How A Service Experience Can Pivot on a Single Point

We empathise. It can be hard to build large experiences. Many of our clients are wrestling with services that involve hundreds of touch-points, channels, layers, systems, tens of thousands of employees and many more customers.

Even though we tend to advocate getting the big, overall picture - a method borrowed from service design - we know it can be overwhelming to take it all in. Or, when taking stock of the breadth of the system, it might seem like there’s just too many problems to solve.

We get it.

And that’s where a hunt for pivots come in. A pivot, in everyday language, is ‘the central point on which a mechanism turns.’

We use the term to describe a specific part of a service that exerts unusual power on how someone’s experiences with the overall service. We’ve got a great story that explains the power of pivots and it involves grocery delivery.

Hopefully, for context, you’ve already tried one these services. They’re available most places now, in some form or another. From supermarkets, smalls stores, or through food aggregators that bring together foods from other suppliers and deliver them to your door.

The experience, through to lens of a user, is pretty simple.

We go to the app, website or other ordering system, and pick out the foods we want. We give a time, give special instructions for delivery and then pay for our goods. Or, if it’s a subscription service, approve our order.

Most delivery systems, following well-defined patterns, should then send some form of confirmation, via both email or text. This includes a notification when the order is lodged, but also when it’s confirmed and then picked for delivery.

Seems simple enough, but here’s where things get interesting.

We used to live in a rather complicated apartment complex. Put simply, getting deliveries to the right spot among the many independent buildings was a nightmare.

But our situation wasn’t the only way that deliveries might be complicated. Perhaps deliveries could be coming to a townhouse with many levels, or a home with a long entry. Whatever the cause, sometimes it isn’t possible to just indicate a simple street address and expect the delivery driver to leave the order on the front porch.

This meeting of delivery and recipient is especially crucial where the delivery includes chilled items. Being present and available to both meet the delivery driver at an entrance and to move the goods into the fridge is a crucial meeting point in time and space.

In my own personal experience, all those years ago, I ended up indicating, in the delivery notes, a spot at the entrance to the complex where I could meet the driver and save them the nightmare of navigating through the maze of buildings.

But when exactly was I supposed to go out to meet them? Surely it would not be fair for them to wait, or me to sit out on the curb for several hours.

Luckily, the service provider provided interactions that offered a way of out of our predicament.

As part of the automated experience; the service sent me information that let me know when the delivery would be coming. This included a notice of the two-hour time-window that I’d booked, but also a dedicated link that opened a web-page with a countdown to delivery.

Finally, when the goods were the next order to be delivered, I received a message to say that the goods were arriving. This set of shrinking rings of specificity made it easy to plan my presence out on the street.

But there was a catch.

(Of course there’s a catch. Otherwise it wouldn’t be quite as an exciting story!)

For reasons that aren’t clear, after some years of mostly friction-free deliveries, for about six months the delivery alert system ceased to work.

I still got confirmation emails that my order had been placed and picked. But those crucial text messages that the delivery was coming, the link to a count-down tracker and the final text message that it was coming next, stopped.

I was puzzled.

My number hadn’t changed. My account was still in good standing. My payment details were the same. I’d altered nothing. But still the messages to my phone never came.

This wasn’t just annoying, it made meeting a delivery near impossible. I’d put my phone number into the order notes, but this seemed to make no difference.

I tried calling the provider and spent hours on the phone with their support teams. Incident tickets were raised and passed all the way along the supply chain. Cryptic messages came back from curt logistics managers.

But to no avail.

So, for nearly six months every delivery became a stressful juggle. Sometimes I happened to be there at the right time. Other times, I would discover that my groceries had literally been left outside at the curb, exposed to the elements and to anyone who felt justified in snaffling themselves some free goods. It got to the point where I was ready to quit using the grocery service entirely and switch to their competitor.

Then, on what I’d promised myself was my penultimate delivery, the text messages started again. And suddenly the experience again became easy.

This whole experience got me thinking about how we evaluate services and our instincts to step back and see the whole picture. I still think this indict is necessary, laudable and powerful.

But once the whole picture is obtained? Well, it’s also helpful to figure out the points on which the service pivots. I assure you, they’re there, hiding in plain sight. Specific interactions that exert a front/back, up/down power about how the entire service is experienced.

With the right research and design you can find them, understand them and prioritise them for support or improvement.

In my case, the service pivot was the delivery notification.

I could have likely handled a reduced selection of goods, a basic website and a stripping away of all those experience gimmicks that large corporate marketing teams seem so enamoured of. But mess up my delivery notification systems and the whole experience fell apart.

It’s a good reminder. On our quest to see the whole picture, it’s always worth taking time to peer down into the detail and find those handful of pivot points upon which the whole service turns.

Make sure those are strong or fix those that are broken and you’ll be amazed at the overall experience uplift.

Power to the pivots!