Hasta La Ideas

Imagine you move to a new city and after some time you decide to have your hair cut or get a new hairstyle. For some people, this would be a frightening thought. Based on your knowledge of the consequences of not finding a new hairdresser who is “as good as” the one you used to have, what would your options be in such a situation? You would probably turn to your local acquaintances to hear about their suggestions and experiences. Then, you could personally visit some of the suggested hair salons to see if they meet your expectations in styles and budget. That’s a start. But wouldn’t it be great if you could present your previous experiences to this new hair dresser, showing images and ratings of those experiences? After all, all of that knowledge you created in your previous visits to the hairdresser is now the most useful asset you could wish for in order to guide you into this new experience.

But the truth is, that knowledge is not easily available. Most certainly you will have to start from scratch. You’ll have to test the available options here and there, until you’re confident of having re-established your “knowledge base” in this new city.

That’s how it is, but definitely not how it needs to be. The currently available technologies make it very simple to create a platform that could collect data from your experiences going to a hair salon in a very easy and rewarding way. The development of a system (e.g. an app, a website, etc.) that could collect key points on the agreement between your previous hair dressers and you would be reasonably simple to implement nowadays. For example, instead of doing a simple “mirror walk” at the end of the haircut, there could be a system that would privately collect pictures or videos of your final haircut and upload it to a platform (e.g., using a tablet connected to the internet), along with your name and the one from the hair dresser, making future service provisions much easier.

After that, you could rate the whole experience attributing levels of satisfaction for each of the service phases based on the perceived benefits you think you got from them. The hairdresser(s) could also add the experience they had with you to their profile, classifying it based on the type of hair, your personality and the purpose of the specific hair style.
The possibilities to add all sorts of information are too broad to be presented here, but (to mention a few) even the chemical products applied to your hair could be made explicit and then related to the final perception of benefit, including allergies and other unwanted reactions, that was registered by you and the service provider.

All of those possibilities—or better yet, those potential service innovations—are made clear if you look at them throughout the lens of a new “logic” to the service provisions: the Service-Dominant Logic.

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