Large organisations can tend to be very product focused and their different department areas very siloed, with not enough focus on designing their services as their products, according to Opher Yom-Tov, head of customer-centred design and innovation at Westpac.
Speaking on a panel session at a recent Parity Consulting event, 'What role can product managers play in shaping service experience?', Mr Yom-Tov said it is surprising that the concept of service has existed “since the beginning of time” but many service-based companies haven’t thought about consciously designing them.
“What we’re trying to do [at Westpac] is change behaviours and work together in different fashions by having people understand how to collaborate with each other across functions and silos” and eventually “rewire” the company according to those behaviours, he said.
He also highlighted the importance of gaining insight directly from customers when designing services. "Product managers may never interact directly with a company’s customers, making it more crucial those staff are able to collaborate with other departments that do", he said.
In large service organisations such as the major banks, service needs to be provided through a combination of humans and technology because it is not feasible to do so through people alone. “So we rely very heavily on having systems to enable us to innovate,” he said.
It’s a challenge to evolve legacy systems fast enough to make them sufficiently flexible so the group can do the things it wants to do at the front end in terms of service, he added.
Technology is also crucial not just from a service perspective but from a staff motivation perspective, he added. “We’ve invested substantially in upgrading our technology,” he said.
You can’t change everything on demand, so you need to prioritise what gets done, but it is important when significant upgrades are performed to let all the staff know, so they can see there is a strong commitment to improving systems, he said.
Also on the panel, Anthony Colfelt, creative director at The Customer Experience Company, said that many large companies (not specific to financial services) are divided up into silos – functional areas with their own competencies and their own budgets.
“There’s competition between one manager and the other, the service department is fighting against the product department – we’re not good at working across silos generally, but to create a good service, you have to be,” he said.
