It could be only in my bubble, but my ears now ache from louder and louder service improvement talk. Ever better ways to map customer journeys, to analyse touch-points, and to improve user experience. I get it. It’s all good, or at least the intention is. But I can’t help thinking how much it resembles the process improvement hype. It lasted until some remembered Drucker’s words that “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”, and embraced Lean. Others embraced Lean on other grounds. In fact, it wasn’t much more than just zooming out. The focus changed from processes to the whole business and improvement included getting rid of unnecessary processes.

That’s understandable, you may say. Processes generate costs. Getting rid of processes cuts costs. Services, on the other hand, generate revenue. No obvious reason to get rid of them but plenty of reasons to come up with new services and improve the current ones.

And yet there are so many services I don’t want to have a better experience with. I want to have no experience at all. Continue reading →