 In this episode, we'll be talking about the challenges related to designing customer experience in a high-stress environment. We'll talk about how can you make strategy, high-level strategy work in day-to-day operations, and finally, how can you use customer feedback to change employee behavior. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. I'm Stine and this is the Service Design Show. I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design services that have a positive impact on people's lives and are good for business. My guest in this episode is Stine Ringwig-Marsal. Stine is the Service Excellence Director at the Copenhagen Airport, where she's responsible for driving the efforts to improve the overall customer experience. In the next 30 minutes or so, Stine and I will be talking about the challenges related to designing customer experience in a high-stress environment. We'll talk about how to make high-level strategy work in day-to-day operations, and finally, we'll talk about how to use customer feedback as a tool to change employee behavior. We post new videos here on this channel every week, so if you don't want to miss anything, be sure to subscribe and click that bell icon so you'll be notified when new videos are out. So that's it for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Stine. Welcome to the show, Stine. Thank you. Awesome to have you on. I really like to have sort of the practitioners or maybe the clients of service design on the show because it's really easy to find the agencies, the consultants, the designers themselves, but you're a person who's actually consuming service design, so I'm looking forward to our conversation. Trying to use it, yes. Exactly. I'm going to ask you the question that I ask all my guests on the show, which we start with, and that is, what is your first memory of service design? It was, my first memory was when I worked as a user experience consultant in a small agency, and our clients started to ask us, okay, so now you've designed our webpage and we would like to design the experience that people get when they enter our call center or enter our store and to get the expert on that, my colleagues contacted the guru on service design here in Denmark, old son, Big Mac, and if I wasn't married to my wife, this guy would be the love of my life. He literally sort of sent me down this path that I was trying so inspirational in ways. Yes. Oh, wow. We need to get them on the show next probably. Stina, you've sent me three super interesting topics. I've sent you a bunch of question starters. We're going to improvise to some interview, Jess, are you ready? I am ready. Okay. I'm going to pick the first topic, and it's really cryptic, so I'm really curious what you'll make out of this, and can you pick a question starter? This topic is called customer feedback. Do we have a question starter that goes along with this topic? My question would be, why use customer feedback? And obviously, when you want to do a design process in any way, you need to sort of know who you are designing for. Know their innermost emotions, or almost, and for that, obviously customer feedback is very valuable. Now, customer feedback is a lot of things. For me, what is important is not necessary to get the percentages of who said what, right, but to get a more qualitative insight in what is top of mind and the emotional most important thing for this person passing through a given touch point. And one of the things that I use a lot is the net promoter score, but sort of twisted a little bit, because for instance, it's very difficult to ask people, would you recommend your colleagues or friends or family to go through a security check? But so we twist the question in a way, but I still use the numbers in the sense where I look at who answered zero to six to see what should we try to get away from, and then who answered nine and 10 to be able to sort of praise the employees for whatever behavior that the customers are praising them for, trying to make that our standard. So to make, to sell to employees and an organization, the idea of why should we improve anything here or why should we work with this? It's super powerful to have the voice of the customer saying, we actually see you like this and be able to use that both as a as a carrot in a way where you say, when your business is love you, this is what you do. And that's awesome. And then to invite a work group in and say, all right, so this is the criticism that we get. How can we counter that without it being costly, without it being tiresome in the everyday operations? And so yes, customer feedback is super important. So we've had the topic of customer feedback come up quite a lot on the show, also related to airports. And one of the topics back then was, how do you gather that feedback? And this is like a two-stage question. First, of course, how do you get the feedback? And are you also looking at feedback that is outside of the doors of the airport? How do you take that into account? How do you mean feedback outside of the airport? Well, before somebody enters the airport or after they have left, is that also something you look at? But let's focus on how do you get feedback and what is the most powerful way that you've found to do that? One thing that's really important is to know that I am not the analytical department of the airport. We have an expert department on that. But for the purpose that I'm using feedback, obviously we have our overall satisfaction analysis that is an analysis where we also can compare ourselves to other European airports of the same size. But when I work with a specific touch point, what I'm interested in is to get specific feedback on that. And feedback that is not just a number per se, where we really see what is the emotional input of the customer. And can you give me an example of how you've seen that customer feedback has influenced decision making or employee behavior? Well, I mean, for instance, we have in the airport a number of staff checks, like when someone like me needs to go into the tunnels, we go through the same type of security check that a passenger does. And so in the staff check, we influence the way all of our business to business customers view the airport. Because for some of them, it is the only place where they actually encounter a CPH employee. CPH is the airport I work for Copenhagen Airlines. And so we did a survey where we actually didn't use a lot of money. We just had 10 interviewer hours. And then we asked customers on a scale from zero to 10, what was your experience of staff check today? And why? So they had to type, you know, was my experience. And we actually did the same survey towards employees and said, in your opinion, what is the customer experience going through staff check? And so we got both the feedback of employees and the feedback of customers. And based on that, I was able to facilitate workshops with employees that then help develop sort of our service principles for the staff check. And if you could dream, if you had all the money in the world, all the time in the world, what would you like to do with customer feedback? What are your dreams or ambitions regarding that aspect? Well, first of all, I don't think I need all the money in the world to obtain my dreams on this, because there's also a limit to how much data you can actually process. And that's one of the reasons I love just asking on a scale from zero to 10, what was your experience? And then why? Because then I get what, what is the first thing on that person's mind that day in that moment. And when we then have worked maybe six months with initiatives, trying to counteract the stuff that people are unhappy with and to standardize the things that people love us for, then we can measure again. And we don't need a gazillion interviews to measure. But what I look at then is, has the number one negative comment been erased from the comments from the customers? And if yes, then we have been successful. If no, I don't do my job well, if you know it. Yeah. So that's quite interesting, because in service design, we sort of have the notion to do a lot of qualitative research, dig really deep. We like to do observations. We like to do a lot of interviews and understand the complete world of passengers, patients, students, employees. And you're just saying, well, if you know the first biggest pain points, that's enough to actually start working and roll up your sleeves, right? Yeah. And I mean, you can do it in many ways. You can do it by hiring an agency, but you can also, if you need to do it cheaper, do it yourself. I mean, I could be up there, might be doing it. But right now, I'm talking from my chair. So just to say, the airport as a whole, we have a passenger department that works with behavioral design and many different departments doing different types of research. So for the field in which I work, this is the way I prefer to work when it's a touch point where we have employees involved. Obviously, observing gives you a lot of data as well. So I do some of that as well. We're entering a process where we're trying to design a new security experience. And I'm a very small part of that big, big project. But me and our behavioral designer from a different department will be sitting for quite an amount of hours and just watching what is the passenger experience here versus the passenger experience in another track where we do things slightly different. So I mean, the designing of the touch point also includes other methods than what I just described. That just happens to be my favorite. And I think adding to that, you said if you want to do it cheaper, do it yourself. And I think it's not only that it becomes cheaper, but if you do the research yourself, if you are engaged in the research process, it's just so much more powerful, right? You don't need to convince other people. You feel the pain of the passengers. Yeah, but I mean, but walking the shoes of the customers is always something that I would recommend. If you're looking at how to design an online payment sequence, try it out when you're done. But I do have respect for people working in huge organizations like myself where if we want to get sort of a representative image of how our customers experience us, I would have to be here 24-7. That would be very exhausting if I couldn't hire some amount of help for it. But for sure, you can do it. You know, you can scale it up or down depending on your budget, for sure. Let's move on to topic number two. Customer feedback. If people are interested, leave a comment on the video and we can continue their conversation there. But for now, let's move to topic number two. And I like this one already. This is the topic of high stress environments. Do you have a question starter that goes along with this one? What if you need to design an experience in a high stress environment? Like an airport. Yes, I think one of the main differences to working with custom experience in an airport environment versus, let's say amusement parks where I have worked before, I've worked in Tewoli and the Copenhagen Zoo, is that in an airport, everybody has some amount of stress. Except if you arrive really early and have lots of time. But most people are slightly stressed about going through security or am I going to make my flight... There's always that pressure, right? Am I going to be on time? There is pressure, exactly. And so one of the things I have really realized is that in many different departments of the airport, I need to design tools for the employees to be able to work with customers that have a high amount of stress. Because that's not always easy. So yes, that's not always easy. The obvious question is, can you give an example of these tools? And what do these tools do? Well, first of all, I mean, there are very sort of tangible. Example is body language. I always say to all of the staff we have that is passenger facing and passenger facing is security, but it's also our passenger service agents that are present on the floor. It's our baggage trolley employees, the ones that are making sure that the employees are in the right place because they get moved around a lot, obviously. So our cleaning staff, all of those, is that when encountering a passenger, the initial response from them often is about lowering people's stress levels. Most of our passenger contact is pleasant and fine, but a significant amount of employees come to me and tell me examples of really awful behavior, which is not because passengers in general are awful people, but they are in a situation that is immensely stressful for them for a number of reasons. So talking to them about body language training, body language, training, conflict, competences, we haven't done yet, but we are in the process of developing that. Very interestingly, I thought that security would be the place in which our employees would face the most stress, but it's actually parking. The staff that when you enter a parking house and then for some reason you are unable to get in, your car doesn't work, your ticket doesn't scan, then they will call to our service center and people are very stressed in that situation and our employees took quite a lot of, to put it politely, smoke sometimes. People would call and not even say hello or anything, just look back at that moment. So we've developed some guidelines for how do you answer a machine like that, because you're not face to face, so you can't calm them down with your body language. You've reached the operational center, they now try to say, hi, welcome, how can I help you to sort of make that, give the customer the sentiment that I will be helped. It may take some time, but they will help. So it's a little, maybe a silly example, but just to say the way you frame things, the way you say things, simple sentences can mean a lot for the customer and the other. This is super powerful and I can imagine that sort of employees have to get used to this idea, right? Because I can imagine somebody is hired to put trolleys back into the right place. He's not per se hired to deal with stress passengers, right? Yes, for sure. But I mean, I think the way you work with customer experience, go all the way back to your human resource department and who is recruited and how we frame the positions that we recruit. And I have to say that I've told a lot of our passenger-facing staff and most of them are super proud to be able to provide that service. They are super proud to be part of the airport. They are super proud to provide the best possible customer experience. And then there are some situations where someone like me goes in and does a workshop with them to counter a specific issue, a challenge, or with the customer experience. But it's not difficult to get people to work with me on customer experience because we live off of our customers. Of course, there's a team that say, why should I do this? And my argument is always, the only way people are going to perceive you as good at your job is if you give them a great feeling in their stomach. They will never know if you are the best security agent in the world. They will never know if you're the best electrician in the world. The only thing they judge you on is how you make them feel. They will never know the security legislation or whatever you need to make that ventilation system work. They will never know it. They don't have the same situation, but they will know how you make them feel. And so if we make people feel good, they will perceive you as someone who is good at your job. So everyone at an airport and maybe all in every service sector, everybody whose front line staff is sort of, part of their job is creating that experience, right? Always contributing to that experience. What is your, if you look back on the period you're at the airport, what is your biggest insight relating regarding customer experience and high stress environments? What would you say is the biggest lesson you learned? The biggest lesson is probably that communicating to people in a high stress environment is difficult. For instance, we try the best we can to make people well prepared for the security process. We have a whole project team around that. I am, again, a small team and getting complex messages across, getting simple messages across is difficult. Getting complex messages across is really difficult. And so, yeah, and so the biggest lesson learned is basically, it's difficult and you don't always need it, but maybe you reach 75, 80 percent. I can so imagine that one of the design principles is you can sort of try to prepare people upfront, but eventually it comes down to the moment where it happens. Yeah, and the reason we want people to be well prepared for the security check is that if they are not, then the person behind them will stand in a queue and be unhappy. And so we try leading up to the security checkpoint, we try to communicate as much as we can with crazy colors and simple icons and all because we're communicating to everyone, all our customer groups with Chinese, Spanish, English, everybody. And so the messages have to be simple and precise. And at the same time, sometimes it's a very complex message that we try to communicate. How much liquid are you allowed to have in which size of container and how should you pack it? And, you know, it's just, it's just very difficult. High stress environments, super interesting topic that we'll sort of wrap up for now and move on to the third one. And I think this one sort of builds upon what you just ended with. And this one is called making strategy work. All right, let me see. I will then choose this. All right, how can we... How can we make a strategy work? So I would be talking obviously from making the service strategy or the customer experience strategy and given touchpoint work. And honestly, what is most important is the process of developing that strategy in a sense where I will set a given target maybe for an area or, you know, consult with the manager of an area. Do you think this is the words we would like to use? This is the place we want to be? If they agree, then take in the employees and use them as your partners in developing it. So that's one thing, when there is actual employees involved obviously. And then using customer feedback is great, but to make the strategy work, you really have to understand the everyday work routine of the employees in order to understand what might be the barriers to implement whatever you think is a great idea. An example, when I just started in the airport, I took a bus ride with one of our bus drivers. And this was a bus picking up passengers plain side. And so I had this idea in my head that it would be great if when we pick up the passengers we could say, oh, to your left you have terminal three and there's this building project going on right now and that will lead to sort of a tourist guide of the airport while driving to the terminals. Not that our rides are that long, but still just a little bit of giving them a great experience. I thought that was such an awesome idea until I had been in one of those bus and saw how much those bus drivers have to watch out for driving in our side. So if I hadn't done that, whatever strategy I would have developed would have fallen completely on the floor for safety reasons. So just an example of how involving the employees in your developing work is important, but it's also important to actually walk their shoes. So walk the shoes of the customer to understand what experience are we giving them and then walk in the shoes of the employees to see what are the barriers and what are the opportunities in terms of implementing whatever it is that needs to be implemented. And another thing I think is crucial when you want to implement strategy is to understand the manager that has to implement whatever it is that you're bringing to the table. In what way? I use a lot of time trying to see how can I best assist this manager to perform towards his manager or her manager and also to look good in the eyes of the employees because that's really what motivates people. And so I will do everything from making the presentation this person needs to use and writing the sound of the email that could be sent out to employees to make sure that that manager isn't sort of dragged down from the daily operation by all of the work that I now as the Service Excellence Director tell them they also need to do. So I'm really involved in all levels and I think to all levels of the organizational hierarchy if you want and I think it's important to provide that support and to think of yourself as the person supporting others in their performance. That's exactly sort of what I wanted to ask you is do you feel your role has become much more of a facilitator and maybe of a guide, a compass that helps people to do the right things and facilitate them to do the right things? Oh for sure. When people ask me you know what is behind the title of Service Excellence Director I said it's a director in the sense where I direct people in the right you know in the right sort of direction and on that way I try to help them as much as possible. And so and so yes I'm definitely facilitating the process of working with customer experience across the organization. I'm also I'm also really curious sort of making strategy work that is translating it into operations that's that's one way but I'm really curious if you also see it happening the other way so is strategy emerging from operations? Is it like a circle? I'm sure I mean when I talk strategy right now I'm not I'm obviously the work I do is a leg in the Copenhagen Airport overall strategy yeah but when I talk about rolling out strategy I'm not talking you know as a human resource manager trying to develop a company I'm trying I'm talking about the specific touch points that are you know related to the Service Excellence program if you will. So yeah sorry what was your question again? Well the the question I can from strategy to operations that's one way but I'm also really curious if the strategy you use comes from operation so if it goes the other way around I mean when I say that I do employee workshops to get to get that input shapes how the end strategy you know tries out yeah yeah yeah so strategy is always like a translation of it mirrors what maybe is already happening in operations and then formalizes it or takes it to the next level right? So something like that. I mean an example one specific touch point that I worked with had the major complaint not complaint but you know on a scale from zero to 10 when I looked at the zero to six comments the the most frequent comment was there's too much private chatter between employees and so what then happened was that the employees said all right we think the same thing but we just don't like to tell our colleagues to be quiet because I'm going to be working with him or her for for eight hours but so they set a sort of a zone saying okay from that door to this place if there are customers within that space we include the customers in our talk or don't talk privately and so that was a way to make it very clear you know when is private chatter between us acceptable and when is it not because it wasn't because employees were trying to give a bad customer experience that they would talk between each other there's just a big difference between when do I feel it's embarrassing to talk about what happened during our last party and when do you feel it's embarrassing you know maybe for you it's 10 meters and for me it's one so this was a way to have you know the input we got from customers and actually the input we also got from employees become part of the strategy of how do we want to manage this specific touch point super interesting to work work in that way um Sina and you also get the opportunity like all the other guests on the show to ask us a question the viewers the listeners of the show is there anything we can maybe help you with or think about you want to challenge us is there anything on your mind no I mean if if I were to to ask the viewers and listeners I would love to know what was your best airport experience ever and why and especially the why is important I guess exactly um thank you so much for sharing your thoughts like again I'm really always interested to hear stories from people consuming and using service design instead of just us designers so Sina thanks so much you're welcome so what is your biggest takeaway from this interview with Sina leave a comment and let us know and if you enjoyed this episode don't forget to click that like button and share this video with someone who might benefit from the things we've just discussed if this is your first time here on this channel click that subscribe button to be notified when new videos are out thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode