Is it time to unbundle the service experience?

Dr. Graham Hill

This is part of a series on 'Rethinking the Service Experience'.

The focal point for companies is the customer journey. But that isn't the focal point for customers. It is time to unbundle the service experience so that it can be rebundled on-demand by customers.

If you spend time on almost any corporate service experience design programme you will see that its focus is a series of customer journeys, e.g. Provide Home Maintenance Services, that sound as though they are something a customer might want, but are actually designed around the needs of the company (in this case, of an Australian retail bank).

If you look at the journey maps you will see that they are designed as a monolithic whole. You have to enter the journey at the beginning and leave at the end. You have to engage in each of the interactions in the journey in sequence. And you can't pause, exit temporarily or return in the middle of the journey.

This is fine from the perspective of the bank, but it is not what customers really do. Rather than a linear, step-by-step, without no deviations journey, customers enter and exit the journey at various points, step forwards and backwards in their journeys and if things aren't working out, will step outside the journey to get help from others.

Rather than focus on the journey, we should focus on the individual interactions within them. And we shouldn't think of them as just steps in a monolithic journey, but as modular 'interaction objects' - with tight design and loose coupling - that can be triggered on-demand by the customer to help them get their jobs done.

And as interaction objects are almost invariably going to be implemented through journey orchestration technology, that means designing them as 'microservices' that capture all the details about the data that flows into and out of the interaction, how the interaction works, and how it supports customers in making better decisions during the interaction.

It is time to unbundle customer journeys into their constituent interactions and to allow customers to configure their own journeys on-demand. If you don't, you might find that customers do it without asking you, and probably, without involving you as well.

What do you think? Is it time to unbundle the service experience?

#ServiceDesign #CX #CustomerJourney #Unbundling

Original LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/grahamhill_servicedesign-cx-customerjourn...