Interview with Timo Patiala, Commercial Director and Partner at Hellon London

By Thomas Brandenburg

 

“The internal stakeholder buy in is so important that I can’t stress it enough. If we just deliver project after project but no actual learning is happening within our clients’ organizations the scaling of the discipline and wider adoption will not happen. It’s just another project.” —Timo Patiala

 

What are the key ingredients necessary in delivering an exceptional end-to-end service experience at scale? How do service designers help?

Delivering exceptional service experience throughout the journey requires a holistic approach to customer experience. It means that the company needs to understand all the touchpoints where they interact with the client, whether they are social, spatial or digital and provide equally good experiences through all of them.  

This is where many stumble, they might provide fantastic digital experiences as they have focused so much on one outlet but then when the same customer experiences a social or spatial interaction and it doesn’t match the expectation from the previous experience, the overall customer experience actually suffers. In short, look at customer experience holistically and this one of the areas where Hellons service designers helps our clients.

 

How should an organizational structure be adaptive or change to successfully deliver new services with speed and scale?  

The structure of the organization itself is perhaps not the main inhibitor for delivering new services, but the rather the culture of doing things. For a company to be able to embrace rapid customer centric development it needs to be able to let go of rigid delivery models as well as the culture of honing a service or a product internally until its “ready” to be launched.

This requires someone within the organization with enough brass to embrace customer centricity and early stage prototyping to empower the development teams. This leads to reduced go-to-market time and also getting it right faster and saving precious £$€. We at Hellon believe that corporate empathy as a trait is going to be the next big thing.

 

What is a key lesson(s) you learned over the years in scaling service design?

This is a bit of a loaded question as it depends on the point of view of scaling, but basically for service design as an approach to take root and flourish in client organizations, there needs to be an internal primus motor, an ambassador at the top level that understands what the aims are and why customer centricity is important.

The internal stakeholder buy in is so important that I can’t stress it enough. If we just deliver project after project but no actual learning is happening within our clients’ organizations the scaling of the discipline and wider adoption will not happen. It’s just another project.

 

Are there any organizations that come to mind that are successful at incorporating service design into their process and executing it at scale?

Many companies are embracing Service Design or Design Thinking these days, we see consolidation within the industry but also a shift where traditional clients do not just want agencies to deliver projects, they want to learn how to do it themselves and skill up their internal teams.  Bank of Ireland, Tekes, Kone and Finnair from Hellons clients in the UK and Finland are doing a pretty good job at this.

 

What are the most useful framework(s) for measuring impact of the design of services?

Measuring impact for a SD project is a topic that comes up with almost every client and rightfully so. That being said, every client and their service are different and they have different motivations for wanting to utilise Service Design.

My philosophy is to find the framework and KPI´s that fit the client and the project at hand which gives a realistic view to both parties about the desired outcomes. Sure, it’s simple to measure baseline (existing service) to the new design of the service (or certain elements of it) or purely archaic measurements like NPS but I prefer to tailor the measurement with each client. Artificial Intelligence is going to be a game changer; we are already experimenting with our clients around the capabilities of our Hellon AI and the prioritisation CX investments.

 

Be sure to see Timo’s presentation, “Selling Service Design – An Adaptive Sales Approach” at the upcoming 2017 SDN Global Conference

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