think carrie, think!

This afternoon (and by this afternoon I mean the afternoon of August 31st) I had a meeting with Dr. Jim Levin, Chief Medical Information Officer at Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital. He contacted me after reading this blog, and was interested in what I was doing at CMU.

It was great to meet someone that was interested in design as a way to enhance patient experience. He knew a bit about usability and related topics, having a bit of technology background. Actually, Don Norman will be in town in a couple of weeks as part of a team doing site visits at UPMC (one of three hospitals chosen in the States), and Jim will be touring them around Children’s Hospital. It will be interesting to see what Don has to say about the current state of the hospital.

For those of you who don’t know, Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital will soon be moving to a new site in Lawrenceville (it’s currently in Oakland). One of the newest developments for the hospital is that that they are going completely paperless. And so, a neat part of Jim’s current work (besides the fact that he also has an appointment as a clinician for infectious diseases) is that he is responsible for figuring out how that all works. I can’t even being to imagine how one goes about managing that sort of thing.

Anyway, at one point we started talking about how we’re starting to think of products as services, and services as experiences. A lot of products nowadays of course, are mostly being designed as tools for a larger service system. I guess in the back of my mind I always knew this, but that made me wonder whether that now affects the way we design for products versus services. One of the major differences between products and services is where the responsibility of value creation falls. With standalone products, the consumers are responsible for creating value from the product, whereas with services, the creation of value from the service is the responsibility of the service provider. But if products become a part of a service system, who’s responsible for the creation of value in the product? And does that then affect the way we should think about its design during the design process?

Moved into my new apartment in Pittsburgh this weekend. Thank you mom. She’s a superhero.

I like the place. It has windows that don’t look straight out onto pavement and the underneath of cars. I see actual trees! The sky! Oh the luxury.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with the Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital to figure out what I can do for them for my thesis. And to hopefully start all the IRB goodness that comes with working with little people. The Children’s Hospital is conviniently (for me) opening a brand new unit right under their Critical Care unit in October. That means there will be lots of room for me to go in and evaluate their current services, and hopefully find something lacking, or something to improve with respect to their current service offerings. It also helps that Bonnie Dean, the director of clinical education/research/professional development and patient care support (phew, long title), has enthusiastically agreed to be my second mentor for my year-long thesis.

As for my thesis paper, I know I will be doing something about music notation and services… but I’ve been thinking lately more along the lines of improvisation and how that can tie into services. Improvisation takes on a whole new notation system in terms of music. And improvisation in services is a whole lot different than fixed and planned service processes. It seems that a lot of problems with services occur because of the lack of proper improvisation, if that makes any sense. I dealt a bit with this over the summer at IBM. Example: routine checking-in at the airport, vs. finding out that your flight was canceled at time of check-in. Canceled flights can be a mess, but they don’t have to be if planned properly. So, planned improvisation, if you will. How do companies currently deal with out-of-the-ordinary situations? Do they know what goes on in their customer’s head as they try to deal with crisis scenarios? How can designers create a strategy for service providers for creating better customer experience? Would proper service notation and blueprinting help?

(Speaking of music stuff, I got into one of CMU’s orchestra classes this year. Very excited.)

ICSID/IDSA Connecting ‘07

The 32nd International DMI Conference

MSI’s Service Innovation by Design

I know there are a lot of other conferences but these three have recently put themselves on my conference radar. Looks like a collection of great speakers and interesting topics. If only I was made of money. Well actually, seeing as how MSI’s conference is only open to specific members, and the DMI conference would put me out over $2K, it looks like the ICSID/IDSA may be a possibility.

Not so much work related

After Sprint made it into the news this past Tuesday, it comes as no surprise that a flurry of articles about customer service surfaced quickly after. All the more research material for me, I guess. Amongst the articles I found MeasuredUp, a site dedicated to customer reviews on customer service and brand experience (although I wonder why they split those two entities up). Apparently many businesses, after reading some of the reviews, have been proactively fixing some of their problems.

If only there were better service quality metrics. Yet another topic I have started thinking and reading about but have had no time to fully explore.

While I’m on the topic of customer experience… here’s a pretty amusing clip of a classic customer service example. It’s Ed Horrell calling Northwest Airlines, wondering why flight attendants get testy when you don’t have the exact change for a cocktail:

A little more work related

Mary Jo Bitner is coming to give a talk tomorrow, concerning her research on self-service technologies. It’ll be interesting to hear why she’s pushing this idea so much, considering the fact that the majority of the services world considers self-service technology to be the reason why customer service is going down the drain.

I am lucky that my mentor is the one organizing her visit. I will get to have lunch with her and Mary Jo, and will have some time to show Mary Jo some of the work I’ve been doing here at IBM. Should be pretty good, getting some feedback from a leader and founder of services marketing.

My mentor brought up Stew Leonard’s today. I’m going to blame my unfamiliarity of this jungle of a supermarket on me being Canadian. In any case, it was brought up because we are trying to find examples of good services to study. I’m not sure if this supermarket falls into my definition of a “good service” (apparently in the warmer months, they have petting zoos outside the market?), but they definitely have their fair share of tricks to maintain profits. Making customers walk through the entire store to get to the other end, having signing animals (and produce) to entertain the little ones, and their famous policy of “the customer is always right” (even when they’re wrong).

New York Times has called this place the “Disneyland of Dairy Stores” (they’re apparently the world’s largest dairy store). Barring the fact that I don’t think grocery stores should be in any way related to Disneyland, it makes me wonder what sorts of decisions went in to making a place like this.

(My particular interest in this may or may not have been due to the fact that I was close to studying Whole Foods for my thesis this coming year.)