IFFI Pitch

Currently working on a very interesting proposal to the design the participant experience at the International Film Festival of India, Goa. It is held in early december each year and attracts participants from all over India and from the festival circuit across the world.

We are proposing to design every aspect of the experience, right from participant registration, choosing movies, booking tickets, the venue, networking at the event… Using a mix of technology and common sense! :-)

Just the process of making the proposal and explaining what could be done is extremely interesting. As an avid participant at IFFI for the last 5 years, I guess ‘research’ and ’studying user behaviour’ is well taken care of!

Tomorrow is the pitch. Lets hope that we get a chance to create a better Film Festival experience!

CASE STUDY: Influencing ATM Usage through Service Design

Today, we are proud to publish our first Service Design Case Study :-)

The Reserve Bank of India recently mandated that bank customers can use any ATM (not just their own bank’s) without any additional fee from April 1, 2009. Earlier, a bank would charge a customer anywhere between Rs.15 to Rs.50 for the use of ATMs belonging to other banks. This fee acted as a disincentive for customers to use the ATMs of other banks. In absence of this, customers will freely use any ATM.

When Bank A’s customer uses Bank B’s ATM, Bank B charges Bank A a usage fee of Rs.17-20. This was passed on to customers. Now that the bank cannot pass on this fee to the customer, it has to bear this cost for every transaction that its customers use another bank’s ATM for. A Bank with a small ATM network will be saddled with huge costs as customers start using the ATMs (of other banks) that are closer or more conveniently located.

“Influencing ATM Usage through Service Design” outlines how a bank can design its service to minimize the use of ATMs belonging to other banks by its customers. We analyze the different scenarios in which customers would use the ATMs of other banks and create a service model to deal with each scenario. We also studied the usage patterns and pain areas for customers in the current system to devise a new service that allows customers to record, track and account for cash expenditure, which otherwise appears as a single-line “ATM Withdrawal” entry in the bank statement, without providing any details of how the withdrawn cash was used.

Download a PDF of the Case Study here. (824 kb)

We would love to have your comments and suggestions on the process, content and presentation of this case study. Please comment here or write to abhi@gutse.in

Customer Service / Customer Experience

In the last week since I started writing this blog, a few readers have shared their ‘bad experiences’ with services. More often than not, these have been bad experiences with ‘customer service’ as opposed to bad ‘customer experience’. There is a big difference. But in the absence of any noticable ‘customer experience’, most customers perceive their experience with the helpline or customer service desk of a company to be the ‘customer experience’.

Customer experience is what a customer feels about any interaction (and all interactions as a whole) with a brand/service before, during and after he buys the service. Customer Service is a much smaller sub-interaction, usually when there is a problem.

The fact is that customers are the most sensitive to how they are treated when they go to the company with a problem. This makes customer service the acid test of customer experience. If a company has an ordinary customer experience, but very helpful customer service, it will still endear itself to the customer.

Customer experience on the other hand is about how useful the customer finds your service, whether he perceives it as ‘value for money, how easy it is for him to learn to use it, if his experience with your employees is uniformly good… and other tangible and intagible attributes that constitute your service.

In a sense, customer service is a commodity, a hygiene factor. Customer experience is what differentiates your service and creates loyalty in the long run.