A presentation at Confab Central in in Minneapolis, MN, USA by Mike Atherton
Like many of you, I started out as a child. Unlike many of you, this was in the 80s, when the world was different.
No web. No email. No Facebook. No cellphones. Even phoning internationally from a landline was something you got dressed up for. For a kid growing up in the north of England, the world was not the global village it is today. But I was into comic books, and through them I got my first glimpse of America.
America with its dazzling array of toys…
Its Bonkers…
Its Sea Monkeys!
What an impossibly exotic and sophisticated place America must be.
I saw an ad for a comic store who shipped to ‘US, Canada, and Other Foreign’. I took paper and pen and hand-wrote an order, choosing the comics I wanted from the ad.
I was so excited.
I went to the post office to get an international money order. This was how we sent money abroad back then. But my little post office didn’t supply them directly. They had to send away to the big post office who sent it to the little post office, who sent it to me.
I was impatient during the wait, but thrilled when it came. I put the order form and the money order in an envelope, and took it to the mailbox. Excited and nervous, I sent off my very first letter to America. And then… Nothing. Back then, airmail was expensive. My comics were coming on a boat. That meant six weeks. When you’re 10 years old, six weeks is forever. You could have a heartwarming Stand By Me summer adventure in less than six weeks. And what if my order hadn’t reached them? How would I even know?
I was staring down the business end of six weeks of impatience, uncertainty, and doubt. And then something happened. The tiniest little thing.
Two weeks after putting my letter in the mailbox, this postcard arrived. Instantly my uncertainty gave way to joy and excitement. Here was a thing from America! How clever! Postcards were cheap to send by airmail. With this small gesture I knew that my order would surely arrive. My wait had been punctuated with communication, so it felt much shorter.
The comics did arrive and so began a back and forth with the American comic book store that lasted years. I’ve never forgotten that tiny postcard or the feelings I had on receiving it. It’s been at the back of my mind throughout my 20 years in designing experiences. The smallest bit of informative content, but the right content to the right person at the right time.
Is that experience design? Is it customer service? Is it content strategy? It’s all of the above.
My whole career I’ve been crossing the streams. Running UX teams in agencies and startups, transforming the BBC with information architecture, and now doing content strategy for Facebook.
What interests me is how we can use the tools and methods from all these disciplines to build better products. UX, IA, CS. We all have the same goal in mind; providing services to the customers of our information, to help them complete their objectives.
We’ve moved on a bit since the 80s. These days things are different. We order from Amazon and have our stuff the next day - it’s amazing! Yet we have so many channels of communication - email, app notifications, SMS, instant messenger bots, social media - that our expectations have risen.
We expect to be kept in the loop. And sometimes we do have a long wait. We might book a flight or hotel rooms months before we check in. Or order a sofa and wait 10 weeks for it to arrive.
Throughout a long customer experience, or even a short one, we subconsciously drift from one channel to another.
When you registered for Confab, probably the next thing you did was look for a hotel room. Maybe you went straight for this official hotel, or maybe you tried a little price comparison shopping on your computer or your phone. Something like hotels.com, where the availability is updated in real-time. That’s because hotels.com is hooked up to a central reservation system. You go ahead and make your booking. That updates the reservation system, which tells the people at the hotel you’re coming. Meanwhile you get an email confirmation of your booking. If you’ve used the dedicated app, you’ll find your booking is registered there too. Which might also trigger a Passbook pass.
Now it’s the day of your arrival. The hotel has alerted housekeeping to make up your room. You get a push notification from the app reminding you of your reservation. When you arrive, you tap in your name on the front desk kiosk and check-in. You’re given a room number. Opening the door to your room you see a welcome message on the TV written just for you. You’ve gone on a journey. A journey not just of sight and sound but of mind. You’ve crossed over from computer to phone to email to notification to travel to kiosk to TV, without ever feeling you left the experience.
You’ve just experienced service design.
In the work we do, often we’re focused on a single product - like a website or an app. All our interactions, our user journeys, and our content are bound within the confines of that product. It’s self-contained, like Instagram, or Wikipedia, or even the BBC services I used to work on.
But sometimes the thing we’re designing is just a piece of a larger puzzle. Take Amazon - that website, or the app, is not really Amazon. Amazon is also the warehousing, the logistics, the fulfilment.
The user experience of Amazon is not the joy of using their clunky-ass website. It’s the joy of having anything you want in your hands tomorrow, for cheaper than you could get it downtown. The website is just a touchpoint; the point at which we touch the service, or the service touches us. The app is another one. So is email confirmation. The package arriving on the doorstep. Even the unboxing experience itself. All moments of opportunity for the service to delight or disappoint us.
So service design looks at the journey across the touchpoints. Where the app or website or smart device might be considered an avatar for the service, service design is concerned with the connective service ecology.
Service design goes beyond the things you can see. If I want to order a pizza, then when I pick up the phone, or go online, or go in-store, I trigger a sequence of actions. The next thing I might see is the pizza arriving at my door. And here service design borrows the language of theatre; the things I do or see directly are happening ‘frontstage’.
Behind-the scenes are the ‘backstage’ actions as my order is sent to the kitchen, assembled, baked, boxed, and put out for delivery. So of course, frontstage and backstage actions are connected. Actions happening backstage trigger each front-stage touchpoint.
Domino’s website showed this beautifully, with real-time updates on your pizza’s progress. By communicating all the backstage actions as well as the front-stage, I get a lot of reassurance that the pizza is actually making it’s way to me. My wait doesn’t seem quite as long.
As content strategists we bring the right content to the right people at the right time. Our customer is on a perilous journey across digital and physical spaces. Giving us their money. Perhaps they’re nervous. Or forgetful. Maybe they don’t trust us yet. What’s the right content for them? The right tone? And when is the right time to deliver it? To know that, we have to understand their journey. Map it out step-by-step. Follow their actions. Not just the things they do, but their emotions and motivations along the way.
Knowing who we’re designing for, what information they most need, and when they most need it - well, that’s the basis of a content strategy. We can work to keep people informed of the backstage actions to reduce their stress, uncertainty, and frustration. We can keep them engaged with our brand, using the relationship to show that we value their custom. Maybe we can entertain a little, creating a memorable experience overlaid on the tram lines of transaction.
So how can we plan for the creation and delivery of an effective customer experience? You know, one of the best jobs I ever had was teaching UX design at General Assembly.
The basic UX process is a cycle of building, measuring, and learning. We identify a problem to be solved, come up with something we hope will address that problem, and measure how well we did. Then we loop around again, refining and iterating and making things better. So I think of content strategy as UX for content. The process is parallel.
Our job is to consider content’s role in supporting a person’s journey to build a positive experience based on information needs and empathy. And that’s useful, because other disciplines have tools and ideas we can steal to help us understand and map a user’s journey from the outside-in.
One of my favourites is scenario design. This is design through storytelling. Scenarios are short stories, starring your user. If you’ve worked with personas before, you’ll know that a persona is a composite person representing audience trends and distilled from behavioural research. Scenarios are where we take those characters and place them in a scene.
So let’s establish a scene.
We’ve all been there. You can imagine how he’s feeling. So what does he do?
Turns out Anil is an iPhone user. We could work with that. And he’s not used this hotel chain before, so we can assume doesn’t have any kind of account.
Oh we’ve just summoned up a touchpoint. A kiosk. This is going to need content, guidance, clear options - especially for someone standing in a hotel lobby feeling tired late at night.
We need some information from him. This is a kiosk, and you know how awful they usually are. Plus he’s standing in a public area, so we want to keep this short and don’t want him to be entering super-secret stuff.
Now we’re being persuasive to get Anil to pony up his email address. And look! We’ve just crossed another channel with an email. Temporary password, since again we don’t want Anil entering something sensitive in a public area.
Direct payment here instead of typing in credit card details. We’re using the capabilities of the device to reduce the workload. Something we should always be mindful of when designing for a specific surface.
And so to bed for our hero. A happy ending to our story. And look at that, we’ve just done some cross-channel user experience design and we didn’t draw a single wireframe. We’ve described some interactions but you can see that for the most part our camera here is not pointed at the user interface. It’s pointed at people.
Our actors have actions they perform, objects to interact with, and a goal. They have a motivation and a set of expectations. And through these things, we define the requirements of our design. Scenarios create context for an interaction, and that context comes in different flavours.
What does our actor want to do? Where are they doing it? When is this happening? What emotional state are they in? What specific needs to they have? Which channels are being used to complete the task?
Every scenario covers one task. So for a complex system, you’re going to need a lot of them. Our story of Anil comes from a set of around 40 scenarios I worked on for a real hotel chain. Through these written personas we designed their service end-to-end. For those of us who best express ourselves through narrative, or for those of us who want to get away with doing a little creative writing at work, scenario design is powerful. It complements the specifics of interface design, and gets us some skin in the game.
For extra credit, turn your scenarios into comic strips to paint a rich picture of your story world. These are great for getting alignment in your team or with stakeholders. Unlike some huge and boring-ass specification document, they’re easy to engage with and more likely to be read.
Next up is empathy mapping. A deep dive into our customer’s world.
What are they thinking? Seeing and doing? How do they feel? When we’re strategising our content, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that people are going to engage with our stuff with the same care and attention we put into creating it.
Newsflash: they’re not. Sorry, but no one wants to hang out on your website to experience your brand story. They’re coming to get shit done.
People are busy. Distracted. Satisficing solutions through a variety of means, not just funnelling themselves down ours. Empathy mapping considers not just their use of our service, but the things going on around them.
Empathy mapping comes from real user research. We’re really getting out there and talking to people about how they feel, and where their biggest pain points are. By understanding that surrounding context, we can better provide that ‘right content at the right time.’
And now comes the big one. Where we lay out end-to-end the steps of the customer journey. We call it a service blueprint and it’s a guide to every interaction across every touchpoint.
Back to that same hotel project. This was a super fancy modern hotel where a lot of the experience was hooked up to your smartphone. On the day of your reservation you’d be reminded and get directions. When you walked into the lobby we could check you in automatically and allocate a room. If you’re using an NFC smartphone you can then use it as a keycard to open the door. Even inside the room, the TV and air conditioning and room service can be controlled by your phone.
Within that we document every action the customer takes. Every action corresponds to a scenario story. And to support that action, we list the roles of each digital touchpoint. A customer could make a booking on the website, the app, or over the phone. We map the points at which they’d receive, say, an email or a push notification.
These things get pretty huge, it’s true. You can make them on a wall with post-it notes, but you’ll need a lot of wall.
I like making mine in Google Sheets because it can get as big as I like, and it’s pretty easy to keep updated. I made mine a shared resource with my team. You’ll see in this one we also prioritised the level of support we’d provide.
Step by step, moment by moment, we’re building up an entire cross-channel service. We include everything from app on-boarding to confirmation messages to telephone scripts.
The swimlanes of this service blueprint give us a list of the things to be designed and the content to be created. We are planning for the delivery of useful, usable content.
As we move channels and across time, all messages speak with the same voice and an appropriate tone. Keeping our customer informed and engaged with the service as they move through their journey.
You could compare it to a hero’s journey, and indeed Donna Lichaw has just written a great book doing just that; mapping user journeys to narrative plot structure.
There’s an inciting incident which sends our hero off on a quest to solve a problem. The quest takes them into the special story world, which is the place our service inhabits. They need to successfully interact with our service to achieve their goal, then go on to feel good about their success and by extension, our role in helping them.
A simple idea, but a way of seeing the complete journey with all its inherent drama. A framework on which to pin content strategy to drive empowering services. Our customer is the hero of their story, and a well-designed experience turns an ordinary person into a superhero.
What does it mean to be a customer? My mother has shopped at the same supermarket for 50 years. Banked with the same bank. The world has moved on, but she won’t switch. In a digital landscape where competing services jostle together, is customer loyalty a thing of the past?
You might buy something from Amazon every few weeks. You might call for an Uber now and then. But outside of the moment of each transaction, do you really consider yourself to be their customer?
The father of modern management Peter Drucker told us that the purpose of a business wasn’t about making profit, but to create a customer.
Create the customer and the money will follow.
It reminds me of my favourite books (and movies), 84 Charing Cross Road. It’s a series of letters between a New York writer, Helene Hanff and Frank Doel, a clerk in a London second-hand bookstore. Helene can’t find decent English Literature in New York, so writes off to England to get books delivered. For over 20 years she is a customer of Marks and Co. and the book is basically her order history.
As the letters cross the Atlantic, a relationship builds up between the bookshop and its customer. Helene’s orders become more casual, “Send me a Pepys Diary if a complete one comes into stock for less than $5” Eventually–sometimes years later–the order gets filled. A very early example of an Amazon wish list.
Frank starts to learn Helene’s preferences and proactively sends small gift books he knows she’ll like. New York begins to stock more English Literature, but still Helene thinks it more convenient to write off to England for her books. Frank and Helene bond not over the process of buying books, but the wider subject of literature. This is a customer relationship which is genuine and reciprocated, and is only occasionally punctuated by transactions. A customer relationship that lasts over time.
There are brands out there today using content strategy to develop the longer-term customer relationship. If service design is the end-to-end journey within a transaction, then customer experience looks wider still. Considering life beyond and between transactions. Planning the whole customer lifecycle.
Compare the Market is an insurance price comparison service from the UK. If you need car or home or travel insurance, just plug in your details and get a range of appropriate policies from different insurance brokers. Then go off to your chosen broker to buy a policy.
Compare the Market don’t actually sell anything, so how have they managed to create customer loyalty? Because when customers want to renew their policy, they don’t go to the insurer - their primary relationship is with Compare the Market.
The secret weapon is meerkats.
This is a family of meerkat characters who front the TV campaign. Meerkats come from Africa, so of course these characters are a family of Russian oligarchs. Why meerkat? Because ‘meerkat’ sounds a bit like ‘market’.
I am not making this up.
There’s even a whole sister website, Compare the Meerkat. When you buy an insurance policy via Compare the Market, they will send you a plush meerkat of your very own. Why yes, I do have all of them.
The toy takes around six weeks to arrive. But you’re not kept in the dark during this time - no, you actually get email postcards from your meerkat as he travels through Europe on his way to you. It’s all a bit silly of course, but it’s kinda genius. During your wait, you’re a captive audience. The content is scheduled to keep you engaged with the brand. It’s appropriately joyful given that you’re getting a free toy. And the emails are respect that: they’re absolutely nothing to do with trying to push you more insurance.
Your free meerkat puts a plushy brand touchpoint in your house. Compare the Market have designed a service which integrates web and email and physical fulfillment. And a content strategy that is tonally appropriate and doesn’t try for the hard sell. In doing all that Compare the Market has not only become the leading insurance price comparison brand, but they’ve actually shifted the brand relationship and loyalty from the insurers to themselves, even those they don’t sell anything.
Going further still are Dyson, who think about content strategy way beyond purchase. Their relationship building starts at purchase. They have mapped out the lifecycle of a Dyson vacuum cleaner owner. That journey starts with excitement over a new purchase, through to learning to use the machine better, through to needing routine maintenance and eventually an upgrade.
Dyson know roughly when you’ll hit each point in your user journey, and have email messaging targeted to suit. A reassuring tone in this message sent 7 days after purchase - you have a guarantee, you’re covered. At 90 days you probably need to wash your filter, so here’s a reminder of how to do it. When your warranty runs out after 600 days, a reassurance that Dyson will still look after you.
It doesn’t end there. Dyson’s calendar runs for 1920 days after purchase, by which time they figure you’ll be on your next machine. They care about creating the customer. Building long-term preference and loyalty, which are the building blocks of brand.
That wouldn’t work if they were spamming us with sales messages the whole time. So instead Dyson consider that customer journey and map the content of their messages accordingly.
My favourite of those Dyson emails is the one about cleaning tips (540 days after purchase). It doesn’t talk about the product at all. Instead it talks about the wider subject of keeping your home clean. Building a customer relationship by supporting the customer’s wider interest.
This is useful, usable content, albeit from a commercial brand. Is this content marketing? Content strategy? Where’s the divide?
Look at AirBnB with their city guides and Wanderlust magazine content. Mailchimp with their booklets on email marketing. GatherContent with their guides and webinars on how to be a better content strategist.
In all cases this content is not pushing product, but providing useful, usable content about the surrounding subject domain. Interesting, relevant, and helpful.
Brand is an idea that you stand for made real by the things you do. It’s a relationship built one step at at time. So if we see evidence that the brand stands for the things we care about too - travel, communications, content strategy, we’re more likely to listen. We give the content more of our attention. We deepen our relationship. We become a better customer. Service design is there to smooth our journey as we travel across channels and across time. When infused with content strategy, it keeps us informed and engaged by supplying us with the right content at the right time.
Without that continuity of service, it’s too easy to fall into the gaps; the service cracks or experience crevasses that we’ve all experienced at one time or another. If you’ve ever called your cable provider with a problem, only to be passed around and having to explain your story every time to the next person, you know what I mean. If you’ve ever tweeted at an airline about a booking, you should expect the social media team to at least have access to your reservation.
When it works, it works like magic. Even with Delta.
Or when you’re hiking the PCT and break your shoes, only to have REI ship out a replacement pair to your onward destination.
These are what customer experience people call moments of truth; those key interactions that make or break a brand.
And here I must give a shout out to Misty Weaver, who shared this great model with me at the IA Summit. It illustrates an important point. With messaging we move informing a broad audience about our brand, to building credibility and trust, to igniting passion and advocacy.
In other words, moving from broad attention-seeking to personal relationship-building. I’d argue that this is also plots the transition from content marketing to content strategy.
Good messaging builds trust, engagement, loyalty, and permission. Our content is always transactional. It’s a transaction of information for that most precious resource, attention. Goodwill buys attention.
I’d like to leave you with three principles to consider in using content strategy to build long-term engagement.
We cross the streams constantly leaping from channel to channel in a single bound. Though we move across devices, we consider it all one experience. So map the entire experience, and look for the gaps.
Where are the high-risk places where a customer may be crossing channels and risk falling into a service crack? What can you design to mitigate that? Where might they be waiting a long time? What can we do in those spaces while we have a captive audience? How can we use that opportunity to lower perceived waiting time and build engagement or even excitement?
Our customer is our hero. They’re busy, distracted, and we only have some of their attention. We support their story, they not here to support ours. How are they feeling at each point? What information will help them - encourage them - to get to the next chapter and complete their quest?
They say that people don’t buy products, they buy empowered versions of themselves. What they’re interested in is not what we offer, but what it can do for them.
Engage them with useful and usable content which celebrates the wider subject your business operates in. Show them that their goals are your goals too.
By considering these principles, you’re covering the three main components of brand preference; the rational, the emotional, and the self-reflexive benefits of the service you offer. Making the customer a part of your tribe. That means being consistent, respectful and above all, authentic.
No, but really. Hear me out.
Content strategy, therefore, is content marketing. We get very cross about this, don’t we? But the way I see it, marketing is the science of persuasion. Persuading people to do a thing. So content marketing is designing content to persuade people to do a thing. Like giving blood. Or voting. Or coming to a conference. My argument is that with all content strategy, be it for lovely non-profits or big evil corporations, we’re planning for user intent.
What are people trying to do? What do we want them to do with the information we provide? What’s our call to action? I’ve spoken today about ‘customers’ but the principles are the same whatever your business. We’re trading information for attention. In a world wide web of voices, we aim to make ours stand out.
Tell me again how we’re not marketers.
We have a saying at work: nothing at Facebook is someone else’s problem. The same is true of content strategy. Let’s use the skills we have to do whatever needs to be done. We can serve designers, and we can be designers. User interface designers; the interface between the customer and the business. Designing a customer relationship from the macro to the micro.
Peter Drucker also said that “Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.” We have systems for content management. What we need is content leadership. We’re strategists. It’s right there in the job title. Strategists set the agenda.
Content may be our output, but it’s the strategy that gets it there, makes it right, and keeps it coming.
We’re in a complex world of omnichannel information, published everywhere. Those journeys (as we also say at Facebook) start anywhere. And eventually everything connects. Streams are crossing. Who better than content strategists to turn complex and ambiguous messages into clarity and coherence?
Language is infrastructure, and we are uniquely skilled to craft messages that change behaviour and change minds. Let’s find customers for our content, and content for our customers.
As I was preparing this talk I knew I wanted to tell you about that postcard I got as a kid. But I didn’t have one to show you. So I emailed New England Comics–still in business at the same location–and asked if they could help. You know, ‘do you remember me from 30 years ago?’
Amazingly they wrote back! ‘I’ve been down to the cellar and here’s what you’re looking for!’.
It’s been 35 years since I bought anything, and I still feel like a customer for life.
An overview of service design and how it can be infused with content strategy to inform, engage, and entertain customers. Building long-term customer relationships though useful and usable content.
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