I recently helped design a music mastering service from soup to nuts.  So fun!  The process reminded me that content plays a key role in the service experience.  I first became aware of this fact a few years ago at Cingular Wireless, where the human-centered design team worked on projects for all customer touchpoints—IVR, store kiosk, customer service representative, website, you name it.  Get the content wrong in or across any of those touchpoints, and the service experience implodes.  Here are a few specific reasons why well-crafted content adds business value to a service.

Content Greases the Wheels of a Long-Term Service Relationship

The business-customer relationship for a product often is short term.  The customer shops, compares, buys, and then the relationship is mostly over. With a service, the relationship often is long term. When a customer signs up for a service, whether a mobile service plan or NetFlix, she often is signing up for a period of time or certain number of uses.  If anything requires good communication, it’s a long-term relationship. The substance of this communication is largely content.

• The business has to communicate to the customer: account status, order history and status, bill statements, special offer notifications, announcements of new benefits or features, technical support and more.
  • This content needs to be accurate, credible, reliable, easily accessible, and easily understandable.
  • If the content is not, customers will lose confidence or become confused and even angered.
• In turn, the customer may need to communicate to the business: change in preferences, bill questions, technical questions, and more.
  • The service needs to provide a way for customers to communicate with it, plus content that helps explain or support interactions and to answer questions.
  • Again, this content needs to be credible, reliable, easily accessible, and easily understandable.

Content Adds a Personal, Differentiating Tone to the Automated Aspects of a Service

Of course, the direction of many services is automation, such as paying the service bill online.  Automation saves businesses money by being more efficient and requiring fewer employees.  Automation often is more convenient for customers, as well. The tricky part? Preserving a personal feel or tone in the service, especially for the long term.  How can you make your service seem different from your competitor’s if it is largely automated?  One way is through outstanding content that has a distinctive voice.

For the music mastering service I mentioned earlier, the president had a large hand in crafting the content’s voice.  I think it largely worked because he designed the service for someone like him. The voice seemed authentic. Also, many of the “web 2.0″ services have extremely informal and human-sounding content, which I think helps create an authentic voice.  A huge brand for many products and services that has impressively managed to keep a distinct voice is Virgin.  I look forward to seeing how voice evolves as service design grows.

Virgin's unmistakable brash voice is clear even on a log in page.

More on Service Experience and Design

• Adaptive Path has quite a few blog posts on service design. One I find especially interesting is “The Price of Convenience,” which ponders the impact of less human-human interaction as a result of “mobile wallets.”
• I’ve written a couple of articles related to service design.
  • Better Bills - Very practical approach and tips to improving a cornerstone of service experience, the bill.
  • Rediscovering Communication - A little on the technical and theoretical side, but with some examples drawn from service experience.
• Daniel Szuc has some interesting thoughts on self-service, including Customer Support on the Web: Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You.