Sense of control : Ability to control your customers

One thing I’ve learned from the master so far is the sense of control; every consumers crave for the ability to control every aspect of their activities and interactions. That is the main challenge of every company and service providers to design scenarios that make consumers ‘ elieved’ that everything is under their control.

Personalisation:
Different users posses different backgrounds and preferences. The question now relies on how can one integrate customers’ variety to enhance and/or support their business? Today we can notice a large amount of businesses that integrate this this idea, turning personal preferences into a tangible product and creating exceptional personal experience.
Zazzle, a printing and gift fabrication start-up, allowed customers to choose from the provided template and customise their purchasing goods until reaching their satisfaction before confirm their manufacturing order.

Comprehensive:
Anything can happen, both good and bad, while users are experiencing a product. Customers may complete their journey fast and flawless, or they may confront technical problems along the way. Good service provider should have every experiences under their control, even the bad ones.
Amazon, one of the largest e-commerce website to date, turns a commonly known negative customer service experience into a positive impression by gathering database of previous customers and prepare solutions for every possible complications. They also create a direct-contact to their customers and help them fix any known issues till resolved, creating customer loyalty also along the way.

Relationship:
Creating relationship between your services and your customers is easy, but maintaining them is yet another story.
Starbucks, the leading coffee brand with countless shops worldwide, has an interesting way forming a relationship. Once enters, the baristas will ask their customers’ name and label it on the cup. They will then call out the name of the customer instead of the drinks. Even though there are some complaints regarding baristas misspelling customer’s names, the overall impression of this scenario is quite great. It also help baristas to initiate topic of discussion with the customers, which in turn, may transform into long term brand-consumer relationships afterwards.

Harmonisation:
As discussed before, everyone has their own personal experience and ways of things. In this way, it is possible that one customer can have more than one digital devices. And in this cross-platform market, users prefer to experience their product smoothly and immediately across different devices. In this case anything can happen anytime, on any devices. Therefore, it is extremely crucial to make sure that your business creates enough and sufficient touch points for  your audiences. That’s the reason why the Banking industry nowadays have to add personal online banking section on the websites with the mobile application for mobile-banking. On the other hands, the existing touch points, such as ATM machines and physical spaces, have to still deliver the high quality service to physical customers.
 
These different little factors can offer the whole new experiences to your business. It is extremely important to make your target feels and think that everything is in their control. However, if we really understand the mechanics behind Service Design, one will understand that everything is designed and completely under the service provider’s control.