CASE OP / 9.15 am – 10.45am
Thursday 19th of May I participated OP Bank´s service design 90 minutes seminar at Radisson Blu Hotel in Kamppi. Harri Nieminen introduced us the world of OP and their new strategy behind OP´s customer service. OP has almost 180 banks all over the Finland. They also offer services for their customers from insurance and health care section. One of the most important competitive actors in customer service 2016 is customer experience. For this reason you must know your customers very well. Today´s challenge is not only customer´s service experiences but also technology. Digital world offers and creates new competition worldwide. People are asking service in different ways than before.
Channel experience © harrimatias #OPmuotoilu
To get there what people are waiting for, OP works together with several designers and listens carefully their own customers. Empathy is cornerstone. At OP their want to create services that are meaningful and loveable, they want to solve existing problems together with their customers. For this as a method OP use OP Design Sprint. Design Sprint is 3 days hands on working together with customers: day1 is learning, day 2 is creating, and day 3 is testing.
Harri Nieminen says: ”If we don’t understand and validate needs of our customers, we concentrate easily for wrong details” “Designer is a trustee of client”.
For me message of this seminar was clear and loud – OP Service design is making things visible and understandable, doing in practise in OP world.
CASE DesignersDay2016 / 2pm-6pm
At the same day I participated for DesignersDay 2016 at Apollo Club, Helsinki, organized by Kesko. Idea behind this day was networking with different type of designers. This evening I was privileged to listen lectures from Dutch designer Gunther Bauer and Finnish Service Design expert Juha Tuulaniemi.
Mr Bauer talked about his own company “Pimp my shop”.
His motto “Learn by doing” has brought him in to retail designing. Through Amsterdam based company Finishing Dutch retail design he has worked together for example big cosmetic and beauty shop Etos in NL. In his example during the lecture I found it fascinating how he added music in his slides while telling us about his project; music to attract our senses! Just like you should do when designing services to people; To get their attention you have to catch the people. Mr Bauer used music to catch up our attention! “You must attract! You have to communicate! You have to be there! Customer wants value and you must answer their needs!” – this was bottom line from Gunther Bauer underlined with Ikea commercial.
Mr Tuulaniemi´s lecture included three topics: product design, innovation and service/product. He was also underlining customer experience and customer centred thinking like Mr Bauer did. Not forgetting brand experience which client usually takes with him to home. It is not insignificant what happens after customer leaves the service (for example returns home from holiday). Tuulaniemi introduced us the usual toolkit of service design and customer journey tools.
As a writer of book Palvelumuotoilu, Tuulaniemi did basically a fast tour of his book´s contents during this lecture. “We are living in the middle of cultural turning point, designer´s main work is to think new solutions for uprising needs” said Tuulaniemi.
Juha Tuulaniemi – 19.5.2016
Written by Paula Nordfors – Laurea, Helsinki, Finland
Service Innovation & Design 
Hi Paula, I am sure you had a intense and inspiring Service Design day, and thank you for sharing it with us! Today digital world gives to the market a bunch of challenges. Enterprises must understand customers really well to find out what is their needs and give them the best service experience, matched with the best technology possible. I was also fascinated about Bauer lecture and how he explained the importance of catching people attention by their senses to have a great communication with them.