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003. What makes a Bad Service?

35m 18s

003. What makes a Bad Service?

In this episode of "Bad Services from the School of Good Services," hosts Lou Downe and Dr. Sarah Drummond explore what defines a bad service. They agree that the core problem is dehumanization: services often treat people as items on a factory line, prioritizing efficiency and metrics over empathy and tailored support. Examples include benefit systems that force homeless individuals to bid on homes without photos, and drive-through coffee shops where staff are penalized by targets for handling simple off-protocol requests. Lou adds that bad services also fail to explain their rules, assuming users have the privilege to navigate hidden costs or eligibility criteria—like restaurants without prices on menus. Sarah highlights how staff become dehumanized by rigid systems, as seen when a coffee shop worker feared missing a target due to a simple order. The hosts note that many service flaws are easily fixable but overlooked due to laziness or a lack of personal testing by executives. They stress that decision-makers rarely try their own services, leading to broken interfaces and confusing language. Ultimately, they call for more relational, human-centered design and urge leaders to use their services firsthand to spot and fix basic issues, rather than relying on surveillance or punitive metrics.

Transcription

6596 Words, 35428 Characters

English
[Music] Hello, I'm Lou Downe, welcome to Bad Services from the School of Good Services, the podcast that delves into why services fail and how we fix them. We've got funny stories, weird metaphors, dubious jokes and grandiose patterns galore to explore exactly how we got to this world of bad services and what we can do about it. As ever, I'm joined by my eminently qualified co-host Dr Sarah Drummond, the better half of the School of Good Services. In this episode, we're going to be talking about what makes a bad service in the first place, which I feel is one of our favourite topics. To be honest, we spend a lot of our time talking about bad services. So yeah, on with the show. We talk about bad services a lot. Yeah, we really do. To be honest, I'm not really sure what else we talk about. Do you talk about other things? Like birds? Yeah, birds, birds and bad services. Yeah, sure. Bad, bad, bad, bird boxes. I like cycling and music. Yes. But then I also get annoyed at like maybe the services providing me the music or my bike didn't get fixed properly. So yeah, it is an occupational hazard thinking about services all the time. I often feel actually quite bad when people have come into the world of service design and you and I have often been at maybe the start of their journey with a bit of training or even in the past, like their first project. And they've come out of it being like, that was great. I love service design. I love designing things at work, but I can't stop thinking about bad services. It is, I think, the kind of flip side of the coin of service design though. I think you have to enjoy a good problem. And in a way that it's not just about solving it, you know, I think that sometimes you see a little glint in people's eyes when they see a bad service and they're like, "Woo, roll on the sleeves up." Like, yeah, I can really get in stuck in with this one that is really interesting. But I think that's like what I often tell people to just go and do as part of their training is to go and look at services and tear them down. So look at the kind of layers that are involved in them and particularly bad ones. Have a look and think, what is it that is actually making this service bad? Is it the kind of front facing side of the user experience? Is it just the way that someone had to order a ticket for something? Is it something that could be solved quite easily? Or is it a much deeper thing to do with like the business model or the staff metrics or something else? And so I think just being interested, like you said, is a good behavior of a service designer, I think? Yeah, definitely. And I think if you have an affinity for being irritated by something, then you have a motivation to solve it. And I think that's what I recognize. And a lot of people who find their way into service design and service design adjacent roles is that it starts by an annoyance, the world not being as good as they want it to be. Yeah. So I am curious, what for you really truly defines a bad service before we get into the meat of it? Like what is the kind of like the on the tip of your tongue when you think about a bad service? Like a heart and sleeve answer? Yeah. What is it? Okay. Oh, right. I think for me, the most frustrating thing to observe about lots of services, in fact, most services out there, is that they take a very factory line approach into the way that they're designed. So they're extremely transactional. And really, I think the the epitome of that is that they dehumanize people. So we push people essentially through a factory process to get to an end. And that is because we're thinking about ourselves in terms of efficiency and operations and being an organization that delivers something to someone as opposed to taking a much more relational approach to that design because human beings, we are messy, we are complex, we do not fit into stage A, stage B, stage C, stage D, stage E, you know, in terms of how service can work. So that really frustrates me. The real epitome of that, there was a dehumanization of people. And we see that in lots of different service areas like care. I don't mean the kind of frontline delivery when you actually get to work with a professional who's extremely caring and loving and gentle. I mean, the process in and around that. So we see that a lot in care, definitely seeing that in things like the benefit system. We've seen it in a lot of public services that really have metrics attached to them that are to do things in a certain speed, a certain time, to a certain scale. And so we just lose empathy, we lose any form of kind of tailored support. And we end up dealing in a different way with people who really need more support, but probably mostly in my experience of researching services and organizations, dealing with those cases right at the end when they've got really complex. So that really, really frustrates me the processing of people and the dehumanizing of them. And I always think of this, I mean, I think a lot about the benefit system and research I've done and just people literally at their wits end like at the end. You see an I Daniel Blake by Ken Lutchen 16 films. If you haven't seen that film, you should watch it. It's a great example of systematically poor service design. Not necessarily user interface service design, because actually the user interface involved in in delivering some of these services and systems in a digital way are actually really good because they're really accessible, they're technically easy to use, but the wider system around it has made that service just really bad for people to use and really dehumanizing. So watching Daniel Blake. So I've seen a lot of benefits, but one of the memories I have of watching somebody having to bid for a home who is homeless. And homeless can mean that actually quite a lot of different things. It doesn't just mean someone who is on the street sleeping rough. It can mean people who are temporarily between a permanent address and permanent home. And I've watched someone who has to every single week log on to a system just to keep themselves in the system of bidding. And I say bidding, it's been giving a home by a local authority account. So to be there every week, if they miss it, they get off the list. And they have to bid on homes that they in very commas want. And these homes have no photographs. Wow. It's completely dehumanizing and it is a system that's pushing its own needs onto people, completely dehumanizing. So for me, at the top of the chain is the dehumanization of people. Right. Just it makes me so frustrated. And for me, it's not necessarily saying that we need a whole new type of service design discipline. It means we need to take a really big look at the system behind it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, to kind of give those services the benefit of the doubt that you often find that dehumanizing as an accidental byproduct of having to provide a very, very high volume service for a wide diversity of different people. And there's a kind of natural dehumanizing process that happens when you try and kind of design for the middle of the bell curve and try to design something that is supposed to work at vast scale. And I think also, you know, to think of some private sector examples of that, you know, hospitality is a great example of this. You know, you can be going to what looks like a lovely hotel and the person at the desk is like, you know, can you give us a rating out of five? You haven't even checked in yet. And by the way, the car parking's got a ticket. For those of you who followed the dead ends podcast, we do a whole episode about luxury services. That example is really stuck with you. It really has. It really has. But I also, I just don't want the private sector to get away with this because it is not just a public sector problem. It's to do with basically efficiency of scale. Sometimes there's other reasons for that dehumanizing. But yeah, I totally hear you. And I see that in so many different examples of services too many to list. But it's really interesting that your, so your example is basically about rules that are imposed on people that are really didactic and really restrictive and don't allow for the kind of messy variation of humanity. My, the thing that kind of crops up for me when I think about bad service is not necessarily the opposite of that, but it is where services don't explain their rules at all. So you have what looks like a really open and flexible service that doesn't have any restrictions on the cost or on the timing or who uses it or on the rules or anything else like that. But when you get to using it, suddenly you find out, oh, wait, hang on a second, it's not it's a service that's not for me. And then you find out that it's too expensive or it's, it takes too long or, you know, actually, you don't meet the criteria of using the service. Perfect, every day example that people will be familiar with is a fancy restaurant that doesn't have its prices on the menu. And so you go to order it and you're like, geez, that's a very expensive dish. Or a public service that doesn't explain actually, this is, you know, it's only [BLANK_AUDIO] allowable for certain types of people and they haven't really explained who that is for. And what you end up with is basically people using that service because they think that it's the right service for them. So you're skewing the audience of people to only the people who have the kind of confidence or privilege to be able to look at something that's really unpredictable and go, yeah, that seems legit. Like I'll totally use that. So that's my bug bear. It's like services that just assume that you will have the privilege to be able to look at them and go, yes, absolutely. This is for me. But I think rules is another one for me in a slightly different way. It's when you see the rules that staff have to follow or the systems that they're rigidly stuck within. And it dehumanises them. So it sort of builds on my first point as well. You know, let me just give you like a really quick example. I think you're with me because you're mostly with me most of the time. But we were trying to get a coffee through a drive through just off a multi way. Oh God, I know this is stuck in your head. No, because I think it's a really good example of where actually staff have been to humanise and become products of the system. And we're only seeing this increase more and more. So let me just go on and paint the picture. We're in a car. Yep. We're tired. I think it's about 8 p.m. Yep. We've been driving for a long time. Yeah. Two hours to go. Motorway service station. Need a coffee. Yeah. Got it. So we drive through. I actually questioned and paused at the machine where you're supposed to say like I'd like a flat white. Yeah. A black coffee. Yeah. Whatever it is. And we did pause and I rolled down the window and nothing happened. And I was like, they're pressed the button. There was some kind of button there. It just was confusing. So I just drove up to the window and the lovely girl that was there opened the window and was like, I don't you have an order. And I said, can I have a flat white piece? And she was totally confused at first and said, but we don't have your order. I said, can I order? And so we ended up in this kind of no man's land of transaction. And then she said, you didn't make the order back at the machine. And I said, I'm really sorry. And we was like, I was being so, you know, I'm never like rude, but I was just a bit confused. I was like, why? I didn't. We were just stuck. And I just said, okay, well, could I order here though? Because I'm here now. And there was two cars behind us. So I couldn't reverse. I am basically in the passenger seat dying inside. No, but I was being polite. Come on. You know, absolutely. But I can tell the irritation that it's rising. And so I said, well, I can't reverse now. And also this motorway service station is such a weird one. I've never worked out because we passed it quite a lot. How to drive back around into once you get through into this one sneaky little lane of this like takeaway coffee place. So back up, we're back on the motorway. And I needed the coffee. So I was like, try and explain that. And then she said, I've got targets to meet. You're ruining them. I thought things she quite said it like this, but I've got targets to me. How did she say it? She said, you're going to make me miss my target. It's this is taking too long. I've got targets to meet. We get judged on it or something like that. And then she said, let me just take your order for you. And I was like, that would be so kind. Thank you so much. I'm really, and I kept profusely apologising. But that for me is when you can actually literally see the dark matter, the rules of the service that are imposed either by, I guess, a policy or a measurement incentive or whatever that might be, and someone being also dehumanised with those rules in front of you. I hate it. I hate it for myself. I hate it for the person in front of me. And so that really gets my, gets my goal, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is why the catchphrase of computers says, no, it is such a kind of, or it grips us inside, you know, and in a way that it's been used obviously in comedy, but it is a reality for many of us when we're interacting with a service that not only do we not understand why decisions have been made and why the service works in the way that it does, but we don't understand it because the staff member doesn't understand it. And they have no autonomy to solve. It's fixed that problem. Have you heard about the new McDonald's thing that's getting rolled out? No, what's the new McDonald's? So they're going to be looking at using a form of AI that can do like facial recognition and tone of voice recognition to make sure that you are delivering the service in the right way, saying, please, and thank you in the right way just during the most. Isn't that just the root of serious surveillance culture? Like, I mean, it raises a really interesting question of incentives, doesn't it? Are you encouraging your staff to do the right thing by praising them, supporting them, paying them well, training them, helping them to feel like a community, helping them to want to build your brand and buy into it? Or are you surveilling them and, you know, chastising them and docking their pay when they do things wrong? You know, reminds me of, um, I can't remember the name of the film. So this story is maybe completely useless, where, you know, the, it's set in a cafe and you have to wear your three pieces of flair, you know, and you have to get told off if you're not wearing your badges that, you know, show your personality and it's just, God, you don't pay people enough for that. Do you know what I mean? No, I'm told. No, I'm told. So that stuff really gets my go. But can I just give you one last one that gets my gone? You do. Just stuff this so easily fixable. So easily fixable. Because some of the stuff that we're saying is a much bigger system look that, that needs to be had. And you mentioned there, like things about pay parity and, uh, equality and a whole system wide stuff around dehumanisation. So that stuff is a bit more complex, maybe to start unpacking and looking at, but the really easy stuff. Like, for example, just making sure that you can actually go through a bit of your service end to end. And you can just actually submit the form or there is not lots of different names for things in the service. Like that stuff is so easy to fix and really is born out of if I'm being really honest, laziness, I think on an executive team to not just try the service themselves. Because that kind of stuff is quite easy to fix and do. I know it gets a bit harder to fix when there's complex, maybe technology products that you don't own and it's hard to get changes to happen on them or whatever that might be. But really easy stuff that I think if you just went through, for example, like the good service principles or a number of other, like heuristic principles principles are available. You could find some stuff that's easy to fix and I think it's lazy actually when that stuff isn't done, when it's badly designed in that way. Yeah. And I'm not even, even a service can still not be right, you know, and exactly do the right thing for people that's really needy, but at least don't be designed in terms of the interface. And I mean interface, I mean like all forms of channels and touch points, not just digital things, just make it easy to use. Yeah. Well, I mean, I would challenge that laziness a little bit because I don't think it's always laziness. I think as you will see in the new book, there's lots of reasons why people struggle to produce services that work. And often it is not that they don't want to. It's often those really obvious things that we don't see because we've got so used to seeing them and because we're an expert in our service, we think that the language is totally understandable or the process is understandable and things work perfectly. But you're right in highlighting the fact that a lot of problems happen because often we just, we have never used our own service. You know, it's a bit like not eating at your own restaurant and it is amazing the number of people who, you know, you talked to them about their service and they say, well, oh, I didn't realise this is what this bit looked like. And I don't want people to feel shame about that because that's just the reality of I think that detachment that happens between decision making in our organisation, the people who deliver our service, not saying it's right, but it is something that we need to watch out for is that just not seeing problems because we haven't looked for them. Yeah, I know I was being, I was, no, I feel bad for saying lazy, but what, okay, let me just give myself an answer. Let me give a bit of space for why I said that we're lazy is the amount of people who have been involved at a very senior level in the strategy for a service having never used it before, never searched for the service, never tried to file a bit of paperwork for that service, never tried to understand it. And you're totally right, like there might already be a bias towards an imbibed or most expert language that they can't spot. So that's not going to solve anything you should always. And I caveat again with test with real people, make sure it's diverse to people, etc, etc. But at least try your service. So that's what I mean by that one. I'm not saying that you can quickly fix it by just getting your chief executive to like tell you what to change. That's not really what I mean, but just fix some of the really easy stuff that's already broken. Yeah. And but then I think we can get more technical about this in terms of actually delving in really specifically. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, this is also without going into too much detail about it. This is why, you know, back of the early days of GDS, we had a principle of, you know, service wasn't allowed to go onto Gov.uk unless it had been tested by a minister because what you're doing there is kind of forcing that feedback loop. If you're forcing the person who's making decisions about a service to actually know what that service does and to test it and to be able to actually go, hang on a second, this isn't working, how I thought it was or actually, yeah, really love this and I want to talk about it. So yeah, do that. So I think let's get a bit more specific though, because they're like, our heart, that's just having a really good old mouth. These are our pet peeves, absolutely. Things that we've been frustrated at and we see and I just, it gives me the, like a service it, you know, like, oh, that's horrible. So the dehumanizing for me, seeing the rules and them being like limiting to people to not actually help someone, I find really difficult and rules when it doesn't explain the service to people I think for you. And then just fixing some of the easy stuff with a lot of caveats involved in what we just said there, so we don't want to come across as like just fix it. It's easy. Yeah. Some of this work is quite hard. Hello, advert time. Did you know that we run courses that help people to design good services? Whether that's for first-timers wanting to dip their toes into dissecting their services for the first time, to building the in-house capability to design, services and gauge your organisation in that work. We have got a course for you. So check out good.services where you can view all of our courses and find infinite ways to work with us from private training and coaching to delivering talks to your organisation. That's good.services. One of the things I really enjoyed that we did last week for a little sticky secret project we've got coming up for the book launch was to take each one of the good service principles that you wrote for good services, your first book and kind of invert them into what would they say if they were bad? So maybe we could just start, I thought, with reading each one out, one for one. Yeah. And then why don't you pick like two or three that specifically speak to you? Okay. So in at number one on how to build a service, that does not work. Make it hard to find. Number two, do not enable users to complete the outcome they set out to do. Number three, do not explain its purpose. Number four, it does not set the expectations a user has of it. Number five, make sure that it works in a way that it is extremely unfamiliar. Number six, bad requires larger amounts of knowledge to use. Number seven, make sure that it forces users to understand your organisation or structures in order to use it. Number eight, it requires the maximum possible steps to complete. Yeah. The longest possible service that never ends. At number nine, is extremely inconsistent all the way throughout. In at number 10, has multiple dead ends, you ain't ever getting to do what you've never reaching the end of this endless service. Your stuck. Number 11, be usable by a select few very unevenly. Number 12, encourages the wrong, sorry, it does get a bit silly, but I think it's a helpful, is a helpful way to look at these. Number, where was I? Number 12, number 12, encourages the wrong behaviors from users and service providers. Number 13, make sure it never responds to change. Number 14, it never explains why a decision has been made. Number 15, make it very hard to get human assistance. Do you know why I kind of love these? And we're kind of giggling, reading them out, but often actually when I'm working on any form of creative idea, sometimes when it's harder to illustrate what good looks like and what it should be, I actually coach people to say, well, what is it not? And these are actually really good to kind of take a bit of a look at yourself and say, actually, is there multiple dead ends? Do we never respond when something external happens? Is it really hard to get human assistance? And let's take a look at that and have a discussion about this, because these principles are not, they're not black and white in a sense of you must do it this way or that way, they are guiding. But this is a helpful, I think, way to look at it from the other end of good services. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, at the beginning of a lot of workshops and training sessions, I run, I always like to ask people the question of what makes a good or bad service and can you give me some examples? And every single time people come back with examples of bad services and they have much more fun explaining those than they do the good services, because when a good service works, it sinks into the background. You don't notice it. So bad services are a lot easier for us to spot and they're a lot easier for us to talk about, I think. But maybe hard to talk about it in the context of your own work and services. Absolutely. So I really like what you said there and that's something that I often do is I drop the good services for a while and say, let's just talk about stuff that's really bad and why is that? And when we talk about it external to our own work, it becomes a lot easier. But then we can transfer those lessons back into our work. So, Lou, down. Which of the, let's pick like to keep this short, let's pick like two or three. Yeah, what would be number one for you? Okay. So I think number one, and I'm not picking this because it is number one. But I would have to be being easy to find and it's kind of flip side making your service hard to find. And the reason why I would pick this one is because unless you're making your service findable for your users, you could build the best service in the world. And if you're calling it something weird, if you are deliberately hiding it, say that you reduce the number of people using it, or even just accidentally doing that accidentally on purpose, making it hard to find, then it's completely pointless providing a service if people can't find it. And I think the reason why this is so important as well is that these questions about what the name of the service is, what the description of the service is, that come up when you talk about making that easy to find, are often in a very quietly hidden strategic conversations about actually what scope of the service is. So it can be a really great way of introducing a conversation actually about whether or not the scope of your service is correct. If you've called your service something incredibly niche and specific, but actually the service needs to be doing something a bit bigger and a bit more expansive to a different set of user needs. So yeah, I would say talking about the name of your service, talking about what you're calling it, how you're describing it, can be a really soft way into having those conversations. So I would always start there. Absolutely. And I think maybe something we'll pick up later on in the podcast once the book is finally released is what does it mean to find a service in the context of our changing form of search. So people going less towards looking for example, website, what does it mean to actually engage with a service when you don't even have to find it, but your agent does. Yeah, I think that's something that we need to kind of be talking about is we move forward in the future. But that what you're saying is not just about the name. As in people understand it, that's one part of it. It's what it does. Yeah. And how it's described in that answer as well. Yeah. Super interesting. Absolutely. And to add to that as well as not just about search, I think people often think about that when they think about the name of service. It's also about how people converse about your service, how they refer other people to it, how they talk about it, how memorable the service is. And that is an important factor in naming and describing as well. It's actually just the amount of load we're expecting people to carry in remembering the name of something that doesn't make sense. So what would be number two then for you? Well, I think closely related to that is, of course, number two, that's why I wrote them in this order, is enabling a user to complete the outcome they they're set out to do or it's reverse not enabling your users completely outcome they set up to do. And I suppose the reason why this is related to being easy to find is if we are creating a service that is extremely narrow in scope, then what we are often not doing is really seeing how our service sits next to other services further downstream and upstream that enable your user to complete an overall outcome like buying a house or getting access to care or starting a business. And even if we just look in a government context, starting a business can involve upwards of 15 different services depending on what type of business and how heavily regulated it is. So, yeah, stitching all those things together is complicated and really related to obviously principle number seven being agnostic of organizational structures. It's not easy to do, but it is incredibly important to think about that overall outcome that your user is setting out to do. Absolutely. Tom and Morgan actually, who has been a long time friend of ours, been born within the past, now working for the British government again, created actually really useful new map using government APIs of service steps. Yeah. And some of these big services and actually really illustrating the point that you said about how many different departments and steps our user needs to go through in order to reach the overall outcome of things like learning to drive for, yeah, open businesses you said. So there's some really interesting example and again, we can probably put into the show notes from people to look at. Let's do number what about number three, let's go for a third. So I think the third one that I would always talk about, even if it doesn't come up in conversation because I think we need to talk about it more, is encouraging the right behaviors of users and service providers and its flip side, obviously, of encouraging the wrong behaviors of users and service providers. And the reason why I think this is so important is because how we encourage behaviors in our service be that through KPIs or metrics or other types of incentives dramatically changes the long term health of our service. So if we have a KPI or a metric that encourages people to deliver a particular target rather than actually provide a good service like your coffee example, what we will find is that you know, our brilliantly lovingly created service that started off really good, slowly over time, degrades and the experience becomes worse and worse as our staff are motivated to basically provide everything other than a good service. so we're motivated. towards having shorted cues or more users or more ad sales or shorter call handling times or sorts of other things. And sometimes those can line up with providing a good service, but often they don't. And this is really, really important for creating a service that will get better over time rather than worse. And it's really interesting that in shittification has started to become part of our kind of lexicon and conversation around this. And I think is encouraging the right behaviours of users and service providers is one of the major drivers of avoiding shittification. And this principle, principle number 12 and the principle about organizational structures number seven really have kind of formed a bit of a bridge into the book Bad Services, which is about why we find it difficult to provide good services over the long term. So yeah, I would encourage everyone to talk about the metrics and the KPIs that they have in place in their service and analyze what impact they are having on the behaviours of everyone in the organisation around their service. Yeah, definitely. And this is a lot of the kind of, I guess it's a dark matter I've often used that term borrowed from Indy Johar and Amy Corn and others who have talked a lot about the invisible rules, materials and things that shaped the environment that we live in and we exist in. And I think that's very much the same a good way of thinking about the kind of end design of services. So I mean, we could go through every single one, but I think this has been, I think when we did it was just a helpful exercise to invert all of these and something really useful, your book doesn't actually list all of these. That's not what the books about. It goes much more into the kind of deeper stuff, which I think is really important, but we're going to publish these, I presume. And yeah, get them out. Yeah, but publish them with the idea that people don't do that. You know, the principles of bad service design are not an thing to aim for, obviously. What about a cheeky, should we release like a cheeky little green poster with the bad services on it? You're asking me like you haven't already decided that that's a good idea. Actually, I think I'm going to launch a set of like limited edition like bad service. Okay, you heard it here first. If you would like to order the principles of bad service design. Don't put pressure on it yet. I've not found the paper stock. We'll be fine, but anyway, thanks for going through these. I think that's a really helpful way and a good place for people to start if actually talking about good is maybe sometimes a bit difficult is to talk about bads. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're, you remember, of course, that spotting bad service design is actually very challenging, particularly because we are by definition often experts in our own service, which makes us categorically unqualified to understand the experience of someone who is not an expert. That is natural. That's normal. That will happen over time when we're producing a service. And it's the reason why the phrase, you know, the hairdressers hair is always the worst or the shoemakers shoes are always the worst. You know, there are like hundreds of different versions of that saying in every different language around the world is true because when we are doing our own thing, it's very difficult to spot problems because we are so close to it. It's easy to spot problems in other people's services. So do bear that in mind, be kind to yourself if you can't find the problems that your users can find. Then it's just another reason why user research is so important. 100%. I also think you know shoemakers and hairdresses are mad at the question. Sorry, shoemakers. Dentists, you know, I'm at dentist always have great teeth. I'm a hairdresser who always had good hair. I know. And my shoemakers shoes don't know that like the photo part. Where did that phrase come from? I actually don't know. This was another day's that hairdresses didn't get the hair done by other hairdresses, but I don't know when that would have been. I think this phrase is a little bit substantial question. But why is it such a saying then? I understand why you use it in a straight point, but I think it was actually a bit rude to trades around the world. I think it was a bit rude. I apologize. Hairdresses, shoemakers, I'm dentists of the world. I'm sure you have excellent shoes, hair and teeth. Great. Well, we'll end on that note. Thanks for listening to the show. Yeah, this has been a really, really great discussion. And next episode, we are going to follow on from this discussion to talk about how we spot a bad service, having just said that it's very difficult to do. So we're going to give some tips, pointers, ideas on where you can look for problems if they're not obvious. So, yeah, listening for that one as well. Okay, that's it for this show. If you want to check out all our episodes as well as additional content, head over to good.services/badservicespodcast. We post notes and links for each episode. Our book, Bad Services and Good Services are available at all good booksellers. And of course, we'd love to hear from you. So if there's an episode you'd love to hear about or a question, drop us a message. And make sure to subscribe to the show to be the first to receive notifications when we release a new episode. Thanks so much for listening. Bye-bye. [MUSIC]

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. A bad service is often defined by its dehumanizing, transactional, factory-line approach that processes people without empathy.
  2. Services that impose rigid, unexplained rules or assume user privilege (e.g., hidden costs or eligibility criteria) create confusion and exclusion.
  3. Staff can be dehumanized by restrictive metrics and targets, stripping them of autonomy to solve problems.
  4. Many service failures are due to laziness or lack of personal testing by decision-makers, who rarely try their own services.
  5. Easy-to-fix issues, like confusing interfaces or inconsistent language, often go unaddressed because they are not noticed.

Summary:

In this episode of "Bad Services from the School of Good Services," hosts Lou Downe and Dr. Sarah Drummond explore what defines a bad service. They agree that the core problem is dehumanization: services often treat people as items on a factory line, prioritizing efficiency and metrics over empathy and tailored support.

Examples include benefit systems that force homeless individuals to bid on homes without photos, and drive-through coffee shops where staff are penalized by targets for handling simple off-protocol requests. Lou adds that bad services also fail to explain their rules, assuming users have the privilege to navigate hidden costs or eligibility criteria—like restaurants without prices on menus. Sarah highlights how staff become dehumanized by rigid systems, as seen when a coffee shop worker feared missing a target due to a simple order.

The hosts note that many service flaws are easily fixable but overlooked due to laziness or a lack of personal testing by executives. They stress that decision-makers rarely try their own services, leading to broken interfaces and confusing language. Ultimately, they call for more relational, human-centered design and urge leaders to use their services firsthand to spot and fix basic issues, rather than relying on surveillance or punitive metrics.

FAQs

The episode explores what makes a bad service, focusing on dehumanization, rigid rules, and hidden restrictions that frustrate users and staff.

Lou says bad services often dehumanize people by taking a factory-line, transactional approach, pushing people through processes without empathy or tailored support.

Sarah describes a homeless person who must log in weekly to bid on homes without photos, risking removal from the list if they miss a session.

Lou dislikes services that don't explain their rules, like a fancy restaurant without prices on the menu, which assumes users have the privilege to navigate unpredictability.

Sarah recounts a drive-through where a staff member said 'you're going to make me miss my target,' showing how rigid targets dehumanize employees and frustrate customers.

Sarah argues that easy fixes, like ensuring forms work or using consistent language, are often ignored because senior leaders never try their own services.

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