Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight – Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O’Connell
“Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight” is a book written by Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O’Connell. The book focuses on service design and strategies for creating outstanding customer experiences.
It discusses the importance of understanding customer needs and preferences, and using that understanding to create tailored service offerings. Through a series of case studies and examples, the book demonstrates how companies can create a culture of service excellence and build long-term customer loyalty.
The first principle: the customer is always right—provided the customer is right for you
Choose the right customer – one you can serve well and profitably. This requires proactive targeting of customers who align with your capabilities and service offerings. Design decisions involve trade-offs and positioning is an art of sacrifice.
Defining the desired customer experience is easier than defining the customer, as there may be more than one ideal customer.
The Fifth Principle Contd.
The financial services industry, in particular, has experienced significant disruption, with innovation in everything from simple transactions to complex financial derivatives. As a result, bank branches today look vastly different from their turn-of-the-century counterparts, much like Victoria’s Secret stores.
Innovation is not just for manufacturers but also for service companies looking to provide better customer experiences and stay ahead in a constantly evolving marketplace.
The First Principle Contd.
Defining the wrong customer is easier than defining the right one because the customer you cannot serve profitably is the wrong one for you.
One way to identify your right customer is to analyze your most valuable customers. Customer retention is more cost-effective than acquiring new customers, and increasing retention rates can significantly increase profits. However, not all loyal customers are equally valuable. Your most valuable customers are those who are not only loyal but also spend more per transaction and represent a significant share of your revenue.
For instance, a customer who visits your restaurant daily for a small purchase is important but not as valuable as a customer who visits once a month with a large group.
The Fourth Principle Contd.
But just because you can share information doesn’t mean you’ve solved the problem. If different parts of your organization aren’t working together, customers will feel the pain. So cross-platform excellence means optimizing the experience first and then working back to channels.
You want channels and departments to be invisible to customers, so they don’t have to think about them.
The second principle: don’t surprise and delight your customers—just delight them
The mantra “Surprise and delight” for customer experience is wrong. Instead, focus on just delighting customers by fully meeting their expectations. Design your services to reliably and economically deliver delight, and if you can add a surprise like a chocolate mint, that’s great.
Use service design to identify opportunities for delight and create conditions to make the most of them. Avoid surprises and focus on delighting customers predictably, regardless of the complexity of the service.
The Fifth Principle: You’re Never Done
The services sector must continuously renew itself through innovation in new offerings, processes, customer experiences, and business models. Surprisingly, many service companies lack a systematic approach to innovation. While goods-producing industries have had a head start with R&D facilities dating back to the late 1800s, services have only recently begun to catch up with the establishment of the first-ever center for studying services science in 2004.
Even the concept of experimentation and innovation in services is new to many companies, which view themselves as downstream recipients of manufacturers’ R&D. However, service innovation has exploded in this century, fueled by rapidly advancing information technology.
The third principle: Great service must not require heroic efforts on the part of the provider or the customer
To provide great service, it shouldn’t require an extraordinary effort from the provider or the customer. Customers and companies benefit when the job is done efficiently and reliably. Behind-the-scenes heroics may be entertaining on a TV show, but it’s not a sustainable business model.
Service must be designed to be scalable and effortless for both parties involved. This is the Third Principle of Service Design: Great service should be a combination of efficiency and elegance, with no wasted time or resources.
When companies rely solely on employees’ heroic efforts to deliver great service, it’s a sign that there’s room for improvement in service design.
The Fourth Principle: Service design should provide a consistent experience across all channels and touchpoints
To deliver consistent, coherent service, you need to understand how customers interact with you at every touchpoint. And you need to present a single face to the customer. In the past, this was hard because customer records were trapped in different systems, making it tough to share information between departments. But now, changing channels should be easy for customers, like flipping a switch on a model railroad.
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