Turning a Service into an Experience | Paul Bulencea

[Music] Welcome to Why Service Design Thinking, the podcast that helps businesses do things better and do better things. Service Design is one of the next big competitive advantages in business, and it is being used with great success by corporations and other large organizations around the world. But how can a smaller business start up or a non-profit adopt these innovative techniques? We will talk with experts in the field and share lots of case studies on how you can engage your customers, create delightful experiences, and build a lasting legacy. Don't forget to listen until the very end for this week's Design Challenge. I'm your host, Marina Tertarian. Thank you for listening. [Music] Welcome to Why Service Design Thinking. Today we have a very exciting episode with Paul Boulincha, who is the co-founder of an event called the College of Extraordinary Experiences. I won't be telling you much about it because he does an amazing job at introducing it, but I will say that I am happy to be attending as a facilitator. We'll also be talking a little bit about the idea of applying game design thinking in order to take a service into an experience which is part of what will be covered at this event. Hey Paul, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Hello everyone. Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here. Paul, let's just jump right in. What is the College of Extraordinary Experiences? The College of Extraordinary Experiences is an event or a conference that I always wish to attend and I was always sad that it didn't exist. When I did my master's degree, I majored in the experience economy and I was studying how people can create memorable experiences. There is a lot of literature out there and several great examples. I couldn't find an event that was talking about this topic. Also, I couldn't find a conference that isn't a memorable experience in itself. That is designed at each touch point and thought through that people go in there and they have their minds blown. I was very disappointed that this doesn't exist. I found someone that is great at what he's doing. He's creating live action role plays. If everyone can imagine going at a castle for four days and becoming someone different. We have the College of Wizardry which has become world famous. It is inspired by Harry Potter. People go from all over the world, 150 participants, and become a wizard for four days. They play someone else or they become a wizard or a professor at the college. That is when I met Klaus, who is the creator of this event. I saw him as the perfect partner to create a conference oriented for business people, where they can just come and learn how to create experiences with their business, with their own themes. He's the ideal partner because I'm taking some of the knowledge that he's using. I'm combining it with the knowledge that I have from the experience economy and also from studying how game design thinking works and how it could be applied in real life. It's a conference in a castle using elements of fantasy and alternate realities. Did I describe that properly? Yes. It is a completely different reality with different social rules that are focused on creating strong friendships, breaking barriers between people and also delivering a lot of knowledge. Just to name few people that are on our professor list at the college. We have Marco Deschi, who is the executive producer of the Lord of the Rings. We have Kim Wiley, who is the global lead for change and transformation at Google. We have people from business such as Sarah Tatcher, who is the creative lead at Walt Disney Imagining. We have people named them the Willy Wonka's of England. They are food architects who combine science with gastronomy to create crazy experiences. We have the people from Bompas and Par joining us. They have, for example, an experience called the spray themes of alcohol into a room. They have a room called Gin. They can go in the room and they breathe and get drunk by breathing. On the walls is written, breathe responsibly. They go in that room and they go in another room and they party. They feel like they go back. We have people like this that are professors but they are also students. If you go there at this event, you are going to work alongside with them to face different challenges and we create that are focused along learning. We also focus a lot on exchanging knowledge, peer-to-peer knowledge and co-creating this event along those people that you are going to meet there. That is a very interesting list of people. What do they all have in common at the core of what they do? I think what they all have in common is they all work in the creative industries. That was one of our main goals to bring people that are top performers. Maybe this is also something that they have in common. Into different industries and just put them everyone in the same place so that they exchange ideas. They also have in common that the main focus of what they are doing is creating experiences for people. Experiences that are memorable. Also our participants that are already signed up, we still have few tickets available. But it is also crazy what kind of list of people we managed to put together. We have from people that are creating military simulations for the army. To people that are freelance florists. To stand up comedians, to actors, to innovation teams from big corporations to CEOs of technology companies. They all come from completely different fields. But what brings them together is they all work in the creative industry. I love that you are using the word creative with experience. I feel like there is a great shift that is happening now with a lot of the service-based businesses that are now going towards experience and that are infusing elements of creativity. Let's talk a little bit about what it means to infuse creativity in an experience. I would like to make a short introduction when we are talking about experiences per se because there is a valuable model that I use. I found out by talking at a lot of different places around the world that people are not aware of this model or very few people know about it. It is a book by Pynon Gilmore called The Experience Economy. The first edition was in 1998 but before that they wrote an article in Harvard Business Review. They launched the book in 1999 and the article was one year before 1998. They have theorized what they call the Experience Economy. This has been widely talked about since the 70s by the futurist Alvin Toffler who predicted a change in the shift in the economy. I remember reading him and he says what the economy didn't take into account was after services. What comes after services? If you think about it, we have commodities as in the agrarian period, then we have agriculture to industry, then we have goods, and then we move from industry to services, a service-based economy. Right now, as we notice, for example, the Tomorrowland Festival, the Burning Man Festival, people are shifting from an economy that is based on services to an economy that is based on experiences. Also due to automation and a lot of other things, also abundance might be another reason why people are looking more for experiences. What is very interesting is that in the research that I've done, it has also seen a shift in the needs of people. They are much more focused. This is not all over the globe but this is in the advanced industrial societies. Due to abundance, they are more focused on self-esteem and self-actualization. Experiences can do that as well. Creativity is the number one thing that you can use in staging experiences. When I wrote the book about how to use game design thinking into staging memorable experiences in tourism, because if you think of tourism, everything that tourism is doing and selling is an experience per se, whatever it's a bad or a good experience that is more or less to be talked about. They are very well focused on that. There are a lot of insights taken from tourism that I add into how to think of creating something memorable. If you think of tourism, you always go into new places. You always have a sense of novelty. When I wrote the book, I also looked a lot at the service design, this is service design thinking book by. - Mark's. - Stick to the horn. - Yeah. - Yes, exactly. - And Jake Schneider. (laughs) - Yes. And a lot, at the service design movement in general, and there are a lot of tools that, for example, the double diamond tool from the British Design Council that I looked at, there are a lot of patterns that you can take from service design thinking and also apply to experience design thinking, or like memorable experience staging, but there's still several differences because when people are designing for services, they want to create something that is standard. They want to standardize it, because what you want to offer, in essence, is something that has a certain expected quality. So if you have a good service, people know it's good, because they know what's going to happen, and they know exactly what they're going to get out of it. But if you're going to Burning Man, for example, you have no idea what's going to happen. And even though I might use similar tools, or some tools inspired from service design thinking, to foster and to channel creativity into staging experiences, there are a lot of other tools that I might use for that. And here comes a lot of topics, and that's why we have a lot of speakers at our conference. And you just channel from a lot of different perspectives, or a lot of different industries, or inspirations you learn from each, and then you try to bring a little bit of inspiration, you combine it, and then you try to see what it gets. - There's a lot of good stuff there. I like what you're saying about the difference between a standardized service, and something that's a little bit more flexible. I feel like it's still standardized. I like your example of Burning Man, in that it's standardized, in that people know to go to a certain place, and they know to expect a certain set of activities, and that's the part that they have expectations for. But then whatever happens in that time, that's the novelty portion of it. So I guess this is my little pitch for service design that there maybe there's a little bit more overlap in that you can still standardize the general concepts, and then just there's more flexibility in the middle. Like it's really interesting. I recently attended a concert by the recording artist, TJ, I don't know what they call him, Kago. And you expect the service of a concert to be that you attend the venue, you get your beer, and then it's the show, right? But for this one, the way that they had set up the show was different from anything I had ever seen in a concert. They had screens that were presented differently. They had these beautiful visuals going through throughout the concert, and then they gave us these bracelets that were synchronized to the music. So as it was playing instead of people holding up their phones, they were now holding up this bracelet, and they were participating in the concert. And I thought that was such an interesting addition to a typical concert experience, right? You just go and sit there for your dance. So I love that. I love those little infusions of this now made it into an experience instead of just a concert. - There is a quote that I left from Pinin Gymord that relates a bit to what you said, which is of course you still use services and goods in an experience. It's impossible to stage an experience without using services and good, because each certain touchpoint might be a service in itself. So they have this quote which says, an experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage and goods as props, engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event. So you have a series of services or let's say a series of touchpoint and each touchpoint could be a service. So if you think how did you get the bracelet? What were the steps of getting the bracelet? So that is a service, but put in a bigger context, it creates the experience. - Yeah, absolutely. So keeping that in mind then, tell me about the touchpoints, whatever you're allowed to reveal at this time. Tell me about the touchpoints of the College of Extraordinary Experiences. - Okay, it is very hard for me to reveal something because our participants have no idea what is waiting for them and neither do the professors, maybe very little. - Yeah. - Very, very, very little. - All right, give us one teaser. - One touchpoint that people can get excited about. - Okay, I will leave it open a bit. So like I mentioned, the Michael Fender, Klaus Rusted, who creates crazy live action role plays at castles that use different themes such as wizardry or such as the war or such as Orcs and Goblins or vampires or the aristocrats in the 20th century. He has a lot of props and costumes from all of these events and we are going to bring a lot of that stuff in the castle and at the castle, since it's a college, we're going to have school uniforms. So a combination of something there might be a small teaser that I don't want to give too much out. So maybe you guys can figure out what the uniforms might look like and what the effect of having a uniform inspired from what we might put together might have on the whole way of how people behave and interact with each other and learn at the castle. So that is a small teaser that I can give away. - Okay. (laughs) Sounds very exciting. That reminds me of the global service gem that's hosted around the world and I host the one in LA and we always have just a box of random costumes and hats and glasses and things that people can put on and I just, I love seeing how everybody just puts on a hat and it just changes the flow of the conversation. It makes it something really interesting and goofy and weird. - The cool thing about the costumes that we have since the way they're used in the games that my partner is doing, the goal of the costumes in the games that he's making is to create full immersion. So that means they're really high quality. - Yeah. - They're really well rendered. So that might create an even more interesting effect. So I'm super curious what would happen when we'd see some of the speakers going on stage in the uniform while everyone, I think the pictures are also going to look totally crazy and this is the first edition and the name of the first edition is the attack of the Hydra. - Mm-hmm. What does that mean? - So we see the Hydra as, if you think I just mentioned the experience economy and there is one interesting phenomenon that maybe a lot of people are aware of but they don't know how to necessarily define it or theorize it. It's called commoditization. So if you think of commodities in the agrarian based economy, the way they're seen by the customers and the way their price functions is strictly based on supply and demand. But if we move to the industrial economy, then this changes a little bit. It's not that supply and demand because there is a bit more higher differentiation. And if we move from there to the service based economy, the differentiation is a bit more higher and it's still not in supply and demand plays a smaller role. And then if we move to the experience economy then this decreases. But what happens when something becomes commoditized or what is that exactly? So let's think at Starbucks. When the first Starbucks appeared, marketers put it in this model from plan and Gilmore and they used coffee as an example. So they say, okay, the commodity is the coffee bean. The good is the packaged and grinded coffee that you can buy in the supermarket which costs a bit more than the coffee bean if you buy the coffee beans at the local producer. And then if you take that coffee and you drink it in a cafe, a random cafe in a city, it will cost you $12. But if you go to Starbucks which is not a service, which is not a good, which is not a commodity, you would pay $4, $5 to $6 for a cup of coffee. And that's the reason why it costs so much because it's in the experience. What happened to Starbucks now in 2016, from my perspective, it has become commoditized. It's not an experience anymore, it has become a service because there are so many spin-offs and there are so many Starbucks and there are so many similar Starbucks that appeared that this is not special anymore. So when you become commoditized, it is very hard for you to keep up a premium price because there are a lot of different other alternatives. Think of airlines, for example. People don't care with what they're flying. That's why they're using low cost, I mean, not across the ocean, but like, let's say for short term flights. It doesn't matter, you just take the cheapest flight and you're not loyal to any company. You're just interested to go somewhere. If you think of flights, they cost, the companies make so less profit on the tickets. It's super crazy because the competition is so tough and it's very hard to keep. So flights in this way, they're not services, they're commodities. It's sickly supplying demand and that's how people choose it. So the Hydra is the best friend of commoditization, which is what the college students are fighting against. That's why they're coming to our college because they want to learn how to defeat common detization, how to to create their brand or their service, how to make it into an experience, and continuously innovating. So the best friend of Commodityization is the Hydra. The reason why we choose a Hydra is because the Hydra has a lot of heads. In our narrative, each head represents something that kills innovation and that creates this phenomenal Commodityization that makes everything the same. So some heads of the Hydra that I'm pretty sure, a lot of us who are entrepreneurs or have an entrepreneurial mindset, thought with is fear, fear of other people to do a wacko idea. It is complacency. It is consensus with the status quo. And for this consensus, as a head of a Hydra, I have a very nice example. I heard it at the Tim Faire's podcast. He asked, does everyone know when the wheels were, were added to the suitcase? When did the rolling suitcase become invented? And then I was thinking and thinking, and I also took this and I'm asking in the presentation, it's really funny because people think it was a long time ago. And then when they say, yeah, it was a long time ago. And then I'm saying, okay, do you remember your father or your grandparents having a rolling suitcase? And they think, no. So when it was adopted by the market was in 1987 or so, which I was born in 1988. So it was not that long ago, which is pretty crazy. So the heads of the Hydra include a lot of things that just block us somewhere. And they don't allow really crazy ideas to go on. If you think of Disneyland, it took so much time to create Disneyland. And that's because the heads of the Hydra were attacking Walt Disney so hard that it took him a very long time to make that happen. So the goal of the students is to defeat the Hydra and hopefully at the end be strong enough like to go back home in their organizations or in their home environment. Like they went through this whole journey of transformation and then become powerful and hopefully changed by getting a mind shift or a different perspective on how to do business. - It's interesting how similar the experiences of a creative or an entrepreneur are. You know, you go through and you go through the same waves as you embark on a project. And I think being able to defeat those concepts together and seeing it like an actual enemy instead of, oh, this is just a feeling I had or oh, I got this far in my project and now I have imposter syndrome. Let me just go deal with it instead of let me equip myself with these tools so that I can deal with it efficiently and quickly when it comes up so it doesn't derail the project. - Exactly. - Yeah. So you said something earlier that stuck in my mind. You were talking about the idea of novelty and it brings up a question in my mind. So you're saying that novelty is crucial to an experience, right? But then how do you scale? How do you scale an experience if you have to rely on the novelty of each time or each variation of it? - I love your questions. I think it is not only novelty because that was just like a small example. It is the combination between familiarity and novelty. - Tell me more. - So think, let's take tourism as an example. A combination between familiarity and novelty might be when you go and visit a completely new destination with someone that you know. You're familiar with that person, but there's something new. - Right. - Another example is when you visit the same destination with someone that you know, but he was not there or she was not there. So you can leverage in the aspect of friends, families, people that didn't experience something. And you can also, if you think, except to Soleil, every one or two years, they completely change their show. And I think you always have to innovate and a way to scale it is you need to build a model that allows you to change quite fast. So I don't think you need rigid structures. So if you have a flexible structures of innovating that always helps. And a way to scale it is, I don't know, you have something that happens as a surprise. You don't know when it's going to happen, but you know that at one point is going to happen. And then you always go there and then you always know that there is a chance that you will get surprised. And I have several examples here. One comes from the parks in the US. They originally did not have squirrels in the parks. They were brought in. - What? - Yes. - Really? - Yes, squirrels were brought in the park. So now they act as a novelty or surprise or a reward that you might just be strolling in the park. And then at one point you know that an interaction with a squirrel might happen. And that gives you, that can create a memorable thing in your like four days stroll that makes your day. Another example is I was, when I was younger, I lived for six months in the Ukraine in Liviv. It's a city in the west of Ukraine, close to the border to Poland. And I was completely shocked how well developed their experience economy concept was, especially with this one guy who had approximately six different concept bars and pubs. And there was this one restaurant which had, was underground. And as you know, Ukraine is split into western east. And in the east there are more Russian speaking people and more Russian-oriented people in the west. There are more Ukrainian nationalist or like Ukrainian focused they speak Ukrainian and so on. And there is quite a big fight or divide between east and west. And west Ukrainians don't like Russians also because they had quite a bad history and worse with them. So how they staged this was super crazy because when I got to the city everyone said, you need to go to this restaurant. So another way to scale is you make it so unique that whenever someone new comes to a place, it is the number one thing to do. So that means you will never have an empty space. So they said, you need to go to the restaurant and then we will go with you even though if they were there, they still get an awesome experience because they look at my reactions to something that they know will happen. And then if you infuse a level of surprise that you still create some small novelty for them by shifting something very easy, then it's easy to do. And let me go through with the examples so people also have a better idea of what I'm talking about. So I go there and there is this-- it's on the street and then there is one guy sitting on a chair next to a bookshelf and he has a weapon, a Kalashnikov. And my friends already told me if you want to go in, he will ask you if you're Russian. So say you're not Russian. And if you say Slava Ukraine, which means Long Live Ukraine, he will give you a shot of vodka. He will open the bookcase and then you can go in. So I go there, I see the guy, I say Slava Ukraine. He lets me in, he gives me a shot of vodka. And then we go down some stairs into this bunker like Restaurant Pub. It looked like a bunker from the war. So that was a bunker that was themed. This is also one key thing of how to stage experience having a theme because it makes it easier to design the experience if you have a theme. So it was themed by the partisan war between Ukrainians and Russians. And it was a very basic design. So it was wooden tables and if you ordered food, the food cost a lot. That's why you can charge premium because people don't come for the food. They come for the experience. So the food was plain potatoes with some sauce and some sausage. That was the food. And for that you paid five to six times more as you would have paid in a normal place for a good meal, a very good meal. But it was plain potatoes with sausages and tasted awesome. Because of the experience, then people started coming and playing traditional music. I love that was also amazing. So that's one element of novelty that could easily be implemented. And whenever you go there, something unexpected might happen. And I was also selecting their advertising. I was one day walking down the street and I see this army truck with guys dressed up in partisan uniforms with huge flags and trumpets and so on. Just doing ad hoc guerrilla marketing for that place. These are some examples of how you could do it. That's interesting. So the core mission or message of that is this really nationalistic vibe. But you can do this. That's why I'm saying to people because I'm going to innovation workshops. And people are completely lost and they have no ideas how to make decisions. And one of the easiest ways, if you look at the experience economy, one of the core tools that you should use is having a theme. And the best example is that you're going to have a theme. example that I can give is think of you want to create a surprise party for your friend. So you're planning this and you're trying to create a cool experience for your friend because everyone isn't an experienced designer, more or less everyone has an idea of how to make something cool. The problem is they just do it very seldom. So it's okay. Let's just make a cool surprise experience birthday party for for our friend and then you meet up with six other people and then you end up having a lot of ideas and not too much is getting concrete and you end up doing something not that special unless you have a theme and you say okay let's talk about what theme do we want to have and you can say okay we want to have the Superman theme easy okay what ideas should we have well we get someone to dress up like Clark Kent and then have a Superman costume under and then that Clark Kent offers her the invitation and then all the decisions and the ideas and the decision to keep an idea or not and the flow of the whole design process is going to go very easy because is it according to the theme or not how are going to do the drinks how are going people to be dressed what is going to happen etc. Yeah that speaks a lot to the idea of designing within confines as a way of giving yourself freedom yeah that's actually an excellent lead-in to the design challenge for this episode so towards the end of each episode I give people a design challenge and in addition to going and checking out the College of Extraordinary Experiences and checking out Paul's book which I will link all in the show notes I want to give people a challenge to think about how they can take whatever it is they're doing and turn it into an experience so tell me three steps that they can take to help turn a service into an experience okay is this fine if I say four you can say as many as you want yes most people I mean I can give you a lot of steps but the core steps is and I already said one is having a theme the second step is thinking of how to implement that theme at all of your all of your touch points and also cross before doing and after the event or the experience that you're planning another step is try to think of how to implement the theme at all by using all five senses the more senses you use and ideally you can use all five of them and I can give you a very nice chart of how you can rate your senses so that people can use as a tool maybe oh please do I'll put it on the site to be downloaded so the more the more senses that you use an ideally if you use all five of them and implement the theme at all five your experience becomes stronger then look at what you were thinking and try to remove all points that don't fit to the theme or look at what you're going to create and see where their negative cues in the experience and try to remove them or try to pivot and implement somehow pushing the theme so it's not a negative cue it's a positive cue related to the theme and last but not least everyone because an experience is an intangible thing everyone wants to have something that they can remember the experience so implement memorabilia so these are from from Pining Inmore's book these are his tools but there are a lot much more things than that so as an example of memorabilia some people maybe even now have seashells from the first time when they went to to the sea nature is best at staging experiences so just go there you're in awe and you just take a seashell but an experience in from an economic perspective becomes an experience when you ask money for it do you find that the experience is more valued when someone's paid for it I think because we're talking business you want to create experiences and make money of course you can also create experiences for free and that's much better since you're doing it for someone that you love or someone that you want to impress or a complete stranger you can also do that but if it's with business or if you're trying to put your entrepreneur hat on try to charge money if you have your entrepreneur hat off just do it for fun awesome well that that's exciting I'm looking forward to seeing if anyone tries any of those and please tell us all about it on on the website why service design thinking dot com so tall how can everyone find out more about the college of extraordinary experiences as well as your book for the college is extraordinary dot college that's the website and for the book is gamification in tourism dot com great and you can get that on amazon yes yes you can you can find it on amazon I also have a blog with with a lot of example and also a blog post describing the memorable experience staging model that I'm using so you can already have a sneak peek and see what is all about there and you can also find me on twitter on Paul Boulinja wonderful I will have links to all of those be sure to check it out Paul this was a very fascinating discussion and I'm looking forward to continuing the discussion more in Poland in November and I can't wait to see what the surprises are I don't even know what they are so I'll find out what the rest of the attendees Paul thank you so much for speaking with us today my pleasure special thanks to Monica Schreiber of brave musician dot com for this week's theme music did you enjoy this podcast if so I would be so thankful if you could take one minute and go to iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcasting platform and take a moment to rate and review this podcast it's a small step that will go a very long way towards helping us grow our community this has been why service design thinking I'm Marina thank you for listening