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Measuring
Service
Experience

A BETTER APPROACH TO MEASURE SERVICE PERFORMANCE Anna van der Togt, Daniel Letts,
Marzia Arico, Wim Rampen, Liz LeBlanc CX MANAGEMENT TOOLS: A SERVICE DESIGNER'S
BEST FRIEND Joris Hens, Kaspar Kazil TRACKING DESIGN FROM OFFERINGS TO STRATEGY
Tua Bjorklund, Pia Hannukainen
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 f ro m t h e e d i t o r s

Measuring Service Experience

“You cannot manage what you cannot measure... and what gets measured Jesse Grimes is Editor-in-Chief
of Touchpoint and has fourteen
gets done.” So goes the old adage attributed in different forms to several
years of experience as a service
management gurus. And it’s one that presents a perennial challenge for service designer and consultant. He
designers; how does one really measure something as amorphous as ‘experience’? is an independent practitioner,
trainer and coach, based in
By their very nature, service experiences are difficult to quantify.
Amsterdam and working inter-
Spread chronologically over time, and distributed across multiple nationally. Jesse is also Senior
touchpoints, that holistic understanding of how a customer or end user Vice President of the Service
Design Network and Head of
truly experienced a service is difficult to come by. And it’s even more of Training for the SDN Academy.
a challenge to communicate that understanding in hard metrics. While some
measurements such as NPS are sharp and easily quantifiable, they draw Giuseppe Chiorazzo is Global
Digital Communications and
plenty of criticism from those who say they radically oversimplify things. Web Leader at ABB Motion.
With service designers more and more being asked to report their success He works on digitalisation
strategies and execution road­
in a way familiar to top management - such as numbers that fit neatly in a
maps, and he is an advocate
dashboard - we’re faced with a difficult challenge. Furthermore, building a case for customer centricity.
for far-reaching service improvements also calls for hard metrics: What can
Damian Kernahan, Project
we measure and track over time to see if the investments made were worth it? Director and CEO, founded
This topic of measurements and metrics in the world of service design Proto in 2008 to help large
is the focus of this issue of Touchpoint, and contained in the following organisations truly understand
their customers so they can
pages are what I hope to be many new ways for you as a service designer deliver outstanding service
to address these questions. solutions and experiences.
Looking further ahead into 2022, the SDN is pleased to announce the
Peter Merholz is an independent
long-awaited return of our traditional Global Conference, to be held this consultant and author focused
year in Copenhagen. While we will be introducing a hybrid format that allows on the organisation design
of design organisations.
remote participation, the ability to reconvene as a community - face-to-
face - is something I’m sure many of us are looking forward to. Watch our Ekaterina Panina is a doctoral
social media for all the latest SDGC22 news, and I hope to see you there. researcher in Marketing at the
University of Turku, Finland. She
studies CX management in B2B
firms, focusing on the strategic
use of target experiences.

Dr. Vidya Priya Rao is founder of

Innovatus Marketers Touchpoint
LLP and Accredited Service
Design Master. She helps
companies harness their power
Jesse Grimes of innovation by breaking out
of their comfort zones and
embracing the ‘what ifs’.

Birgit Mager, publisher of

Touchpoint, is professor for ser-
vice design at Köln International
School of Design (KISD), Cologne,
Germany. She is founder and di-
rector of sedes research at KISD
and is co-founder and President
of the Service Design Network.

Touchpoint 13-1 3

6
14 FEATURE:
MEASURING SERVICE
EXPERIENCE
16 Time for a Holistic Way of
Measuring Experience?
Veronica Naguib
2 IMPRINT
22 From Touchpoints
3 FROM THE EDITORS
to Datapoints
6 NEWS Suhaib Aslam, Sander
Bogers, Sietze van de Star
10 CROSS-DISCIPLINE
28 The Multi-Factor Framework
10 Measuring Service for Evaluating Service Design
Design Impact Danyang Wang, Wei-An
Milla Mäkinen Hsieh, Hsien-Hui Tang
4 Touchpoint 13-1
22
34 Measuring for Sustainability:
Friend or Foe?
Shreya Dhawan, Leah Berg
39 A Data-driven Service
Blueprint to Get Things
Done
Gea Sasso, Sonia Balduzzi,
Sara Bellini
42 Experiences that Count
Titta Jylkäs, Sérgio Tavares
46 A Better Approach to
Measure Service
Performance
Anna van der Togt, Daniel
Letts, Marzia Aricò, Wim
Rampen, Liz LeBlanc
 c ontents

56

68 TOOLS AND METHODS

72
70 Applying a Data-driven
Approach to Qualify a
Persona Service Strategy
Aron Krause Litvin, Ana
Maria Copetti Maccagnan

74 Addressing the Information

Gap in Maternal Care
50 Surfacing and Measuring Ekta Jafri, Priyanka Pillai,
the Whole Aaina Amin, Nisha Rangdal,
92 PROFILES
Tom Foster, Luke Watson Poorvi Mathur, Ishani Sathe
92 Service Design in Japan
56 CX Management Tools: 80 Applying Service Design to
A chat with with Taro
A Service Designer’s Academic Processes
Akabane and Atsushi
Best Friend Manahil Huda Hasegawa
Joris Hens, Kaspar Kazil
86 Tracking Design from
96 INSIDE SDN
62 The Future of Measuring Offerings to Strategy
Service Experience Tua Björklund, Pia 96 Socjomania receives
Dr. Vidya Priya Rao Hannukainen Organisational Accreditation

Touchpoint 13-1 5
 A Better Approach to
Measure Service Performance
Creating tools for long-term, informed decision-making

Ever since the idea of great customer experience entered

the minds of business leaders, they have been pushing their
organisations to measure it. Organisations of all stripes invested
heavily in the tools and skills to truly understand the experience
of customers using their services. To do so, they relied on survey-
based CX measures such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or the
Customer Effort Score (CES).

Anna van der Togt is a senior
service designer, specialised in
supporting corporate clients
with customer-centric &
circular transformations.
Daniel Letts is Service Design
lead & Customer Ex­perience
Consultant and certified
Agile Scrum Master.
Marzia Aricò is Design
Director at Livework, she is
specialised in organisational
transformation by design.
Wim Rampen is Managing
Director of Livework
Rotterdam and a seasoned
CX management expert
in service industries.
Liz LeBlanc is a lead
service designer with
extensive experience in
leading customer-centric
transformation projects
for a wide variety of
clients & industries.
The trouble is, these measures might
gauge general customer sentiment,
but they don’t enable organisations to
act. They are too generic to identify
precisely where customers feel things
are going wrong, are often based on low
response rates1, and lack a clear link to
operational factors or desired business
outcomes, making it difficult to prioritise
improvements.
Companies need a new approach to
measuring services; one that is more
precise and comprehensive and is linked
to specific journey steps across the
customer lifecycle. It should be grounded
in deep insights into customer needs and
1 McKinsey & Company. (2021, July 12). Prediction:
The future of CX. McKinsey & Company.
Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.
mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-
sales/our-insights/prediction-the-future-of-cx
motivations, and connect to business and
operational measurements, such as costs
or efficiency. Preferably, an approach
that can easily be scaled for a consistent
and transparent way of monitoring
service performance — unlocking an
organisation-wide practice of informed
prioritisation of tactical and strategic
efforts. In short, an approach that allows
service performance measurements to be
a decision-making tool.
In this article, we’ll present a new
methodology for measuring service
performance that addresses the short-
comings of the CX measurement prac-
tices that are most commonly used today.
We have co-developed this methodology
with several large clients in the bank-
ing, energy and retail sectors. We will
showcase examples of the method that
bring clarity to how it can inform decision-
making and lead to bottom-line business
results. We end with insights on how to

46 Touchpoint 13-1

A set of metrics that covers across the entire customer journey and from three perspectives
Phases Unaware Aware Interested Buy
Client metric 1
Client Client metric 2
metrics
Business metric 1
Business
Business metric 2
metrics
Ops/Org metric 1
Ops/org
Ops/Org metric 2
metrics
Ops/Org metric 3
“To-be” from start-to-end and front-to-back
get started, including concrete tips to introduce ‘service
performance views’ into the decision-making process.
The benefits delivered by this methodology come
neither quick nor easy. The robust and scalable pro-
cess is designed to set up performance measures for
the long term, relying on collaboration and input from
various teams across the organisation. However, the
advantages of putting in the work will be substantial.
It enables comparison to historical data and analys-
ing service performance trends across the board. As
customer expectations change, measures adapt to meet
those new needs without losing the ability to compare
to previous experiences. It’s work, but it’s worth it.
Customer, business and operation in one holistic
overview
A service offered to a customer is the sum of the parts
offered by an organisation. That means organisations
need a holistic view of what constitutes a good service
(both in the eyes of the customer and the business) and
what is required to deliver it (the operational story).
While the exact approach may vary across organisa-
tions, this methodology consists of three key elements:
m e a s u ri n g s e r v i c e e x p e ri e n c e
Setup Early use Use Incident Change Reconsider Leave
C. metric 4
Client metric 5
Client metric 3 Client metric 6
Business metric 3
Business metric 5
Business metric 4
Ops/Org metric 4
O./O. metric 5 O./O. metric 6 Ops/Org metric 7
From start to end
First, organisations map out their customer journey.
As a service unfolds over time and primarily focuses
on serving customers, the methodology starts with
them. This start-to-end view of the steps customers go
through to meet their needs serves as the foundational
grid to structure service performance metrics. Creating
comprehensive data sets that span full journeys allows
organisations to map and track performance across
interactions, touchpoints and channels, and sheds
light on the root causes of performance. Each journey
is mapped along the higher-level customer lifecycle to
provide a high-level overview of the full service ecology.
Understanding front-to-back
Secondly, organisations set out to gain a deep under-
standing of needs across their journeys. This is done
through deep qualitative research on customer needs,
wishes and desired outcomes across the journey, but also
includes rigorous introspection. For organisations to a.)
understand what is needed operationally to deliver the
customer experience effectively, and b.) know which
factors drive profitability, means that they can finally
Touchpoint 13-1 47
connect customer value to business and operational
measurements, such as cost or efficiency.
Translating outcomes to signals and metrics
The three types of needs are formulated as outcomes
across the journey and translated to lower-level signals:
indicators that lead to an understanding of whether
the service system is delivering on the outcomes. The
customer outcome "I want to better understand the
conditions to the acceptance of this contract" could
translate to multiple signals such as "The customer
doesn't ask front office for an explanation" or "The
customer doesn't take long to get back to us with
a signed contract". These signals are then further
refined into metrics which are tracked over time. To
continue with the example mentioned before, a metric
tied to the first signal could be "The monthly number
of emails/calls asking for contract explanation". The
methodology imposes a number of requirements on
Shortcomings of traditional CX measures
Narrow focus on attitudes – only measures what people
think of the general experience (in hindsight)
Just one or two general measures for the entire service –
assess general customer sentiment or a (part of a) service
Survey fatigue and low response rates – heavy reliance on
surveying customers on every interaction, causing survey
fatigue and skewing results due to low response rates
Business metrics in customer disguise - current
customer metrics are actually company centric asking
for likeliness to promote or buy again rather than qualities
of good experience
Not actionable – data generic and not clearly linked to
root cause of problem or to business value, difficult to
prioritise improvements
Unclear link to organisational efforts – causing low
understanding, disengagement or entire organisation to
claim NPS increase
No warning signals – current approaches fail to identify
(early warning) signals that a service is failing
48 Touchpoint 13-1
how these metrics are defined. These may include
the unit of measure, the measurement scale, the
optimisation direction and the availability of the data.
A toolset consisting of templates, explanatory
decks and examples helps guide the methodology,
resulting in ‘service performance views’ both per
customer journey, as well as an ‘aggregated-up’, high-
level view across the entire customer lifecycle.
Result: actionable service performance views
This new approach to measuring services is both more
comprehensive and more precise. Comprehensive
because it results in a dashboard-like overview showing
the high-level performance across the customer
lifecycle of all services an organisation provides. And
precise because this high-level overview links these
measures to those at customer journey level, providing
the granularity needed to pinpoint which factors are
driving performance at which point of each service.
New methodology's answers
Combining attitudinal and behavioural data – incorporates both
people's attitudes and their behaviour (e.g. how long does it take
them to do something)
Precise and comprehensive set of measures – links measures to
specific journey steps across the customer lifecycle
Leveraging non-survey based data – takes advantage of data gathered
from internal systems and processes, measuring the customer's moves
Explicitly measures from three perspectives - the customers'
viewpoint, the business' viewpoint and the organisational viewpoint
are made explicit based on deep qualitative insight
Informs evidence-based decision making - on the back of holistic yet
granular overviews of services instrumented with quantified indicators
of the factors that drive performance
Enables accountability against key outcomes and metrics –
the granularity needed to pinpoint which factors are driving
performance at which point of each service
Day-to-day dashboards Indicating change – can link outcomes to
internal early warning signals displayed on service management
dashboards

The measures displayed reflect the key outcomes
(high-level or journey-level) that customers,
operations and the business are looking to achieve,
and can either display as ‘RAG’ status , as ranges, or
as specific numbers. Each measure on the dashboard
can itself be interrogated to see how it has been
constructed, and who is responsible for delivering it.
One large utility provider wanted to improve overall
customer satisfaction, but found it hard to prioritise pain
points and identify the most impactful course of action.
The methodology helped them to:

— Identify and validate the top five customer outcomes
across one of their key customer journeys.

— Link these outcomes to internal early warning signals
for their day-to-day service management dashboard.
These signals now serve as indicators for service
failure (or success) for service owners.

— Developed new survey questions to be run
continuously on a selection of customers only and
phased out various interaction surveys and survey
questions.

— Identify internal processes that significantly impact
customer outcomes and define and implement new
metrics to track service performance.
Most of all, after applying it once, they understood
how to roll out this methodology across the rest of their
key customer journeys and review the desired outcomes,
signals and metrics defined periodically to keep them
up-to-date with the ever-evolving customer needs.
Value of the service performance views
The methodology allows leaders across organisations
to create and share holistic overviews of their services
with quantified indicators of the factors that drive
performance. This creates a single shared truth, enables
accountability against key outcomes and metrics, and
informs evidence-based decision-making on where
to invest to improve the service and track impact.
Another promising use of the service performance
views is how it helps to prioritise customer experience in
strategic roadmaps or planning. Knowing what outcomes
customers value, how well the organisation is performing
against them, and connecting that performance to
business and operational measurements, fosters a better
m e a s u ri n g s e r v i c e e x p e ri e n c e
understanding of how these factors are connected and
how CX improvements lead to business results.
One US investment bank, for example, wanted to create
a living overview of how their services were performing
across lines of business. This overview was to inform the
prioritisation of initiatives, budget allocation and generally
support better decision-making. The methodology helped
them get started by creating a service ecology that could
hold a cohesive, outside-in view of all the bank's services
to customers. Nested below each service, the key journeys
were detailed and enriched with qualitative customer data.
The journeys were then turned into a decision-making
tool by equipping them with key customer, business and
operational metrics, following the methodology described.
The journeys' instrumentation and their positioning
into a larger map of services have enabled the
organisation to give context to data. That means being
able to compare services on customer, business and
operational dimensions, allowing a much more effective
prioritisation of initiatives. The bank is now able to
know how effective and relevant the services they
provide are to their customers, how much it costs to run
them, how much they generate in terms of revenue, and
what projects are currently in flight to improve them —
all from one overview. This resulted in better alignment
over real priorities and reduced the duplication of effort.
How to get started
There is no one rule on how to start on this journey, but
experience teaches that these are the key activities that
help support this kind of work:

— Create a shared view of what you offer to customers
from a customer perspective (not an organisational
one). Use simple language to allow anyone in the
organisation to understand it and relate to it.

— Stress test it with different parts of the organisation
and introduce it to people – this is probably a view of
your organisation they have never seen.

— Pick one journey in this overview and start from
there. The journey must be situated on the map
described above to explain how to scale the work.

— Involve the right people from the start, this is a
collaborative effort.

— Involve your stakeholders in introducing these service
performance measurements into existing meetings
where prioritisation and decision making happen.
Touchpoint 13-1 49
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