Here for the Coffee, or for the "something else"?

No much intro .. intro will come later. For now, I'd like to share with you the following research questions and results.

Research Objectives

The research aimed to answer the following questions:

1. What are customers’ drivers to visit a coffee shop?
2. How much is the coffee shop’s offering in synch with those drivers?
3. What are the other areas the coffee shop should look into to grow the target and redefine a new focus?

Results

Following is a brief of the Results of the research

• People come to coffee shops for many reasons; amongst which is not to just drink coffee.
• People do create their own categorization and classification of coffee shops and on "what coffee shop fits for what purpose."
• Customers reported some cases where coffee shops are doing more than just offering coffee like the cases of meeting rooms and match-watching setup.
• Being not coming for coffee, all customers have substitutes for coffee shops that also offer some extra value.
• All customers agree that they wouldn’t drink coffee if they don’t have to.
• Coffee shops are designed to make customers consume coffee. The decoration in researched coffee shops included nothing but texts on coffee, pictures of coffee, they were all shades of brown and yellow, all equipments in place and staff are there to sell coffee.
• Customers can’t understand what else could coffee shops offer them to make their value creation better, but when certain concepts are offered they like them.
• There’s low involvement in the value creation process, this resulted in all happy moments and pain points having nothing to do with the service being delivered but more with the activity (he’s happy when his friends arrived, he’s upset when subject of study got harder).
• Some customer’s were affected by the perception of value creation of other stakeholders (one customer goes to coffee shops with his wife because for her “happy families go to coffee shops”)
• Service providers don’t keep consistent value proposition and delivery. Some branches of the same brand were smaller, more confined, noisier than others. Some come in multistory, independent buildings while some would be small stores. In return, customers create their own virtual value proposition and perception of each individual branch and act accordingly.

I would like to ask if this makes anything spark in your mind. Is it the same way in your community? Is there a service you know suffers from similar problems or root causes? what's it we're missing and what could be done?

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What Would You Vote For? 5 Topics for Service Innovation & Design Research

 Ok, I'm about to start my thesis for masters in service innovation and design and I'm also reactivating my PhD initiative for Service Design.
For your own information, The masters is in business administration so it's a business school more than design school. For the PhD initiative in service design it's a design school.

I do need your vote for what topics you see are the most needed and valid for service Innovation & Design. You can be as detailed or as brief as you wish. Again, masters project shouldn't be that long while I'll have more time for the PhD. Following is 5 topics I came up with and I do appreciate your input. For voting you can just arrange them from the most that you like and descending (e.g. 3-5-4-2-1). Following is the way I shared them with potential sponsors from business so the language is more copywriting oriented :)

1-Service Design Meets Service Design
There’s currently 2 main approaches for service design who’re not integrated and don’t work together. We’ve the operations management and product innovation approach led by six sigma and TRIZ and we have the design thinking-inspired approach as known in design-inspired service innovation. Both are needed but they’re never applied together and the gap between practitioners of both fields is huge. If you need inspiring and engaging radical innovation, yet measurement-oriented approach that facilitates the implementation complexities, service efficiency and productivity, you surely need this outcome.

2-Sustainable Experience Networks Through Diamond Touch Points
Experience flows in networks. Brands get created in the relationship between the firm and the staff and come alive in the interaction between the staff and the customers. Current service design tools are customer-centered. They rarely address the experience of the other stakeholders involved in the value network who surely affect the experience network. If you believe we’re in need for diamond touch points that would consider the design and alignment of the experiences of those stakeholders and support the sustainability of the experience network, then you surely need this outcome.

3-Is it too intangible? People and Physical Evidence in Digital Services
Intangibility is one of the main attributes of services, especially when compared to the so-called tangible products. But as we moved to digital and e-services, we started to realize that services used to actually be tangible. We used to shake hands with employees, drink coffee, like or hate ambiences, pay cash, line in queues and so on.
Now these aspects are vanishing with the penetration and revolution of the e-services. We remain human beings and touch points can’t be all touchless. Customer experience in digital services is not all about UX. How can we extend e-services to cover the tangibility gap in physical evidence and people? If you’re digitizing and enabling the technology in your service interface then you need to consider this outcome.

4-Service 2.0
Ok, Tomorrow as a business you may getup from your sleep not too late as you would think then, to find that your industry is not the same anymore. Your customers do have the tools to create their own experiences and share it with each other. Moreover they believe you’re unable to deliver their experiences, as they should get them. It’s when your industry becomes more shared, more co-created, more personalized, more crowd-sourced, more democratized, more long-tail oriented, more design-for-generosity themed and more customer-generated.
You would step-back to focus on serving as the best platform for them to deliver their experiences on, while they decide how it should look like. How will your business model be? What would your organizational requirements be like? How would you compete? And what would be the market landscape? If you need to know a bit more on that, then you need this outcome.


5-Service Innovation Body of Knowledge

Service innovation encompasses a wide collection of knowledge areas. The fast development and growth of the field requires the development of a structured body of knowledge that would define the basic knowledge areas. Unlike other BOKs that get created to standardize domains, SIBOK is required to support the growth and adoption of service innovation on the practice level. This body of knowledge would create a room for improvement in this critical area of organizational excellence and business competitiveness. If you’re in need for a structured framework for qualifying your internal service innovation leads, then you’re in need for this outcome.

Hospitality 2.0: Intro and Community Engagement In SD and Delivery

The Main Idea
Web 2.0 has inspired us on everything 2.0. It's about making things, more shared, more co-created, more personalized, more crowd-sourced , more democratized, more long-tail oriented, more design-for-generosity themed and more user-generated.
During working on the Intensified Hospitality project, I used to reflect on what hospitality 2.0 can be like. I remember driving along the Doha Corniche and thinking, "how can we make these hotels less-rigid and involve people more to make the experience more-engaging?"
I looked on the web to see what was written on hospitality 2.0 and what I saw was more on the technology utilization side or the social media utilization. I'll try to propose a different perspective on hospitality 2.0 in the following directions.

How?
From this point of view I'll list what I think of Hospitality 2.0 and how it may look like when we think of it that way, and what are the values that customers can contribute with to create a better value for the whole society.
In order to come up with what hospitality 2.0 could be like we can think of what web 2.0 included of techniques and try to apply those to hospitality. We can also look at the outcomes of the transformations driven by the web 2.0 on business models, pricing, agility, lifecycles, customer involvement, industry structures .. Etc. . I'll not go with you through this process. I'll jump to my findings, and you can follow your own process and come up with your findings, and please share them. In this post I'll just address one direction and I'll continue in future posts.

First Direction: Community Engagement in Service Design and Delivery
 The entity that delivers hospitality does exist in a society, which it shouldn't be isolated from.  Surely, it needs to set the frameworks and platforms for this involvement and engagement, and this should define the rules of the game.
Hotels could think of the surrounding or operating society as customers, and as partners.
A partner doesn't have to be an established business. If a person is able to offer a service that a guest may need or use then he could be a partner.
With this way of looking at it, we would see many opportunities and new roles needed within the hotel to manage this relationship.
Let's agree that the guest doesn't usually come for the hotel itself, but he comes for what he's going to do outside the hotel, which may be business, tourism or any other activity.
The hotel should know how to play a part in the experience the customer lives while trying to get these needs satisfied.
We need to take into consideration that hotels have always been successful in giving us silos to be in. The amount of work it requires to keep those silos ready, tidy and "occupied" takes a huge percentage of the hotel resources and the rest could be dedicated to the customer. This means that there are not that many resources to dedicate to the customer, as most of hotel resources are dedicated to the property itself.
From that point of view, hotels can't really deliver personalized experiences with their current capabilities and their current operational models.
It's just like how you think of the amount of content in Britanica and the corresponding content in Wikipedia. Or the amount of video coverage before and after YouTube and similar video networks.
 It's the same. For now hotel rooms are just good concrete walls, and that's it. The same room fits for James,  Adam, Linda, Sara, Omar or Abdullah. We need a totally different level of focus to drive this experience layer.
The hotel should think of how to manage the involvement of the society to create a better hotel experience.
Now in order to think of new concepts we have to imagine that if we told anyone about people building an encyclopedia for free, taking photos, videos, writing and more for free they would have said we're talking nonsense. It's the same as the response from David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s when they said "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?".
The following are some rough crazy examples of what could this involvement be, these examples are so easy to criticize, but they do show what I mean by community engagement:

1. SUB-HOTELS:
   Hotels can stop renting rooms to guests. They can utilize the society to create sub-hotels in the hotel. In this model, the hotel will provide the rooms and some basic services to those sub-hotels, ensure certain standards are applied. And would give the opportunity for those sub-hotels to create different customized experiences and get their sub-hotels advertised and reserved through the Hotel system. Those sub-hotels could exist in more than a hotel, with the same name where you know they mean a certain brand value. They can appear as restaurants or any other service concepts as well. In this concept the hotel takes care of the basic and standard hotel-aspects to leave the room for sub-hotel management for creativity of personalized experiences.
2. CAPSULE-HOTELS:
   Well, in order for the hotel to provide me with a nice experience it doesn't mean that I have to be in the premises and jurisdiction of the hotel. For sure, Large hotels have to decide on where their branches could or couldn't be. What if I'm a business person going on a trip to a smaller city and I'd like to stay in this hotel, where it decided not to have a branch. With hotels thinking lean and modular, they could partner with different smaller entities in the society where they can manage a series of smaller properties or even apartments that provide the same level of service and brand promise of the main hotel, and even under the same brand name, with smaller versions of mobile house-keeping, concierge.. Etc. facilities.
3. SKILL-BASE:
   Every society is full of talented and skilled people who have skills ranging from Tai-Chi and swimming to handcrafts and flower arrangement.  Hotels can provide a very wide range of learning experiences by establishing and maintaining a catalogue of local training services which the customer can book upon reservation or check-in.
4. LOCAL DINING:
   Local people can still cook and serve food in small kiosks or on counters in the main restaurant. The experience could extend to have the guest having his lunch at the comfort of a traditional home of one of the authorized dining partners.
5. PERSONALIZED HOUSEKEEPING:  
   Who can setup a room for a man in 50s better than a man in 50s? Or a girl in 20s more than a girl in 20s? Or a mom with a baby more than a woman of a matching profile. Housekeeping here doesn't only mean to straighten up the room, change the sheets, re-fill the used amenities or the coffee trays.  It also include supplying his room with the like-minded books to read, newspaper, update on events. Choosing him a matching soap, shampoo, TV channels prioritizing .. Etc. In this model, Housekeeping person has the capacity to establish a connection with the guest even if asynchronous to know more about his likes and expectations, can the regular housekeeping person deliver the same personalized and human experience?
6. HOTEL FACEBOOK GROUP:
   Hotel should help customer have a direct access to local people, local recommendations, local information ..etc. a facebook group of hotel local club would help customer find answers on any questions he may get at any point of time. Following up on the group, would help the customer know a lot on what's going on in the city without having to keep up with the media, or for stuff that wouldn't even appear in the media like sales, accidents, shows .. Etc.
7. BUSINESS:
   please review the post "Towards more business-oriented business centers"

In the following posts I'll address the following directions of hospitality 2.0:

• Guest Engagement in Service Design and Delivery
• Information Creation and Sharing
• Global Hospitality Co-Creation Perspective

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Towards More Business-Oriented Business Centers

This is not a part of the intensified hospitality project but it’s an idea that was always there during the project.
I don’t know that much about the evolution of business centers in the hotel industry. But I would assume that at a point of time there were no business centers and then they started to add them to satisfy some basic communication needs that only business people needed back then and weren't easy to find around. And as far as I know it stopped there.
I see that most of business centers in the hotels today are incomplete secretarial centers. They sometimes provide more modest communication facilities than what we're already moving around with in our life of mobility.
I would think that business center is where a hotel can most add a value to business. I would simply say that hotels have the opportunity to be real business centers, all of the hotel, the entire hotel and not a small room thrown behind corridors. but let me now keep it to the same business center and not a business hotel.
I would say why don’t we have business centers being the places where business takes place? Where networking happens, where the hospitality industry weaves its values around a very huge portion of its customers and their real needs and interests.
I guess we need to move away from thinking of all customers the same way, and of business guests just like any other customer where their needs are expected to be a bed and a bathroom. Normally, when you even come to what executive rooms mean, it’s more of a luxury and not that much to add in the business domain. According to the proposed concept, following is what a hotel business center can offer.

1. Establish and maintain a directory of local business entities and business people and make it available for guests.
2. Establish and maintain a reputation system for those local business people who benefit from the business center. The reputation system relies much on the feedback given by the guests who established a relation with the local business person or entity.
3. Establish and maintain a repository of catalogues of products and services for suppliers operating in various fields for easier selection and ordering.
4. Create the opportunity for guests to communicate with other guests for networking and exploration of opportunities based on their preferences.
5. Create the opportunity for guests and local business people to communicate for networking, exploring opportunities based on their preferences.
6. Providing secretarial, translation, legal, accounting and tax advisory facilities for faster deal closing.
7. Hosting a bank branch for faster on-site banking and financial services.
8. Stock market follow-up and transaction facilities.
9. Running a linkedin group that would connect guests and local business people before and after the visit.

Do you think such a business center will have a different value to offer to you on you next business trips?

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Intensified Hospitality- Third Concept: Weave & Style

I've posted the first concept "Intented" then posted the second concept "Moment Share". This will be my last concept and my last post on the intensified hospitality project.
Concept Description

The concept is about enabling the customer to tailor and design his own experience. The customer is utilizing the menu of hotel offers to create his own blend of stay. The customer is highly empowered to design his stay style according to his stay purpose. In addition to the settings the customer chooses for his service, the hotel makes available for the customer a wide range of related information, services and tools.

Mood Board

Service Evidencing
The following is an imaginary ad for the service.

That's it for the intensified hospitality project. Should you need other parts posted from what you can see in the project outline, please let me know.

Following are the posts on the intensified hospitality project on Auroralahti:

Intensified Hospitality- Project Outline

Intensified Hospitality: Service Style Cards

Intensified Hospitality: Concept Blending

Intensified Hospitality- First Concept: Intented

Intensified Hospitality- Second Concept: Moment Share

Intensified Hospitality- Third Concept: Weave & Style (this post)

Intensified Hospitality- Project Outline

I have only one concept left to share. Before I post this concept I though to share with you the project outline in case you thought there may be something you'd like posted from the understanding and thinking phases. I'll start with the project cover just to set the mood and then to the Table of contents which contains all the project outline then will post a couple of section separators just to further support the mood :)

Following are the posts on the intensified hospitality project on Auroralahti:

Intensified Hospitality- Project Outline (this post)

Intensified Hospitality: Service Style Cards

Intensified Hospitality: Concept Blending

Intensified Hospitality- First Concept: Intented

Intensified Hospitality- Second Concept: Moment Share

Intensified Hospitality- Third Concept: Weave & Style

Intensified Hospitality- Second Concept: Moment Share

In the last post, I've shared with you the first concept of the intensified hospitality project (Intensified Hospitality- First Concept: Intented ) which was about deep authentic, traditional and local experience. In this post I'll share with you another concept which is moment share. Unfornaturely I couldn't put as much effort in explaining this concept as I did in the "intented" concept but I hope the effort made will make it easy for you to get my proposal about it.

Concept Description

This concept is about enabling the guest to leverage the social media capabilities to share his experience with the world. The hotel would embed the recording, capturing and publishing capabilities within the hotel processes. The customer just sets his preferences in the beginning of the stay and then it goes with no interference, he would just comment and interact with his family and friends based on these posts made by the hotel on behalf of him. The hotel also provides a framework for sharing between hotel guests in general who can share knowledge about hotel and local experiences.

Mood Board

Service Evidencing
The following is an imaginary ad of the service.

Following are the posts on the intensified hospitality project on Auroralahti:

Intensified Hospitality- Project Outline

Intensified Hospitality: Service Style Cards

Intensified Hospitality: Concept Blending

Intensified Hospitality- First Concept: Intented

Intensified Hospitality- Second Concept: Moment Share (this post)

Intensified Hospitality- Third Concept: Weave & Style

Intensified Hospitality- First Concept: Intented

In the following posts I'll publish some of the concepts I got to explain in the explaining phase. Before I start with the first concept I would like to share with the readers that my project innovation focus was on the front office operations. The hotel I did the project for proposes the position of offering arabic-culture driven hospitality. And this will explain the focus on the culture-driven hospitality as one of the concepts.

Concept Description:

The concept is about delivering an authentic, original and traditional hospitality experience in the hotel. The concept will feature painting the hotel with the different aspects of the culture. The concept delivers this value to customer even if he’s staying only for few hours in the hotel. The concept also helps the guest take the experience home with him through the “take it home” concept of being able to buy certain items of the hotel equipments. The hotel utilizes different role-playing and scenarios to help customers live the experience.

Mood Board:

Scenario

Service Evidencing

The following is an imaginary magazine ad of the service.

Someone saw it and said "Wow, your hotel doesn't have a logo" and he's right. The ad missed a hotel logo.

What do you think about this concept? Did you like it? Would you like to live this experience? What would bother you about it and you'd want improved?

Following are the posts on the intensified hospitality project on Auroralahti:

Intensified Hospitality- Project Outline

Intensified Hospitality: Service Style Cards

Intensified Hospitality: Concept Blending

Intensified Hospitality- First Concept: Intented (this post)

Intensified Hospitality- Second Concept: Moment Share

Intensified Hospitality- Third Concept: Weave & Style

Intensified Hospitality: Concept Blending

Thanks for the comments on the previous post on "Intensified Hospitality: Service Style Cards". Here, I'll present another method for generation that I used in this project. I came up with this method and called it "Concept Blending". The basis of this concept is already there and it's somehow related to lateral thinking. The idea of the method is to pick other service concepts and see if we were to adopt any of the experiences in these concepts in the service we're developing, what can we get to? I've tried 5 service concepts against the hotel to see how we can offer new values in the hotel experience. You can also post your creative ideas.

Restaurant

1. A receptionist waiting by the door
2. A table for guest to wait on.
3. A menu that includes the different accomodation offers
4. Ability to choose from a wide range of options to make guest’s own experience
5. Ability to choose an activity in addition to the main stay

Market

1. Variety of options for almost everything
2. Ability to buy any item of what the guest likes in the hotel.
3. Sales and Promotions on stays, food, drinks, services and facilities.
4. Brands and sub-brands for all services and facilities. 

Hospital

1. Hotel checks on the guest as he wishes.
2. Hotel gets room ready for guest to sleep.
3. Hotel gives guests free simple medical checks.
4. Hotel helps guests lead a more healthy life.
5. Hotel follows up on guest's medicine taking.

School

1. Hotel includes a library
2. Hotel includes a break time where guests get out of rooms and meet in the main areas and socialize.
3. Books delivered upon check-in.
4. A teacher about culture and about hotel facilities is available upon request.
5. Hotel includes rooms that illustrate culture and history backgrounds. 

Airport

1. Printing luggage sticker with room number on it. And a passport sticker for express check-in.
2. Check-in in the airport shuttle
3. Messages from Hotel Captain (Manager)
4. A Duty free shop in the hotel
5. Hourly stay rate

Following are the posts on the intensified hospitality project on Auroralahti:

Intensified Hospitality- Project Outline

Intensified Hospitality: Service Style Cards

Intensified Hospitality: Concept Blending (this post)

Intensified Hospitality- First Concept: Intented

Intensified Hospitality- Second Concept: Moment Share

Intensified Hospitality- Third Concept: Weave & Style