Human beings have an innate desire for beauty. We seek beauty in almost everything in our lives. Be it experiences, products, relationships or even in a mathematical equation. When it comes to products, we are exceedingly surrounded by beautiful products. Products such as an Eames chair; a radio by Dieter Rams; the CD player by Muji; the iPhone or the Tesla model S fill our lives with beauty. We can easily think of further examples of beautiful products. However, when it comes to beautiful services, we often find ourselves lost. This article is about that. It’s an exposition of what makes a service beautiful.
Attributes of a Beautiful Service
1. All key elements of a service are beautiful
A service is a value exchange that takes place between the customer and a company using the following key elements; Information, Touchpoints and the Servicescape. All the three elements must be beautiful and beautifully weaved together to create a beautiful experience for the customers.
A- Information:
All services require exchange of information between customers and the service provider. Therefore, information presented to customers must be beautifully designed, easy to digest; be in right format and quantity. It must further be easy for customers to provide their information if required. Excess information will overwhelm the cognitive capacity of the customer. Too little information will confuse customers.
B- Touchpoints:
Services are delivered through a set of interfaces called touchpoints. Touchpoints must be useful and a joy to use. If touchpoints are not beautifully designed, customers will lose interest in your service and may not continue with the service. Human touch points such as your service staff should exhibit beautiful behavior when serving customers. They should be welcoming, confident; appear competent and trustworthy; radiate positivity and appear to show genuine care for customers. They should truly embody the ethos of being empathetic to customers.
C- Servicescape:
Some services take place in a physical space called servicescape. It is truly imperative that service scape is beautiful to make it attractive for customers to visit. The ambience of the servicescape should be pleasant and comfortable for your customers. Ideally it should be engaging all the five human senses and appeal to them. It is highly likely that customers will wait to be served in your servicescape. A beautiful ambience will make that wait more pleasant and less frustrating. Moreover, the servicescape must be easy to access and navigate through. Without that beautiful ambience would not be of much use as the customer will be too busy trying to navigate instead of being engaged by the ambience.
2. Service is emotionally engaging
It is essential that a service is emotionally pleasant and engaging. This will result in the customer feeling special. It will create beautiful memories for the customer and will make them back for more. To be emotionally engaging, we can design services using elements that are humorous, entertaining, visually appealing and ensure service delivery is quick and reliable as much as possible. Furthermore, a service must try to personalize the experience for the customers. Enabling customers to co-create parts of their experience will create engagement and a sense of belonging and feel valued. This will help them feel special and good about themselves. Focusing on removing factors that cause negative emotions such as being confused, frustrated, angry and irritated will also enable you to create a service that elicits positive emotions such joy, happiness, energy and feelings of comfort and relief.
3. Service provides delightful moments
People are continuously seeking things that make them feel alive. Therefore, services should provide delightful moments to customers at different parts of their experience. However, customers don’t seek delightful moments throughout their journey especially for interactions that are simple. Only a few delightful moments will do. It is important to note that delightful moments are delivered when the customer is not expecting it. This will yield great moments of delight for the customer rather than informing them prior to the moment.
4.Service has a novel elements
We humans seek new things and experiences. We seek novelty and originality. Having novel elements makes a service feel attractive and hence more beautiful. To add novelty, you can address a customer’s needs or pain-point in a new way; and add new types of interactions that make customers’ lives easy. Avoid adding gimmicks for the sake of bringing something new. Novel elements should be genuine in that they still address needs of your customer but in a new and easy way.
5.Service just works seamlessly
A beautiful service just works. It must be simple and easy for the customer to access, navigate and consume. There must be no dead ends.Think about booking a ride through Uber. Their service just works. The service must hide all the complexity of the system delivering the service, so the customers only experience a seamless service. However, there will be at times, unexpected situations that can create problems that result in service failures. Service providers should anticipate such situations and have procedures to resolve such problems beautifully making the customer say, “there was a problem but to my delight they solved it.”
6. Service Experience is consistent
One of the things that makes something beautiful is the concept of wholeness and unity. Therefore a service is beautiful if all aspects of the service are consistent throughout. Lack of consistency can result in confusion and thus frustration for the customer. The service should feel, and look like it’s one “whole” service throughout the customer journey. All elements of the service should be in sync with and complement each other. For eg. the tone of your service communications should be consistent with how the service staff behaves with your customer
7.Service is thoughtful and doesn’t ignore any details
A beautiful service is well thought through down to the last details. It doesn’t omit any detail or nuances. All possible scenarios related to the customers needs are designed for in advance. Your service must make the customers say “Oh, they even thought about that.” This will make the customer feel truly understood and cared for.
Those were the key attributes that make a service beautiful for your customers as well as beautiful for your staff to deliver. A beautiful service will not only please your customers and have them coming back for more but will also provide you with a competitive advantage as beautiful service experiences are difficult to replicate.To put the above attributes in practice, it is advisable that a framework be created which you can use to systematically design all the above attributes in your services, making it a thing of beauty.
