Hasta La Ideas

Guest post by Tiffany Chu, Continuum.

After lunch, we settled back into our seats for a talk titled “Digital Service Design: Lessons from the Cloud.” It was not, in fact, another rehash of cloud computing, but instead a specific point of view on the nuances of service design within the digital realm, presented by Monica Bueno, a principal at Continuum.

The first lesson Bueno proposed was to rethink the role of staff—a surprising, not-entirely-intuitive perspective for the digital domain. She offered the example of TD Bank, who has ramped up their deployment of digital banking tools in order to free up their staff to be much more customer service-oriented and do what humans do best. She also mentioned the latest Zappos commercials, whose ironic humor highlights relationship-building between staff and consumers—an external ad campaign which is actually underlined on the inside with incentive programs for longer call times and ensuring every employee is trained in the call center.

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