. If all we see of our users is their failures - when they lose their passwords, can't do something etc then we will see a very specific version of them.
Proportionally over time, they’ll seem like they struggle more than most and so we will start to see them as somehow less capable. or at the very least, different to ourselves and our colleagues.
When we have this relationship with our users our organisation becomes resistant to even the idea of user research, let alone designing services to meet those needs. The world seems split into a dichotomy of ‘the customer is always right’ (applying to everyone else's services) and ‘we can't ask our users because they don't know what’s good for them’ (applying to our own services).
4. The consequences of your decisions on services isn’t considered
A direct result of any organisation that can’t see its services, has a disconnected relationship to its users and struggles to remember its purpose is of course an organisation that is going to struggle to understand the effects of the decisions it's making on its services and users.
The challenge of course is that almost all of these decisions will in some way affect the services that your organisation provides, from its policies, to its culture, hiring practices and the way it manages procurement. Without an awareness of the way in which all of these decisions will affect our users we will end up making mistakes.
In this world, our services are created as an accidental byproduct of other decisions being made, rather than as a conscious choice for a service to work in a particular way. Not all are as disastrous as they were for Atari, but they can be extremely damaging nonetheless.
5. Failure to prioritise
Every decision has the opportunity to improve a service, as well as making it worse.
Choosing which decision to make is hard. Even harder to do so without evidence or user research (as is often the case).
Organisations struggle with prioritisation in lots of ways; sometimes in trying to make a decision we take so long as to render the decision completely pointless. Sometimes in order not to decide, we chose everything.
Sometimes a decision is made, but without the right amount of time, the right budget, or the right people and suddenly we’ve got too many things to do and not enough people or time to do it.
In this world, we’re perpetually chasing our tail, trying to work towards ever more unrealistic goals. Things fail as a result and we become increasingly short-term about the decision making, thus perpetuating the cycle.
6. Short-term thinking outweighs long-term thinking
Sometimes our organisation is so transfixed by its current issues that the prospect of long term thinking seems impossible.
By doing this we end up making short-term decisions that make that situation far worse, rather than better. Why do we do this? We don't often understand the effect of the decisions we’re making on our services, with an added bonus; panic.
When we’re panicked, we tend to make much more short term decisions. Which makes sense if you're a hunter gatherer running away from a bear, but not so much if you’re an organisation trying to work your way out of a financial crisis.
I’m not in the habit of quoting Sigmund Freud, but Freud has a good way of describing this phenomenon. He says that ‘we are much more likely to be motivated away from pain, than we are towards seeking pleasure’. The same is true for service design; we are often more motivated by wanting to reduce the risk of something bad happening than we are by the prospect of improving something.
Yet it’s this ‘improvement’ that helps us in the long term. Without it, our services slowly degrade, subject to the slow effect of entropy over time. Technology moves on, so does the world but our services don't.
When we choose to do nothing to improve our services we are making a choice. The choice to do nothing is still a choice. The slow failure is just as bad as the fast one.
7. Your organisation wasn’t designed to deliver the services it now provides
As we’ve established, services help people to do something. That something often includes interacting with multiple teams within an organisation, or even across multiple organisations. This is because services tend to copy the shape of the organisation that’s providing them.
As humans, we tend to find working in small, known groups easier than big, unknown groups. That means that when a team is responsible for one part of a service, they generally try to contain the boundaries of their part of a service to something that is manageable. Over time, that means that what started out as a seamless journey between two bits of a n organisation becomes increasingly separate as both teams try to manage the uncertainty of their work.
We see this all the time, in fact it's so common that we have a name for these strange shapes - silos. This process is natural, but completely avoidable because it’s not just our organisational structure that affects our services, the relationship should work both ways.
Our organisational structure affects our services, but our services should affect the way we are structured too. The problem we encounter is where this link is broken. We do user research, we improve our services, but the shape of our organisation doesn’t respond. Eventually physics takes hold, an unstoppable force meets an immovable object and the bigger one wins, usually our organisational structure.
What we end up with are services where the silos reinforce the silos only to be interrupted by occasional organisational redesign work.
8. ‘Technical’ skills aren’t valued
Because of the rapid change in technology (and out lives with it) what was an acceptable service 5 years ago now barely works. Yet many organisations are still running services that date back to the early days of the internet, because no money has been invested in constant maintenance. Why?
Because we think there is a difference between WHAT a service does and HOW it does it. What our service does becomes a strategic conversation, something discussed regularly at board meetings and in senior forums. How the service works is rendered as pure, technical detail, and because we don't focus on it, will quickly slide out of view.
With services, the medium is the message. You cannot separate what a service is from how it works. To operate a good service without knowing what a good one looks like and how it is built is like operating a chair factory and not knowing what chairs are or how they’re built.
Do you want your service to allow users to create new accounts or not? Exchange items? How do you want to encourage them to buy something? These are all things that are extremely difficult to discuss unless you’re talking about how exactly a service works.
To run a service-providing organisation you need to acknowledge that the ‘how’ detail *is* strategic.
Sadly not only do we not value technical details generally, we don't value it in people too. In organisations that struggle with this, we delegate technical decisions, downgrade ‘technical’ salaries, and make it difficult to progress with expertise.
As a result, we create a vicious cycle that values process over outcomes and generalism over specialism, making it extremely difficult to have the necessary conversations about services at the right level, and making good services almost impossible to deliver
9. Your organisation incentivises the wrong behaviour
If you give people a target, they will inevitably try to meet that target, regardless of whether it helps to achieve the thing they’re setting out to do.
This is true of some of the most fundamental targets in our organisations - from call handling times that force operators to get rid of customers without fully answering their questions, to up-sale targets in shops that cause customers to take longer to pay at the till because they’re bombarded with additional offers. What we measure is invariably what gets done in our organisation. If everything we measure affects our behaviour, we should at least know what that behaviour will be.
10. You think you can get away with it
Sometimes, very, very rarely we continue to deliver poor service because, frankly, nothing bad has happened yet. In this world we are simply continuing doing a thing because, for various reasons, the inertia of not doing anything about it is easier than doing something. No one’s blown a whistle, no one’s pulled an emergency cord. Until they do, we’ll keep quiet.
If you’re affected by any of the issues on this list, we have training that can help. Check out our Agile Service Design course, Service Owner and Scaling Good Services courses that all help to equip you with the skills to negotiate these issues.
