Opportunity Mapping

Opportunity Mapping helps organizations to create new services or improve existing services based on ideas and concepts generated from customer research. This activity provides the business stakeholders to prioritize the opportunities to create roadmaps.

This article focuses on few ideas to prioritize the opportunities from ideas generated in a brainstorming session. Also, a hypothetical example is shared for this opportunity map activity.

Key Service Design Opportunities

Organizations identify new service opportunities for new or existing services. This article shares the following checklist of uncovering service design opportunities.

• Customer facing improvement
• Process-based improvement
• End-to-End improvement
• Future-facing improvement
• Service Innovation

Activities in Opportunity Mapping

1. Create future state ecosystem maps
2. Create a 2×2 grid for prioritizing opportunities against impact vs. existing/new services
3. Map the actors and opportunities  on a continuum from no changes to existing social behaviors to new social behaviors
4. Map the emerging trends and competitor data below the continuum of social behaviors
5. Map the above actors and opportunities against the organization’s capabilities focusing on cost, time, technology, resources, and partners
6. Prioritize the opportunities 

Example of an Opportunity Mapping activity

Problem

Banks feel that setting up ATMs in rural areas is expensive. How can the banks ensure that their customers can withdraw cash at any point of time without the banks setting up multiple ATMs in rural areas?

Possible service concepts (from Ideation)

• Encourage banking customers to withdraw people from ATM on wheels, which visit at specific intervals in a day (Idea 1)
• Encourage staff at local courier/post offices to send their employees to withdraw money from an ATM in a centralized location (Idea 2)
• Encourage bank customers to send a drone from their current location to an ATM near the branch and the bank’s employee securely sends the cash through the drone (Idea 3)

Activities to prioritize opportunities from a service concept

Identify an ecosystem of actors from a prioritized service concept
(Idea 2)

Identify the new and existing actors, their capabilities and the interdependence of the actors

1. Identify an actor
2. Map which parts of the service concept is relevant to the actor (opportunities)
3. Continue step 1 and 2 for all primary and secondary actors
4. Prioritize the actors, relevant capabilities (new roles) and opportunities for the service concept

Rank actors and opportunities against impact on customer experience

Rank actors, capabilities, and opportunities for impact vs. new services/existing services in a 2×2 grid

• Prioritize the actors, capabilities, and opportunities for impact (low impact to customer experience vs. high impact to customer experience)

Map actors and opportunities against impact on social behaviors

Map the prioritized actors, capabilities, and opportunities on a continuum of  no changes to existing social behaviors to new social behaviors

Map trends and competitor data against actors and opportunities 

Map the emerging trends and competitor data below the continuum of social behaviors

Map the opportunities against an organization’s capabilities

Map the prioritized actors, capacities, and opportunities against the organization’s capabilities focusing on cost, time, technology, resources, and partners

1. Prioritize the opportunities and their actors
2. Create service design principles for the prioritized opportunities
3. Map a future customer journey focusing on the prioritized opportunities for a specific primary actor

Conclusion

After completing an opportunity mapping activity, the stakeholders would have identified the prioritized opportunities from a service concept. They could continue the same set of activities for other service concepts and decide on creating a roadmap for the prioritized opportunities.

Social Banking Experiences

What is Social Banking?

Social Banking enables customers of banks to conduct their banking activities through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Social Banking is a new initiative started by banks to cater to the current online behaviors of today’s young generation who spend a big chunk of their daily time on social media sites especially on their mobile phones.

Considering that banking is a industry where change is slow, social banking is a new bold attempt to attract the young generation.  But is this new initiative really catching on with the young generation?

We will look at few examples of Social Banking in India, the current mindset of customers towards Social Banking and barriers, and few steps to design a social banking experience.

Examples of Social Banking in India

1. Download a bank’s mobile app to create an account by taking a selfie and enter few relevant details including the customer’s national identity information to create a bank account in few minutes.
2. Pay utility bills through Facebook Messenger.
3. Meet bank employees virtually through video branch services.
4. Follow a bank’s Twitter account to pay a friend.
5. Interact with a robot at the bank branch regarding information on banking transactions.
6. UPDATE: Example of a mailer inviting credit card applications with the promise of efficient and quick interaction through a chatbot (mailer received on July 15, 2017).
   

Current mindset of customers towards Social Banking

Ideally, this new initiative is targeted towards the audience segment who spend a great time on social media platforms. However, what is worrying that the youngsters see social banking as a cool feature rather than a transactional channel like the bank’s mobile app or website.

Main barriers against adoption of Social Banking

Comfort and convenience with existing digital channels
Today’s young generation are comfortable accessing  their own bank’s mobile or website or with third-party payment apps such as Paytm or Phonepe. The above digital channels are easy to use and their user experience is high thus retaining these existing customers.

Perceived view of social media platforms
Customers see social media platform as a place to share information at their pace surrounded by friends whereas banking is perceived to be a private and secure activity conducted in a safe and secure environment.  A banking activity is thought to be important whereas activities on social media platforms are seen as fun and not important.

Lack of awareness with existing customers
Banks market social banking as a new cool feature  but its recall value is very limited. Two of my friends, who are regular users of Facebook were not sure whether their bank offered such services even though their banks did advertise on their website, which included an interactive demo.

Steps to design a Social Banking experience

Banks see social banking as a new way to engage with the younger generation in addition to their transactional activities with the existing touchpoints. Banks might not have full control over their social banking experiences as it is dependent on the specific social media’s platform’s user experience. So, customer experience is partially impacted by the specific social media’s platform and the integration of the bank’s service with the social media platform. Hence, there is a high possibility that the customer experience of social banking will be definitely fragmented.

Sharing steps below to design a better social banking experience:

1. Zoom out to learn about the customer’s daily life activities rather than focusing on the specific banking customer journey.
2. Learn about the customer’s social media behaviors.
3. Learn about the customer’s current usage of bank’s touchpoints.
4. Implement gamification and behavior change techniques to help customers to be at ease when conducting banking activities with their preferred social media platforms.
5. Monitor the usage on the social media platforms and prototype as necessary with new ideas till the customers find it easy to switch between their current touchpoints and preferred social media platforms to conduct banking activities. 

Time to shift to an engaging conversation

Current usage of digital touchpoints enable the banks to save time and resources but risk seeing the customer as a disparate set of data points rather than engaging them at a human level to know about their financial needs in their life. With the introduction of social banking, banks have a good opportunity to shift the transactional nature of digital interactions into more meaningful conversations with their customers.

Future State Service Blueprint

A future state service blueprint visualizes the future state of a concept for a new product or service based on a specific customer’s (persona) journey and how their new journey is supported by different employee roles, processes, technologies of the business organization and third-party partners.

In this article, we will briefly look at: 

• Current state service blueprint
• Challenges of a future state service blueprint
• Example of a future state service blueprint and its impact

Current State Service Blueprint

Current state service blueprints are commonly created by organizations to map the existing customer’s journey across a product or service and how their journey is currently supported by different employee roles, processes, technologies of the business organization and third-party partners (if applicable). Based on the blueprint,  the business stakeholders identify the pain points and opportunities for customers and organization.

Challenges of a Future State Service Blueprint

The organization identifies and creates new concepts based on the pain points and opportunities identified from Current State Service Blueprint.

In this phase of validating new concepts with prospective customers, the primary questions focus on whether the concepts provide a value for the customer’s need.

When a concept shows promising feedback from customers, then initial pilots are conducted and based on the responses, the concept could be implemented at a scale as a new product or service.

When do we create a future state service blueprint?  
After the concepts are prioritized after validating the success of the value proposition from initial prospective customers, a Future State Service Blueprint could be created with a prototyping mindset with the necessary KPIs.

Example of a Future State Service Blueprint and its Impact

Let us look at an example of a possible future state service blueprint and its impact.

Current State: At a theater in India, their customers can purchase tickets  through:

• Digital channels: Website, Mobile App, Third-Party Websites, Third-Party Mobile Apps
• Offline channel: Purchase ticket in person at the theater’s booking office

Opportunity Space: The business stakeholders mapped a current state service blueprint based on customer research and identified that patrons traveling in a group of 4 or more to watch movies could be a prospective new market segment.

Future State Scenario:  After brainstorming, the business stakeholders identified two concepts.

First Concept: Provide end-to-end delightful experience by enabling the patrons traveling in group of 4 or more to be picked up from their preferred pickup point anywhere in the city, keep the patrons engaged during their travel to the theater by sharing stories of their favorite movies and stars, and drop them back to their destination using third-party cabs.

Second Concept: Provide end-to-end delightful experience by enabling the patrons traveling in group of 4 or more to be picked up from their preferred pickup point anywhere in the city, keep the patrons engaged during their travel to the theater by sharing stories of their favorite movies and stars, and drop them back to their destination using cabs purchased exclusively by the theater.

Future State Service Blueprint
The business stakeholders conducted the following activities:

1. Created primary and secondary personas
2. Created a future customer journey map of the personas
3. Mapped the organization’s employees’ activities, processes, technologies, third-party partners with an indication whether the above organization’s activities were new or required updates to the existing roles, processes and technologies
4. Created KPIs as a range and not as specific numbers

Impact on Business: Based on the data (qualitative and quantitative) collected from prospective customers and prototyping the organization’s back stage activities, the business stakeholders could decide to take a concept forward with a better understanding of implementation challenges including the integration with third-party partners if necessary.

As the fidelity of the concepts change, Future State Service Blueprints should be updated to reflect the latest validated learnings from a prospective customer’s journey. Scaling a concept to a newly launched product or service requires considerable time and investment and Future State Service Blueprints could help to reduce uncertainty regarding the product or service’s success in the the market.

Encountering Constraints in Experiences

When customers encounter services daily, they often face constraints during their service experiences. Constraints help organizations by providing boundaries to their products and services regarding what is possible and not possible. However, organizations fail to realize the impact of the constraints on the customer’s experience with a product or service.

I am sharing my experience of visiting a print store and the constraints encountered below.

From the above experience, a closer look at the above constraints reveals that the organizations may not be able to control the intended outcome as per the customer’s expectations.

Organizations can minimize the negative outcome to a great extent by prototyping the “common” and “outlier” use cases and their specific “context” with the specific customer segments. The feedback from prototyping service experiences possibly could lead to new ideas and helps the product or service to be a trusted partner in assisting the customer’s activity.

Prototyping service experiences across different channels gives a deeper understanding of customer’s expectations of their omnichannel experiences.

Service Recovery Experience – Online Transfer of Payment

Often, we encounter challenges with daily services that we access. For e.g., paying the monthly bill for Internet connectivity to the Internet Service Provider (ISP). Customers might not have a relationship with these services provided by the specific service provider.

The service provider knows that customer pays the monthly bills for the service provided. So, the service provider might not take steps to learn more about the customer’s experiences when they face problems in making their monthly payments as they know that it is the customer’s responsibility to pay the bills through different digital and non-digital channels.

I did face a problem when trying to pay my monthly bills and received no status updates as to whether the payment was made.

When customers do not know the status of their payment, they tend to be anxious and agitated. They might even take steps to pay again. Providing reassurance to customers to the specific channel irrespective of the outcome of the payment goes really a long way in letting the customer that the service provider values them highly. Also, letting the customers pay from where they were stopped indicates to the customers that the service provider knows their context thus improving the customer’s satisfaction and experience with the service provider.

In this service recovery issue, I see that customer could be dissatisfied with the specific digital touchpoint and initially look at other touchpoints to make the payment. If the customer’s context does not allow the customer to access other touchpoints, in the long run, there is a possibility of turning to other competitors.

 

Peer-to-peer lending (P2P lending) Experience – Applying for Personal Loan

Peer-to-peer lending (P2P lending) is the practice of lending money to individuals or businesses through online services that match lenders directly with borrowers. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer_lending).

My friend was looking for a loan and he had applied at few private sector banks and P2P companies in India. He was able to get a loan through a P2P company. During his interactions with the P2P companies, he realized that P2P companies are filling a market opportunity for personal loans. My friend and I have summarized the key advantages and disadvantages he faced when applying for a loan below.

What was surprising that the FAQ content on the P2P websites do not explicitly state the “disadvantages” mentioned in the above image thus reducing the level of transparency the P2P brand has with customers. We had to speak to the customer staff for a deeper understanding of the loan approval process. Clearly, I see a reduced “touchpoint value proposition” from the perspective of a customer who is applying for a personal loan.

Often, it happens that when the customer gets the loan approved, the customer forgets these “disadvantages” and rates the financial organization highly through a feedback survey.

A better way to learn about the “disadvantages” from a customer’s perspective is to have the customer staff engage them during the specific stages in the customer’s journey to learn the customer’s positive and negative experiences. However, the financial organization has to be cautious of the fact that customer’s emotional state during that period would be biased towards getting a favorable response for a loan rather than be transparent about the actual frustrations.

A way that I can think of is to divide the customer’s journey into stages based on their priorities and outcomes.

For e.g.,
Apply for Loan Channel [Stage] – Criteria met – Yes/No [Outcome]
Provide relevant documents [Stage] – Yes/No [Outcome]
Waiting period [Stage]
Status of loan [Stage] – Approved/Not Approved [Outcome]

Having conversations with customers’ who have negative outcomes with possible incentives might help the financial organizations discover findings that could lead to new service opportunities at that specific touchpoint rather than sending a feedback survey at the end, which might not capture the complete customer’s experience.

Improving Customer’s Current Payment Experience

Due to the recent demonetization of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 in India, customers are short of cash as ATMs are empty. This has forced many customers who regularly pay by cash to opt for payments through digital wallets. Keeping this new trend in mind, many small stores and hotels in India have started accepting digital payments.

A month ago, when I was in Bangalore, I visited a hotel to have my lunch. While standing to pay my bill at the payment counter, I observed a specific customer who was not able to pay his bill as the swiping machine couldn’t connect to Internet to complete the transaction.

I have attempted to capture the current payment experience of the customer in the following storyboard.

Looking at the storyboard, it is easy for executive stakeholders to identify which customer experience issues are strategic and tactical. It is easier to get buy-in from the executive stakeholders for the prioritized issues paving for a speedy resolution of the customer’s challenges with their current experience.

 

Offline UI Experiences

A week ago, I was traveling from Hyderabad to Coimbatore by flight. During the flight, I thought it would be a good idea to check the conversational UI offline experiences of few mobile apps that I access regularly. I opened the specific apps and looked at the UI message displayed. Even though these apps were not designed for offline use, I was able to see few similarities in the UI messages.

Key finding – All but one app informed that Internet connectivity was unavailable. However, none of the apps were able to provide a clear message as to why Internet connectivity was unavailable, which is the context of lack of telecom availability when traveling by flight.

The UI messages were evaluated on the following parameters:

• Primary message to customer
• Identification of customer’s context
• Conversational tone
• Next activity to be performed

The apps accessed offline on my Android mobile device were:

• Facebook
• Facebook Messenger
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Uber
• Ola

Sharing the findings of  each app below.

Facebook

• Primary message to customer: Clearly states that Internet connectivity is unavailable.
• Identification of customer’s context: Fails to inform as to what could be the reasons for unavailability of Internet Connectivity.
• Conversational tone: Friendly.
• Next activity to be performed: Requests customer to retry.

Facebook Messenger

• Primary message to customer: Clearly informs that app is in offline mode.
• Identification of customer’s context: Informs the highlight of the offline mode even though the specific device is offline. The reasons for the cause of the offline mode is missing.
• Conversational tone: Formal and helpful.
• Next activity to be performed: Informs the next activity to be performed in offline mode.

LinkedIn

• Primary message to customer: Clearly states that Internet connectivity is unavailable.
• Identification of customer’s context: Fails to inform as to what could be the reasons for unavailability of Internet Connectivity.
• Conversational tone: Pleasing and evokes a sense of human conversation.
• Next activity to be performed: Requests customer to retry.

Instagram

• Primary message to customer: Message is unclear to customer as to what could be the issue.
• Identification of customer’s context: Very unclear.
• Conversational tone: Abrupt.
• Next activity to be performed: Requests customer to dismiss message without letting the customer know what to do next.

Uber

• Primary message to customer: Displays two key messages: 1. Enabling Location Services (primary) 2. Missing Internet Connectivity (secondary).
• Identification of customer’s context: Fails to inform as to what could be the reasons for unavailability of Internet Connectivity.
• Conversational tone: Formal tone.
• Next activity to be performed: Requests customer to enable location services.

Ola

• Primary message to customer: Displays a key message of Missing Internet Connectivity.
• Identification of customer’s context: Fails to inform as to what could be the reasons for unavailability of Internet Connectivity.
• Conversational tone: Formal tone.
• Next activity to be performed: Requests customer to enable location services.

Assessing the current customer experience of edge cases of existing products or services could possibly lead to new opportunities for companies to serve their customers in a better way through new products and services!

Note: Screens retrieved on December 14, 2016.

Changing Habits While Setting Financial Goals

Setting short-term financial goals is not easy. With multiple financial priorities competing for attention, sometimes it becomes difficult to achieve a goal. What if credit cards assisted customers to achieve short-term financial goals?

The above statement might be funny because credit cards issued by financial institutions thrive on the interest paid by the customer’s inability to pay the full amount within the stipulated period. What if credit cards help the customer to set goals at the start of a year and display the status of the goals achieved at the end of the year thus increasing customer’s emotional engagement with the financial institution?

In short, it is a tiny change in customer’s behavior and financial habits.

I created the three screens displayed below that could possibly trigger a conversation in customer’s mind as to why a customer’s goal was achieved or not.

• First screen – Setting goals at the start of 2016.
• Second screen – Displaying summary of goals with a positive acknowledgment that one goal was achieved.
• Third screen – Displaying summary of goals with a negative tone that only one goal was achieved.

First screen – Setting Financial Goals (Setting goals at the start of 2016)
Emotional engagement – Customer slowly builds trust with the financial institution as the customer feels that financial institution provides information about funds in an easy-to-read manner while customer’s goals are planned and set. By encouraging the customer to set the goals in the context of current and outstanding funds in the card along with insights on spending patterns, the customer is able to have an clear understanding. This understanding would help the customer to make a well-informed decision while setting the goals.

Second screen – Summary of Goals Achieved
Emotional engagement – Financial institution positively thanks the customer for achieving one out of two goals and encourages the customer to think deeply by offering two options in a conversational tone: What is the next activity? or an introspection through insights on spending patterns? It is an human tendency to understand the possible reasons for not being able to achieve one goal when another goal is achieved. Customer feels appreciated and empowered to know the reason behind as to why a specific goal was not achieved and start trusting the credibility of the customized financial insights.

Third screen – Summary of Goals Not Achieved
Emotional engagement – Financial institution politely responds through visual imagery that customer was able to achieve only goal. Only one question is asked: What happened? This question is open-ended and encourages the customer to think deeply as to why only one goal was achieved. Customer will definitely look at the insights of current spending patterns for a deeper understanding. Though, initially the customer might feel uncomfortable with this visual imagery, later on the customer will begin to trust the credibility of the customized financial insights.

With the customers accepting the credibility of the customized financial insights, there would be a possible shift from the transactional relationship between the customer and financial institution to a deeper engagement.

Service Experience – Purchase of Additional Internet Data

Of a sudden, I had to purchase additional data for my monthly Internet usage. I expected that it would be easy by logging to the website of the Internet Service Provider. However, it was not easy. My touchpoint interactions with the website channel was unsuccessful. So, I navigated the murky waters of Interactive Voice Response systems of the call center channel to purchase my data after my initial hiccups.

My experience was unique in the context that I received a message that the system was not available for the transaction across the website and call center channels. The backend processes seem to be working fine by this consistent display of the message. However, the client-facing messages received across the website and call center channels was confusing, which led to this service experience being not memorable.

Looking at the service experience, I realized that placing a simple message next to where the data could be purchased on the website could have avoided this lengthy experience.

This is a good opportunity for the Internet Service Provider to improve their omnichannel experiences!