Mind the gaps—designing multichannel service experiences for real people
at Interaction South America 2014
Type
talk
Interaction South America 2014 keynote on designing multichannel service experiences for real people. Polaine shows how gaps between channels, departments, staff and systems — for example airline booking, call-centre and check-in — fracture customer experience, and argues for coherent service design across touchpoints rather than isolated "user experience" fragments.
People
Andy Polaine
Methods
Service DesignService design examines how people, tools and organisational processes work together to deliver an experience. Map the customer-facing steps alongside the staff activities, policies and systems that support them, often using a service blueprint. Bring the relevant teams together to identify broken handoffs, duplicated work and conflicting responsibilities, then coordinate changes across the service. Use it when problems span departments or channels and cannot be resolved through interface changes alone. Include employee experience because internal constraints shape what customers receive.
Journey MappingJourney mapping brings research about people’s experiences into a shared visual account of stages, actions, thoughts and feelings. It is useful when a service spans multiple steps, teams, places or touchpoints and you need to see where those parts fail to connect. Collect accounts from several users before mapping. Arrange their experiences over time, identify common stages and highlight problems and dependencies. Work with the team so the map informs decisions. Preserve meaningful differences between journeys rather than forcing every participant into a single path; revise the map as further research changes your understanding.