Over the holidays I travelled to the UK, where I hired a rental car at Heathrow airport before heading southwest towards Cornwall. The car was new, from a leading rental agency and, mechanically, it handled well in tricky conditions. So far, so good. With two 12.3” dashboard display screens, access to Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, live navigation services and every conceivable, configurable option, the “infotainment” system should have enhanced the overall driving experience. Instead, it was beyond frustrating.
As a rental car, the ideal situation is to get in the car, adjust the mirrors and driving position, check the indicators and lights, start the engine, and drive away. Only on this occasion, we drove away with the sound system volume set to stadium rock levels and there was no dial, switch, or obvious button to turn the volume down. Trying to fumble through the interface at 70 mph on a busy motorway, where the “hot spot” for each option seemed to be no more than a handful of pixels requiring several seconds of firm pressure to activate, all while being told to “focus on driving” and being beeped at continuously by the driver alert system, was hardly the most relaxing way to start my journey.
With no manual in the glove box, a frantic online search finally revealed that six touches of the screen were required to turn the volume down and get back to Google Maps, with a further six touches to stop the car beeping at me every five seconds. Infuriatingly, every time the engine was turned off, these settings all defaulted back to their original position, so we got to do it all again and again!
I have no doubt that, once configured, it is all perfectly straightforward and very effective, but it was a rental car, and the agency should have known that spending hours reading through manuals and watching “How To” YouTube videos does not enrich the rental experience.
The GPS system was also a cause of frustration. Cornwall is criss-crossed with roads designed with the trench model in mind. They are barely a car-width’s wide, squeezed between 2-3m high hedges, and follow a random pattern of blind corners and vertiginous inclines and descents with minimal passing places. Coming head-to-head with a van or farm vehicle travelling in the opposite direction is not for the faint hearted.
Unfortunately, neither the inbuilt navigation system nor Goole Maps had a feature that would allow me to avoid these goat tracks, and the only driver alert feature missing was one informing me of an oncoming tractor just around the next corner or warning me that the road I was heading down required rally driver skills. And so, I had to resort to analogue mode and buy a map book. Far easier!
Based on this experience, a few operational risk and design issues sprung to mind:
It does not matter how good the technology is, user familiarity, skills and experience with the technology play a critical role in reaching a successful outcome.
In a service business, one of the “users” is the customer, i.e., the consumer of the services is also responsible for “manufacturing” the service.
It is not about having the best technology; it is about ensuring that the deployed technology is fit for purpose.
Just because the CI/CX design works for one use case, does not mean it will work for all use cases.
Setting expectations at the start of the customer journey is critical for managing the customer experience.
The journey is just as important as the destination when determining customer satisfaction.
The shortest and fastest path may not always be the right choice, execution risk is a vital consideration.
Assessing risk and planning for the unexpected is a continuous process.
Of course, none of these issues is insurmountable, but what it highlights is that designing services is not easy and requires input from multiple stakeholders, with different perspectives on what success looks like, including the customer.
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