Designing an effective service strategy and training for a tourism and attraction group
How to raise the bar for service excellence from 0% complaints to 100% compliments?
A local tourism and attraction group wanted to increase service excellence at their various attractions, restaurants and gift stores. Though the experience was already adequate, they wanted to raise the bar for themselves to increase NPS and focus on creating consistently delightful service throughout the customer journey.
Role
Service Designer & Visual Designer
User Research, Service Strategy Design, Training Design
Responsibilities
Service guide, game cards, service diary, training manual.
Deliverables
3 Months
Duration
2021
Year
Methodology
Discover
Design
Deliver
Discover
It was important that we design a service strategy and training that was branded to the group’s identity as well as targeting specific pain points where customers engaged with the service. To do that, I had to understand the key service gaps, and moments of genuine hospitality in the Singapore context by doing the following:
Qualitative research through 1 hour interviews with management, service staff, and customers
Mystery shopping for audit
Landscape and contextual research
Research synthesis
From the in-depth research, we saw that the current service was adequate, just the same as any other place. However, for this local tourism and attraction group the question wasn’t just ‘how do we deliver better service?’ but rather:
How can we create moments of delight?
Mystery Shopping
In-depth Interviews
Sharing Insights with ClientDesign
To understand how they can deliver moments of delight, we designed a co-creation workshop with the star service staff to come up with a set of organisational values and driving philosophy from ground up. To arrive at those values, I designed fun activities for the workshop such as:
Storytelling Speed Dating: To compile stories that belong uniquely to the group with their most memorable service moments.
Values Chart: To generate values with all staff and align on a prioritised set of values.
Service Journey: To describe ideal service behaviours at each touchpoint.
Service Hero: To describe situation when things go wrong and how a ‘hero’ can save it.
Profiling: To create guest profiles of the most common type, favourite type and the most difficult type of guests.
Staff prioritising values
Staff filling up service stories
Workshop MaterialsDeliver
The co-creation workshop provided detailed information for us to form the 3 stage service training. Shifting away from the typical employee training the service staff was already used to, we designed the training in the form of fun games.
As someone who has been a service staff and enjoys playing various board/card games, I modified a popular card game – Cards Against Humanity – as a service training game. The three rounds of the game followed the 3 stage service training with the content being provided from the staff themselves.
We conducted a train-the-trainer workshop for the same star staff members to ensure continuity and transparency of the project. We also delivered artefacts such as the card game, reflection booklets and SOPs for the staff to roll out themselves.
Prototyping Games for Service Training
Gamified Training User Testing
Train-the-Trainer WorkshopLearnings
From the interviews and workshops with the staff, I realised how important it is to get buy in from the ground level. The staff already knew how to deliver good service however there weren’t any clear SOPs. By co-creating the service strategy with them, it generated a lot of enthusiasm to see their stories and experiences be the new guide for future employees.