 In this episode, we'll be talking about how to transform transactional organizations into ones that are customer centric. We'll be talking about the power of an insight. And finally, we'll ask the question, are we all designers? And here is the guest of this episode. I'm Jose Mello and this is The Service Design Show. Hi guys, my name is Marc Fontaine and welcome to The Service Design Show. The show where you get to learn what some of the world's best service designers are currently thinking about. So you can use that knowledge to transform services and businesses all around the world to become more human-centered and eventually more successful. We bring you a new episode every two weeks on Thursday. So if you don't want to miss anything, be sure to subscribe. My guest in this episode is Jose Mello. Jose is the head of innovation at Liberty Mutual in Brazil and he also teaches about service design and design thinking at several universities. For the next 30 minutes or so, we'll be talking about three topics. How do you transform transactional organizations into ones that are customer centric? What is the power of an insight? And finally, are we all designers? If you'd like to fast-forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description. Or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. So, let's jump right in. Welcome to the show Jose. Oh, very good to be here Marc. Jose, we just had a small chat before the show and you told me that you've been into service design for quite a long time. And I'm super interested. Do you remember the first time that you actually heard about service design or got in touch with it? So that's a very good question. Actually, I think the first time I got in contact with service design was in the 80s because I was with my mom on a bank. And we got a huge line to withdraw some money at the bank. And it wasn't not only one line, but it was like three lines, so I get to go from one line to the other. And at that point, I didn't know what service design was and I was just a kid. But 30 years later, I met a bunch of people who were speaking and talking about service design. I was looking for a way to understand more how could I deliver and design better services for people. I've been doing that in my entire life. And I think at that point was the moment that I realized what service design was. It was my first contact, like 2007, 2008, almost 30 years later. But I have been experiencing service design for my entire life. Or the lack of service design. And maybe that experience on the bank made me the professional I am today. Because it was so frustrating that I wanted to do something to change that type of thing. Alright, interesting that the lack of service design is the first memory. I can relate to that. So Jose, you sent me three topics that we can talk about in the show and I have them next to me. And you have a few question starters that I gave you. And we'll be co-creating the questions as we go along for the next 20 minutes, right? Oh, perfect. So I'll pick the first topic and I'll surprise you. I'll just pick a random one. I won't do them in the order you gave them. So I'll pick this one. And this one is called customer-centric organizations. Do you have a question starter that goes along with this one? Yes, yes. So let's start with this one. How can we? How can we make the organizations more customer-centric or how to make that? I've been working on that for, I would say at least the past 10 years. So combining my experience at Itaú and then my experience now as the head of innovation at Liberi Mutual here in Brazil. And I think one thing that is key to turn a transactional organization into a customer-centric organization is people. Most people believe that it's a matter of processes, so making better processes, but it's not about processes. It's about people because are those people who deliver the processes? And for example, here at Liberi Mutual, we've been working for the past three years and a half to create a culture of customer-centricity into the company. Because we strongly believe that it will deliver our differentiation in the market. We'll bring this differentiation to the market. And we've been doing that, starting by the people, starting to bring people together and making them understand why think about the customer is so important. And you mean the employees probably, right? The employees, yes. I'm speaking about the employees. So people who are out there speaking with the customer every day and following a script to deliver one type of service. And most of them, they do that, but they do that without understanding what are the real needs of the customers. So using it as an example as well, last year we did a project here. I'll show you just the big bookcase. Wow. So in the past two years, we did a project here where we brought people on the street to live exactly what the customer lives every day when they need the service from our company. So we sent people to see the tow trucks helping a customer, a person who had an accident, how they deal with that problem, and how we deal with the process. And we engaged something around 100 people on the project from several different parts of the company just to make them see what's the level of services they deliver to the customer. And that was a game changer for us here to get people involved and engaged in the process. Was it hard to get people involved? It was hard because people don't have time, they never have time. They are always busy because they have something to deliver, they have an operation to run. But that operation just exists because of the customers. If customers don't buy, the operation doesn't exist. So I think in a nutshell, I think engaging people in the customer mindset is really key to move companies from a transactional company to a more customer-centric company. And if you would have to give, what has been your biggest learning for the past three and a half years and if you would have the opportunity to do it over again, what would you do differently? Well, very good question. I haven't thought about that, but I would say that maybe I would get people on the street sooner than I did. Because I worked more than one year, one year and a half almost, to do this type of project to get people from inside and go outside with them. I started to create this change by the inside. So bringing people on meetings, speaking about the customer importance and who is the customer. And it took me one year and something to realize that it was not working well. If I didn't get people and put them on the street to see what happens in real life, we would be speaking until today about why focus on customers is something key for the company. And for one example for you, last year Liberi was awarded the insurance company in Brazil that most respects the customer. So it's a work that we've been doing not for so long and we start to see the changes. So you're saying it's really all about being in touch with the customer. Get out of the office, get onto the street, talk to the people that are using your service, right? That's what you're saying. Yeah, that's it. And for everyone from the top director inside the company until the lowest levels on the company, they need to know who the customer is and be in touch with them. That would be my advice for someone who wants to go down that path. Let's keep it at that for this topic, I shall say, and move on to the second one because, right, I'll pick this one and keep the most controversial for the last. The second topic is the power of an inside. I guess it relates to what we just talked about. Do you have a question starter? Oh, yes, yes. So let me see here, let me see here. The power of an inside. The power of an inside. Don't make it too hard for yourself. Yeah. What if? Yeah. So maybe the question here is, what if we could think of an inside more as an interpretation of effect? Rather than the real fact. All right, that's something you need to explain. Yeah, that's a trick question. But let me try to explain that. I've been doing research for a long time, especially research to understand customers and to design services for those customers. And we designers, most of the projects that I see, we designers, we go there, see effect. So we see that people wear yellow shirts, and then we write down an inside saying that people wear yellow shirt. The problem with that is that it doesn't make any sense to create something just knowing that people wear yellow shirts. So we should think of an inside more like an interpretation of that rather than the fact itself. So we should try to understand why people wear yellow shirts and how that relates to the service of the project that I'm doing right now. And it's so hard to see people taking that step ahead and trying to create a point of view about that specific topic that they saw on the street. That I think that's why I chose that topic to speak about. So it's like, for me, it's the difference between almost like quantitative research versus qualitative or design research where we as designers are or should be intrinsically motivated to understand the why. Yes, totally true. And so how do you break that? So I can imagine that if you go on the street with employees and hope that they will find an inside and you see that they get stuck at the yellow shirt, how do you help them to move beyond that? So we usually do several rounds of discussion. So one thing that we always do when someone goes out to do some observation is to list what we call their top insights, which really are not insights, they are just observations of what they saw on the street. And when we get together, we put everyone together who did the same research and we start a discussion of why that is important, why that specific observation is important for us. And that's how we come from like 50 observations on the street to three to five really driving insights that can help us create a better service for our customer. So the discussion is a very important point of the process. And is it also do you use evidence from the field research because in our projects, for instance, we do photo studies and then just hanging up the photos and having the studio filled with these photos. It just helps you to see the patterns and to have a better discussion. Are you using some techniques like that? Yeah, yeah, we use some techniques like that. We use a lot of photo research and because that's very immersive. So even the people who didn't had the chance to go out for a research, but we need them as part of the discussion to being that immersive space helps a lot to to gain the right discussion. Yeah. And I think from what I've seen, for instance, what helps is forcing people to actually look through a camera, you know, because they see other things during the research. So if they don't use a camera and they don't have to make a photo, for instance, during observations, they will see past the things that they are used to, right? And with a camera, they will have to make a photo of it. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's a very good one. It just forces people to pay attention to the things that are common, I guess. Yeah. Oh, that's a very good one. Yeah, I'll try that next time. I haven't done that, but I'll try that next time. Yeah. And so the power of an insight, anything else you'd like to say or add about that? Anything? So I think we spoke a lot about how to gather information from our observations and research and how to make it turn it into an insight. Maybe we could speak a little bit about what to do with that insight right now. Sure, yeah. So which I believe is where the power of an insight is. So once we have all this discussion and we could write down one really powerful insight for that project and one insight should be something like a very short phrase, something that really... is really unique to that project. We start to understand the boundaries of the project. And one thing that is really hard for someone who is designing is not what the project should be or should address, but what the project should not address. And I think the insight, it creates the boundary of the project so that we can understand what are we not going to solve with that project. Because when we start, you'd like to solve the entire project and all the problems that the world has. Once you define the insights you're going to work with, you are creating the boundaries. You're creating, this is what we're going to solve. I'm not going to solve anything else. And I think this is why we come up with those insights, just to help us frame the direction of the project. And the frame is also super useful, I guess, during a project to see if you're still within the scope, right? Oh really? Yeah. Yeah, doing the things you should be doing. Yeah. All right. Make sure you're not going to stray to a different path and start solving an insurance project and end on a pharmaceutical project. So yeah, insights are very useful to create boundaries. That's interesting, as you'll say. Time is flying by, so let's move on to the third topic. And I think a Swedish company once said this, right? And the third topic is called We Are All Designers. Do we have a question starter for this one? Yeah, I'll pick this one. When will? When will we all become designers? Aren't we designers already, as the Swedish company said? Yes, we are. But we don't realize we are. And I think that's the problem. Because everything that is not nature in the earth was designed by someone. And for those who believe in a God, even nature was designed by someone. So if everything was designed, it was designed by a person that has or doesn't have a design background, but they need the design ability. And that's why we have a lot of services that doesn't have any design in it. And that's why it's so frustrating for the regular people. So I strongly believe that everyone has the ability to design and everyone is innovative in their ascension. But we are not trained for that. And if we had, maybe in the early stages of school, very simple and soft skills for design would help a lot for us to be able to design things better in our world. Alright, so I have two young kids. Now as you'll say, help me. What soft skills should I help them with in these early years? So I'll list you some of them. So one, for example, a spirit of participation. So it's the willingness to collaborate with other people to build something. Because in the world we live today, we cannot build something alone. We don't do anything alone. We need people. The second one I would say is experimentation. So it's learned by doing, not by only thinking. Because when we use a lot our thinking process, but we don't make it tangible, we are not really testing how people are going to relate to that specific thing. So I would advise you to teach your kids to experiment and experience more things. And learn and fail and move ahead. We are very afraid to fail. And the interesting part of course is if I look at my young kids, they don't even have the notion of failing. They just do stuff. It's not failing for them. It's just another experiment. But along the journey that we take through school and through university, we get influenced by their notion of failure. And we begin to, we become afraid of experimenting new things. Because we don't want to fail. So I'm not going to test because I don't want to fail. And actually failing or the experimentation process lowers down a lot the risk that you are going through. So how do you help people that are, I don't know, in their 30s, 40s, 50s to rediscover their ability to experiment? How do you do that? So I think something that is very important, I think, is first help them with some very maybe basic skills so that they can understand that they have the ability to experiment. Because sometimes we hear from people that they, I just don't know how to do it. I know you're right. I think you're right, but I don't know how to do it. So we have to help them understand very basic skills from some techniques to do that. So observation techniques and some building techniques to help them do that. So I would say a common language of what is to experiment. And the other thing I think is more related to the environment where they are working in. So the environment needs to be friendly for experimentation and it also has a lot to do with the rewards or the reward system that you put in place. So if people work alone on a cubicle, they will never collaborate with anyone. So you need open spaces, you need the environment to be friendly for them. If they stay on the same seat for the entire day, for the entire week, they're not going to collaborate. They need to move around. They need to have that mobility. And also the reward system. You should reward not only the results that people bring, but also how they made it. So what's the process that you took to get there? Let me understand that and reward them for each step of the process. And I guess this also strongly relates to the first topic we talked about, about customer centricity. If we look at the process, if companies would reward employees that take their time to go on the street, talk to customers, it would probably create a totally different atmosphere. So putting those measures into place is really essential. Yeah, totally true. So you'll say, final question for you. And this is your opportunity to ask the people who are listening or viewing this episode to ask them a question. Is there something you'd like to ask? So I'll ask them what was your most powerful insight listening to this, watching our show today? Right, yeah. That's a good one because that's also something I ask at the end of the episode. That's a good question. What was the biggest insight from this episode? Leave a comment. We are really curious. So Jose, thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas and it was my pleasure. Oh, thank you very much, Marc. So what is your biggest insight from this episode? Let us know down below in the comments. This show is all about helping you to become a better service designer by sharing real-life stories of people that are currently shaping the service design field. This is your first time here and you'd like to see more interviews. Check out some of the past episodes and be sure to subscribe. I'll see you in two weeks time with a new episode and for now, thanks for watching.