service 2.0 Hub: Service 2.0 Cafe Outcome- ServDes 2012, What Would...

service 2.0 Hub: Service 2.0 Cafe Outcome- ServDes 2012, What Would...: So one of the major activities that took place in the Service 2.0 workshop at ServDes 2012 was the Service 2.0 cafe. 9 ServDes attendees c...

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.

Beginning or Ending: Count Paradigm vs. Countdown Paradigm?

A month ago on the beginning of Ramadan, I posted the following on Facebook "Beginning and end are 2 sides of the same coin. The beginning of anything means the beginning of its end or the beginning of the countdown towards the end. I guess if we looked at it that way we would know that the month has started to end yesterday".

Few months before that I had a discussion with some colleagues about what I can call the countdown paradigm; about looking at time and processes always as countdown towards the end. So it simply means that if you joint a job today then your days in the job have started to decrease and the remaining days are less until you reach your last day on this job even if it's after 10 years from today.

Few days ago, it was my last day with an employer to join another employer.

I'm currently going through many beginnings and ends, and I guess we all do that everyday on a level or another but sometimes we don't pay that much of attention.

My question for you is, how do you normally look at it? How would you like to look at it? When you join the new job, are you beginning? Or are you ending? Is the beginning the beginning of the end? Or is the end the end of the beginning? 

I guess we would all say that there's a beginning and there's an end and there's a timeline in between. I guess we may sometimes disagree on where the beginning ends so that timeline would begin or where that timeline ends so the end would begin.

In many cases, you all of a sudden hit the unexpected end and then you can't really clearly define those three entities; beginning, timeline and end.

I normally adopt the count paradigm and not the countdown paradigm, especially for those things with unknown or undefined end dates. I normally say I've been in this position for 3 years and I don't think of it as I have 1 year left.

There're very clear things where we adopt the countdown paradigm like in contracts, studies .. etc. And I don't get surprised when I see people adopting the count paradigm in those cases as well.

As we're very familiar with the count paradigm I would like to elaborate a bit on the countdown paradigm and see how good or bad, convenient or inconvenient it could be.

• Countdown paradigm is very-result oriented, it looks at the time as a resource against the set of objectives, with the bell ringing for the beginning you'll know that the resource is decreasing and you'll be more mindful on what you've to get done for yourself and others.
• Countdown paradigm is very much focused on what's next, it's not focused on the end only as it clearly proposes the new beginning after the end, so it always helps you be ready.
• You're heading towards the end and towards the new beginning at the same time, and both do have requirements that you have to work on now.
• Countdown paradigm is not pessimistic, it's very optimistic, it's about nice glorious ends and challenging beginnings, it's about advances and new frontiers.
• Countdown paradigm is not stressful, it's a real stress-relief agent, It helps you arrive at destinations prepared and makes you ready for surprises and unexpected ends.
• Countdown gives you a good criteria to decide on things, investments, decisions based on their contribution to the end and their value at the destination or the at the next beginning.
• If you took the macro countdown paradigm into account, you'll wonder about your end in this life and your objectives towards yourself and others and you'll be focused on the next beginning depending on what you believe in. In the end it'll always help you be better in managing your presence in this world.

What do you think?

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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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The Art of "To-Start"

In the first post in this series we highlighted the problem of priorities in our lives. We asked how to make the tasks that are meant to have the highest positive impact on our lives more urgent and not to remain as dreams till we run out of life.
In the second post we addressed the causes that drive each of us to not take his dream that seriously and to keep it as a dream and no more.
This is the last post in the series and I'll reveal the sercret solution of the problem. If you didn't read the 2 earlier posts, please do. It should help you understand the problem more and so you'd know if this solution is for you.
The solution is to start. Yes, to start achieving your dream, to put it into action, to take it off the shelf and to make it reality.
When I say to start, it doesn't mean to take your PhD now, but it means to work on your first smaller task on the whole big task of the PhD. If this smaller task is to pick your subject then do this now and let this be your urgent task.  If it's to find the suitable university or program then this is your urgent task. If it's to get a certain prerequisite, then this is your urgent task. Whatever that smaller task is, do it and focus on it for now.
The first question we asked was how to make the PhD as urgent as buying the tomatoes your wife asked for. I would say that getting the PhD couldn't be made an urgent task, but the smaller sub-tasks that form the PhD as a whole could be urgent tasks. So getting your PhD could not be an urgent task, but submitting your proposal, documents, studying for an exam, submitting a review, and meeting your project group are all urgent tasks.
You may have accused all those who're around you of being unfaithful, insincere, betrayers as you've found out that they're following you up on unimportant tasks and never asked you seriously about your PhD and when you'll be done with it.
Let me tell you that as the start will turn this monster task into smaller mice it will also establish new followers in your life in addition to the current followers. All those followers will be advocates for these new mice. Your school colleagues, lecturers, supervisor, program director and family will all be very serious followers on your new highly urgent tasks.
By starting, the monster will become a queue of mice that come one after another, and all of them will build the required urgency around themselves. They will be followed by the new agents until they're all finished, that simple.
Let's go through the causes we've listed in the last post and let's expose them to the "to-start" solution and you'll see the magic of this simple solution.

• Starting will put you in the environment, will give you the example, will make the benefit clearer to you since your first visit of a university website.
• Starting will make the route clearer, will clear its milestones, and this will help you effectively go through it. 
• Starting will help you focus on your current tasks, will help you know what you have to do now and not to be busy with what's to come. A task after another you'll find yourself defending your thesis and then comes the honor. 
• Starting will build your credit of achievement and with each step you make you'll be more capable to continue and accomplish.
• Starting will turn the dream to truth, hope to achievement and bitterness of regret and defeat to joy and dignity of progress.
• Simply, after you start you'll be a totally different person, and you'll be on your way to achievement. 
• Whatever comes on the road after your start is nothing but a problem that's easy to solve. 
• Every failure you encounter after starting is a new learning experience which qualifies you more for achieving your goal. 

In brief, before you start you're a fantasy, after you start you're reality.
So dear traveler, get busy with your first smaller sub-task, hold the first ring on the chain and start. Push yourself to start or get pushed. Throw yourself into it or find someone to throw you in it. Hold your breath and jump in. Don't worry, you'll not drown, there's plenty of companions and plenty of boats only for those who've defined their destination.

<< Why You're More Serious About The Tomatoes and Not As Serious About the PhD

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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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