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I’ve decided to start a Pinterest board dedicated to collecting service “beats” — small moments of service interactions that can be captured in a photograph — in order to illustrate, discuss, and study broader service phenomena.  Above is my shabby first contribution to the Service Beats board:  A crappily-taken photograph of the “self-service” check-in kiosk at the 2012 Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York’s Lincoln Center.

What the photo is attempting to document is just the latest example of something I’ve yet to see work properly, the self-service check-in (or check-out) station.  We’ve seen examples of this before — CVS, Ikea, EasyJet, and many others — and the result is usually the same as in the above photograph:  After making an honest attempt to use the station, many people still need the help of a live human being, which results in inefficiency, redundancy, and frustration for provider and consumer alike.

Let’s take a look at the two separate touchpoints for checking in at Fashion Week:

• Self-Service Kiosk
  Visitors are greeted by the Self-Service kiosk immediately upon entering the building.  The kiosk features four terminals, each one with a small screen, barcode scanner, and ticket printer.  Visitors are instructed to scan the code from either their smartphone or printed invitation, which produces a printed ticket.  Staff members hover watchfully near the kiosks to provide additional assistance, roughly two staff members per kiosk.
  
• Standard guest check-in desk
   A standard event check-in setup can be found beyond the kiosks and coat-check area, divided into separate lines for each particular show.  Each line is serviced by as many as six staff members, each of whom is equipped with a full terminal set up.

Some observations:

•  If you had your invitation at the ready (via mobile device or in print), had no questions or special requests, and all of the kiosk equipment was functioning properly at the moment, the self-check kiosk worked pretty smoothly. In the time I was observing the kiosks (5-7 minutes while my wife was using the coat check), about 30% of the people who used them were checked in and on their way without incident.
  
• This is a fairly narrow use case, however.  For example, my wife and I had an additional invitation that was left for us at the venue but wasn’t emailed to us, a situation which required us to use the standard line each time we checked in.  How many people had “special” cases, and couldn’t use the kiosk?  How many only discovered this after attempting to use the kiosks?
  
• All the kiosks were able to complete were narrow, specific service transactions.  You scan your invite and receive a printed admission ticket.  You are not able to get any additional information, make changes, or resolve issues without getting the attention of one of the roving staffers, who might be otherwise engaged.  And even those roving staff are not equipped to deal fully with special cases, and end up redirecting visitors to the standard lines anyway.

How much service value do self-service kiosks really offer?  Kiosks attempt to use technology to industrialize part of the service environment; when they work well, people can move along quickly through the service pathway without requiring a trained human staff member. Ideally this addresses efficiency questions of time and cost, but what about other service-related concerns? What about situations that require expertise or implicit knowledge?

The Fashion Week kiosks represent a minimal case of the use of kiosks for check-in and check-out.  The event is invitation-only, the kiosks do not handle financial transactions, and attendees are screened by security for admission before they ever reach the kiosks.  But what about other situations where kiosks are deployed, where kiosks are entrusted to performing financial transactions (CVS, Ikea), or are placed in charge of asking security questions (EasyJet)?  In each of these situations, kiosks often fail badly at their assigned tasks.  Four out of five times when using a self-service checkout at CVS or Ikea, I’ve needed to show my credit card or item receipt to a cashier to complete the transaction; and I don’t think anyone would ever believe that a terrorist plot was foiled by the automatic questioning of an EasyJet baggage check-in kiosk.  Maybe the technology isn’t there yet — or maybe it is misguided to try to industrialize the most important touchpoints in a service environment, replacing relationships and expertise with QR codes and touchscreens.

This December marks six years since JJ and I started Flashing12. Over the past six years, we've grown the role F12 plays for our clients from performing pure technology implementations to providing a full portfolio of communications strategy services. We've learned quite a bit from our experiences, from our research, and most importantly, from our clients.

I have recently returned from Geneva, Switzerland, where my wife and I (and our two cats) have been living and working for the past three years. While in Geneva, I began a PhD in Service Science — the interdisciplinary study of the design and implementation of services — under the leadership of Professor Emmanuel Fragniere (HEG-SO Geneve, University of Bath), one of the founders of the Swiss Institute of Service Science and the HEG Service Lab.  We are developing a method for designing and improving services using ethnomethodology and theatrical re-creation; an early draft that I presented to the Journal of Organizational Ethnography at Cardiff University this summer can be found here.

As much as 60% of the GDP of developed nations comes from services.  Virtually all transactions nowadays include a service component in which value is co-created between the provider (a travel agent, for example) and a client (a would-be vacationer). And this includes consumer products:  When you buy an Apple product, you're getting access to an entire world of Apple services, from pre-sales information to the App Store ecosystem to post-sales technical support. Even a cup of coffee from Starbucks comes wrapped in a layer of services that contribute to the "customer experience" that people have come to associate with the Starbucks brand.  

I've come to realize that the work we do for our clients — internal communications, social media strategy, constituent outreach, etc. — has always been a form of service design.  We tell each and every one of our clients the same thing when it comes to communications strategy:  Learn who your audiences are and what they care about, form relationships with them, show them that you are listening to them (and care about what they care about), and continually reiterate the process. Communication is at the very foundation of any service, especially the service of communications itself.  We've always spoke the language and shared the values of service design, even if we didn't know what it was called until relatively recently.

We'll be using this blog to explore the rapidly-growing field of service design, and to work out the details of Flashing12's own emerging service design practice. One part research, one part personal obsession, one part it just sounds like fun work to do.  On y va!