Good Services - Lou Downe

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like buying a house – or it can be very small – like getting lunch. Either way, it will be broken down into smaller parts that help you achieve that overall goal.

       Services in the internet age are not only defined by the user who’s looking for them, but composed of ‘small pieces loosely joined’ as David Weinberger predicted in 2002. For example, when you’re embarking on the goal of buying a house you might find that you need to complete several very distinct steps in order to be able to achieve it – like hiring a surveyor. Those steps themselves will then be broken down into smaller tasks. For example, when getting a survey done, you might need to first book a time for that survey to be done, then pay for it and review the final result.

       In that way, each service is broken down into steps, and each step into a series of tasks. Each one of these steps or tasks will probably be called ‘a service’ by the person running it. What defines the edge of a service is very dependent on your context, so if all you do all day everyday is provide surveys, it’s easy to think of the service as providing surveys.

       While it’s important for each step and task to be well-designed, it doesn’t mean that these things are services. The only person who gets to decide what the service is, is the person who has the goal they need to achieve – and that’s your user. It’s your job to orchestrate all of the pieces of this service in as seamless a journey as possible, even if you don’t provide the whole service yourself.

       Designing services that are defined by user needs can seem like a daunting prospect. These services could be very large, and involve multiple different organisations to string together. It’s important therefore to have some sense of how to break down a service into its component parts so that each ‘loosely joined’ piece can be designed in the context of the whole service.

       Your user defines what your ‘service’ is

       Designing how each of these pieces works together to help a user to achieve an end goal is not only possible, but vital to the success of a service.

       Service: for example, buy house

       A service is something that helps someone to do something. Only your user can determine what the service is.

       Steps: for example, get a survey

       Step are the things your user needs to do in order to achieve their overall goal. Crucially, steps should be introduced to a service where your user needs visibility and control over what happens next. For example, it would be incredibly unnerving to be able to do all of the things needed to buy a house in one seamless step.

       The separate steps within the service of selling your house and buying a new one give you visibility and control over important decision points – like deciding which house to buy, how much money you want to spend or how many bedrooms you might need for any children. All of these steps are separate within the overall service of buying a house for the good reason that time and consideration are needed to make these decisions. This is why different organisations often fulfil different steps within the service. The break between those different organisations (if it works well) act as a natural point for consideration of information and decision-making.

       Tasks: for example, check your survey

       Tasks are the individual things you need to do to complete a step. How many steps or separate interactions your service has will depend on how many decision points your user has to make to achieve the desired outcome.

       What makes a good service?

       When Jordan Haignes started to get phone calls from Citigroup about repaying a loan, he didn’t know why. He was annoyed. The bank, it seemed, thought he owed them $15,000. But Jordan hadn’t ever taken out a loan with Citigroup. After some investigation, it transpired that, like millions around the globe before him, he had been the victim of identity fraud. Someone had taken his name, address, date of birth and other information and run up a bill of thousands on a credit card in his name. He complained, why had Citigroup agreed to give this fake Jordan a credit card, and why, now that the fraud was discovered, was it his job to sort it out?

       The answer lies in our fundamentally different views on what we expect from services, in contrast with our expectations of almost anything else in our lives.

       Any person in the US who is a victim of identity fraud is legally required to prove that their identity has been stolen in order to not be held liable for any damage done by that impersonator – and yet service providers don’t suffer these penalties when they fail to identify users correctly.

       This is a problem that stretches across the banking services sector and beyond, and it shows that, not only are the providers of services often not culpable for the failure of their service, they’re often unwittingly involved in engineering its failure themselves – whether they know it or not.

       Katy Highland was one such victim of accidental service sabotage. A teacher from New Rochelle, New York, Katy took out a loan when she went to college to pay for her teaching degree. When she graduated, she soon found herself struggling to repay her loan with two small children on a teacher’s tiny salary.

       She called her loan company, Navient – one of the many organisations the US government outsources loan management to – and was offered to pause the payments on her loan.

       Thinking this was her only option, she paused her payments.

       What Katy didn’t realise was that there was a government scheme that meant that – as a teacher – she was eligible to write off the remainder of her loan if she paid 120 consecutive payments on time. Every time she deferred her payments to Navient, she was racking up interest and disqualifying herself from the scheme. So why, when this clearly wasn’t the best thing for her to do, was she repeatedly told to defer her payments every time she called Navient?

       As it turns out, Navient, like many organisations, has a strict limit on the amount of time a call centre operator can spend on the phone with a customer without losing their bonus. In this case, it’s 7 minutes.

       What with the numerous identity checks, surveys and statutory notices that need to be made to meet company policy, that 7 minutes becomes more like 5 – not much time to give high-quality advice to someone like Katy. In fact, almost the only thing you can do in 5 minutes on the phone to Navient – apart from complain – is to defer your loan. So this is what happened to Katy.

       From top to bottom, everyone involved in providing this service to Katy, and the millions like her, is incentivised to provide a service that harms both individual users and society as a whole. Navient was being incentivised by the US government to provide a cheap service, not an effective one, just as each call centre operator was incentivised to get Katy off the phone as quickly as possible. No one was focused on making sure that Katy could afford to keep teaching.

       Individually, these can all seem like accidents, ‘just the way the service works’. But at some point, they were all conscious decisions that add up to a service that neither meets the needs of individual users nor the goals of the organisation providing it. Someone decided to implement a 7-minute rule on the call centre and keep it there, despite the length of time each person needs to spend on customer identity checks. Someone decided not to train all staff in the government scheme that would have meant that Katy could have written off her loan.

       As of 2018, 44 million Americans owed a total of $1.5 trillion in student loans. About 4 million of those Americans are already in default and a large number are on their way. At the same time, the

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