Five principles of service design, adapted for the COVID-19 era.

How do you as a company leader design for this different world? When the ground shifts beneath you, the first thing to do is find a solid place to stand - and that is your value proposition. Customers come to you for a reason: because you're innovative or top-quality, because you're a one-stop shop, or because you build deep relationships. Yes, you need to both stress-test that value proposition and do a gut check on it, but in all likelihood, you'll reaffirm it. Now is not the time to change it.

What might change, however, is how you deliver the value you promise, and that depends on five principles that translate a value proposition into the experience customers actually have. We first outlined these service design principles several years ago in "The art of customer delight." Today, we use the acronym SPICE, because they involve segments (which customers you serve), promises (the expectations you set), innovation (how you evolve and improve), coherence (how you orchestrate sales channels and ecosystem partners), and efficiency (how you become easy to do business with). When you apply them in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, they may lead you to new and different insights about how to design your customers' experience and employees' activities.

Continued here