Boeing as a service provider: W.P. Carey's Center for Services Leadership

A couple of my favorite quotes:

"Services are just very hard to get your head wrapped around," says Gravell. "Sometimes you can lose the big picture of what you're doing with them. It's more complex than the product side -- not from a technical standpoint, but from a value-creation and customer service standpoint."

And

The Boeing of today has its field service reps providing tech expertise not only to new customers rolling out new platforms or new product, but also to old customers managing mature platforms. The company is constantly seeking new ways to keep its clients and make their operations more manageable. The goal, Shaheen says, is to ensure that the Boeing customer experience is positive, consistent and reliable.

Read the rest here. 

There is a growing interest among academics to understand this transition from a pure manufacturing role to one of service, sometimes called servitization, the idea that manufacturers transition into being service providers.  The difficulty is the experience part, as said in the article in needs to be positive, consistent and reliable.  I'm certain we will hear more about it.

Peninsula Hotels CEO discusses importance of experience

Strategy and experience expectations discussion with Peninsula Hotels CEO from WSJ:




At about 2:30 he says:

We market the feeling of a guest experience.  That we are not offering just a room for people to live in, but it is an entire experience of coming to a Peninsula and being treated to experiences that are special.

He said experience 3 time is as many seconds...

Mark Cuban's rant on "Fan Experience"

Whether you like him or not, he seems to understand what he is selling:

"We in the sports business don’t sell the game, we sell unique, emotional experiences.We are not in the business of selling basketball. We are in the business of selling fun and unique experiences. I say it to our people at the Mavs at all time, I want a Mavs game to be more like a great wedding than anything else"

See the rest here.

Assorted Links

Robot waiters taking over:  here and here

Low fare, pay per use hotels:  here

Mass producing real hand painted art: here

Hotels using social media as quality assurance tool: here

Good example of a service "stage" Disney style: here  

Memory of a service: vacation edition

I thought this video was interesting, but it is full of Disney propaganda:

Digital photos shared real time, and memorabilia.
Vacation with the purpose to create memories for children.



Excuse my brevity and lack of posting, Ive been busy with dissertation stuff.

Sequence in everything: campus tour edition

Hat tip Design for Service

A Cornell University Campus Tour

A new trend among universities is to use aspects of service and experience design in campus tour.  I suggest taking a look at this article for a good application of Pine and Gilmore's The Experience Economy in a University recruitment setting.  Here's an excerpt:

Jeff Kallay is a pioneer in this new frontier of college recruitment. Campus tours, he preaches, should not only relay information, but also create a memory. What makes a company (or college) great, he believes, isn’t just products or services: “It’s all about the experience.” To that end, he encourages colleges to tell stories that will distinguish them from competitors, to engineer an experience that will stick in consumers’ minds. Call it the Gospel According to Mickey.

There is a bunch about scripting and authenticity and creating peak moments:

 Gilbert suggests that colleges think about creating a “signature moment” during tours. Moreover, he urges them to consider ways of engaging the five senses (taste is usually the trickiest one). At the University of Akron, visitors gather around a forty-foot-tall statue by Dale Chihuly, a blue glass tower known as the “rock candy” sculpture. Later, guests receive a stick of blue rock candy, with a tag that thanks them for visiting and directs them to information about the artist and the university. (It’s the kind of marketing that might just crack your tooth.)

Apart from the idea of a peak moment, there is little discussion about how the sequence of a tour might influence the memory, i.e., where should the "signature moment" happen?  At the beginning, the end?  Where should we go first, then where, how should we end? Seems like these could be important.

Sequence in everything: T.V. plot and joke telling edition

I stumbled onto an interesting blog today from a T.V. writer Jane Espenson (hat tip Ransom Riggs). Here's what she says here blog is about:

I'm a former writer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and have written episodes for shows including: Angel, Firefly, Gilmore Girls, Ellen, The O.C., Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Dinosaurs, Andy Barker PI, Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, Caprica and others. My blog is intended to help new writers tackle the job of writing those all-important spec scripts. I can't read your work, get you an agent, or get you hired. But I can give you solid, time-tested script-writing advice!

I've been thinking a lot about how service design and experience design is a lot like story telling and even more like T.V. writing since we hope that the customers will continue to come back for more and more.  A good writer develops episodes that make the viewer want to come back next week to see whats next.

My favorite topic of sequence (see here and here for a review of why it is my favorite topic, maybe here too if you up to reading an academic article) is found dispersed in here blog and seems to be a pretty important topic to writing a good script.  Here are two posts I found interesting:

Sometimes the funniest part of a joke should not be put at the end: Not Lovin' It

I realize now... not to put the funniest word at the end of the line, but to make sure the line continued past it. This seemed to me to go against one of the basic principals of joke writing, but now I see the value in it. He wanted casual, easy, "thrown away" funny, not needy rim-shot comedy, begging for laughs by hitting every comedy-made-easy rule.

The pilot (first) show should be revealing: Hot Cold Openings

Yes. This is huge -- a lot of people never read past the opening, so making it as perfect as possible is crucial. Jeff says: I am a big believer that the opening line of a pilot (or the opening image, or the teaser) should be the series in microcosm.