Get measurable outcomes, fast.
We run a phased design process to rapidly find the value and opportunities for your business and customer experience, in operationally supportable ways — for new proposition development, process optimisation and omnichannel transformation.
This is service design for business innovation.
Business experience is horizontal, not vertical. It transcends everything, and a well considered strategy can harmonise teams and act as a force multiplier for executing your vision.
We will help you to support the ambitions of each party by showing how an improved business experience is the glue that joins everything together.
The enormity of this can seem daunting, but we show value through smaller, quantifiable steps which are delivered collaboratively, and generate customer stories which enlighten the wider team with real-world experience, direct from your customer.
The future business experience is about a deeper relationship between the service provider and the customer. Specific capabilities such as seamless billing & account management are foundational, but the interactions that a business customer has at every touchpoint whether digital or physical are an opportunity to reinforce that brand experience.
Now is the time not just to catch up, but to leapfrog expectations.
“Iconic brands need brilliant teams to design and deliver products to market.”
Our pitch to you
We prove value, fast.
We quickly establish where the value is, how it relates to an organisation's strategy, and what should change in order to deliver it. We do this through experiments scaled from the very lean to the longer term trial, with a view to deliverable change. We work into CTO, CIO, CMO and the next layer down, because we are dealing with strategic outcomes.
When we need to scale, we partner with mid-size agencies such as Etch UK and GoBeyond. It is not uncommon for us to win work against the big strategy houses & systems integrators etc. and have a reputation for flying under the radar, picking up the pieces after those organisations.
Our rates are competitive, and we bring some of the industry’s leading talent in this space. There is no bait-and-switch either, you work with our core team throughout.
We design for deliverable outcomes.
We apply design thinking methods to identify, explore and solve problems in business, transforming organisations and deliver lasting value. Our approach is pragmatic, evidence-based and tested. We embed in your teams to drive this innovation, and equip you for success.
We will:
Shape your value proposition.
Understand your customers’ beliefs, attitudes & behaviour.
Hypotheses defined & tested in trials.
Map the route to delivery & support.
Map your operational model, to find optimisations and mitigations as you progress to operational maturity/bring products on stream.
Equip your team with the tools and skills to succeed.
You get measurable and proven value, delivered promptly, with a clear route forward.
Summary of recent work
Innovation in healthcare insurance.
How do we take a holistic view of health and wellbeing as a global reinsurer so that we can lower claims & costs? We helped to set out the framework for a programme to explore exactly this — bringing alignment across many moving parts.
Healthcare tech product & service
We are working with a business who are looking to capture more of their market with a holistic approach to patient experience and digital products.
Shaping a community proposition
Social is easy, but social that really drives engagement within a niche audience for a big retailer/wholesaler needs some thought. We helped set the wheels in motion for a genuinely desirable community for this audience.
Defining the business model for a music industry startup
The founder has the spark, and the concept in mind… but how do we find what’s valuable to the market? What should the product be? We worked with them to unpack the necessary detail, to form a proposition which is then tested in the market.
The foundation of the next 5–10 years of an established business.
Our client is a SaaS business in the procurement space. They have an existing web-based product, supported by consultancy. We are helping to shape the model of their software and service to drive a shift towards self-service. Everything rides on this being successful.
The forecourt for an electric future
Mapping the entire customer experience and service features end-to-end to ensure a seamless outcome and consistent marketing. EV charging changes the experience around refuelling. We helped to define their ambition through detailed mapping of the experience and touchpoints.
This is service design doing, fast.
Introducing the ‘kitchen workshop’ sessions.
Whether you’re the founder of a new enterprise, or an established business you have a lot of things to juggle. It is typical to bring in service providers, staff and tech to meet your needs but who is looking at the big picture to make sure everything works well?
We offer these low-risk, fast paced workshops (the kind of thing we could run around your kitchen table) where you see progress, fast. You get to double-down on value, for your business and staff, your customers, the service providers that you work with and more… to look at the moving parts and ensure that what you want to do will actually work and deliver that value.
How it works
We’ll explore your business & ideas through a series of canvases, that we’ve set out in advance ready to use — these are the scaffold to guide the conversation from discovery into definition of useful outcomes that you can use to follow the value story.
Two of our service designers will run four workshops with your team, each one about a day. We will also be gathering data for write-up at the end, which will be a further day. We’ll facilitate the workshops to generate a shared understanding of the opportunity for your business.
You’ll get a leave-behind of a Miro board that you can continue to develop as you drive the business forward and use as a springboard for implementing change.
1: Purpose and vision. Introduce the approach, and move from your high level purpose right into the vision and needs of your clients.
2. Value proposition. Value proposition and the business model. Describing your business with a particular look at how you create value for your clients.
3. Service blueprinting. Service blueprinting. Modeling the flow of value across your processes and people so you can see where to improve, or address what’s missing.
4. Operating model. Operating model. Principles, structure, measurement, skills, strengths & weaknesses.
5. What next? This is your foundation for success, with ideas that can be used to improve on your business outcomes. Things you can test and deploy, directly measurable changes.
Exploring a value proposition with a client, at our studio kitchen table
A typical engagement is 5 days, and around £7,000.
Case study
A year-long trial to improve guest experience in a busy hotel by using digital to cut wait times for requests.
Problem statement
Guests often request service items such as pillows, towels etc. with around 1470 requests made per month on average. Guests call for service, increasing the burden on the contact centre and hotel staff. The hotel must understand the request, assign it to an available staff member (by radio, or verbally — note here the service staff generally speak Spanish, so translation is required) and have them fulfil the request. There was no clear line of communication back to the guest on the status of their request, and there was no end-to-end accountability for staff involved in delivering these requests.
Opportunity
Reduce contact-centre load / increase capacity with same staff
Improve consistency with templated requests
Bring end to end accountability from an ‘assigned-ticket’ based system
Options for a more ‘discoverable’ service which improves guest experience, and options for incremental revenue with F&B
What are we measuring?
Guest experience outcomes (satisfaction increased)
Revenue increased
Time to fulfil requests
Number of requests fulfilled per day
What did we do?
We ran a design discovery exercise to learn about the hotel operation in detail: interviewing stakeholders, walking the floors front and back of house, following the process of a request in detail across every touchpoint. We gathered deep detail — listening on calls and radio conversations, looking at the workplace in every aspect.
We selected a software platform (ALICE) that would be a good match for our hypothesis around addressing the communication accountability and inefficiencies in the process. That platform allowed us to work across the whole set of service layers from guest touchpoint right through to backend process (integration with PMS, Opera and staff roles/training). We:
Set up an SMS based trial for guests to text a request for anything they’d usually call for
These requests appeared in the software app, in the contact center, which could be assigned immediately to on-duty staff
On-duty staff were issued with mobile devices to receive requests, and mark them as done/clarify anything about the request
Delivered updated SOPs for the hotel staff to work effectively — including training and integration in partnership with the vendor and our client
Designed a marketing & guest experience campaign to raise awareness, and deliver assets across all guest touchpoints: in-person; mobile web/app; IVR messages; signage & in-room TV
Set up the monitoring and analysis to gather data on usage, efficiency and sentiment
What was the result?
Shorter wait times for guest requests
Increased capacity to serve guests with staffing levels
Improved service quality — guest expectations managed with clear and consistent messaging
End-to-end accountability
Reporting that drives actionable insight
Lessons learned, including Wi-Fi coverage requirements for mobile devices
Input to vendor and client roadmap for broad-scale rollout of service.
Hotel team able to use software for broader scope than trial — managing cabana bookings, maintenance and more.
LEGOLAND California Hotel
Guest request messages into the contact centre and immediately assigned to staff for action
Hotel staff receive requests on mobile devices
Cabana bookings via mobile device by the poolside, for immediate booking confirmation (driving additional revenue).
Future state exploration around chatbot and intelligence automation to further optimise guest experience and resourcing allocation.
Low-risk engagement
Need a short-sharp hit of expertise? Engage at any point in your process.
Doing something big? We can engage at any point, but you’ll get the best outcomes the earlier you start, as we work with you to define the case, the measures by which you prove it and start to bring the good news stories in from the field through research and storytelling.
Meet our team, and find out how we can help your business