Example Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge

As Operations Director at a medium-sized cleaning and maintenance company that focuses on  corporate facilities and large-scale construction sites, I have the challenge of growing our residential  services branch of the company. We understand what facilities managers want, we understand  architects and engineers needs when in construction sites, but we need to start comprehending the  needs of residential users which is an unknown market for us.

Selection

I like  the storytelling tool because it helps you analyze your clients and helps you create a more  appealing product or service that will help you grow your business and result in a more loyal clientele  that is always satisfied and feels understood.

Storytelling is the use of words and actions to show the elements and images of a specific story  while connecting and influencing the listener’s imagination and emotions. Used in the context of  design thinking it is a powerful tool that helps you to obtain client insights, it helps you build  empathy and allows us to understand more about emotional experiences and characteristics of our  clients. As designers, we can create “personas” to represent our target clients or users. Then we add  problems or certain conflicts to stories that show their journeys and problems as users. By building  stories, we can start to understand what our target users or clients demand from a solution.

We use stories and storytelling every day in various aspects. From telling your wife about your day,  to explaining a project at the office. Everything we tell needs a story behind it so that it is easier for  everyone to understand and remember. If we train our minds to use this as a tool in our design or  thinking process, then we would have a powerful tool that gives us an advantage over our  competition.

Good stories always captivate audiences and leave an impact.

Application

To get started we wanted to define our main target customer and it’s needs, so decided to build  personas and start analyzing them. We ended up with 3 main target customers that we felt  represented the target customer we must direct our services. We started adding conflict to their  stories to represent social struggles and current events where we are placed (México City). This are  the personas and their story.

-Sara the housewife with 3 children whose main objective is to take care of her house and her  children, she always lives in a hurry and has almost no time for herself. Cleaning her house is  particularly important to her but with 3 small children it is an almost impossible task.

-Mary works as housekeeper for a wealthy family from Monday to Friday. Her tasks are taking care  of the children of the family and the keeping the house in mint conditions even with the 3 dogs that  where treated as family. She has 2 children whom she hardly sees because she is always at work.

She seeks to complete her tasks with the best quality possible and if she can do it in the shortest  time possible to be able to return home and rest it is a plus.

-Jennifer is a single mother of two children. She struggles to make ends meet so she gives most of  her income to the wellbeing of her children. She barely has time for herself since she works long  hours and then must go back home to her kids and the typical house chores. Cleanliness is important  for her but without the time and money this ends up as a luxury.

When we started analyzing our small database of residential clients and comparing it to our  personas, we started to find trends that we thought we could scale up. We saw that the presence  of children and specially pets meant a special window for a service in carpet washing. Also, small  children also represented an opportunity for the offering of mattress washing. But not everybody  had time to spare, so everybody wanted a fast service that could be done in a day and even on  weekends.

From this analysis, we started to do surveys to this specific demographic in order to understand  more about them and to generate insights.

Insight & Approach

What this analysis of our personas led to the implementation of two different strategies.

1.- We designed a system from our existing machines and products that could fit into a small van  that could cover the essential services of a residence in one day. We instructed our staff on what  procedures should be done to deliver a quality job in the smallest amount of time. The system  resulted in the use of a small portable extractor that could easily fit in a house, with special products  that could handle stains and common house problems effectively, and procedures to allow for  everything to dry and be ready to use in a couple of hours. Price was obviously an issue so we where  able to reduce costs due to the creation of small groups of 2 technicians that would be able to do  the entire work.

2.- The analysis of our personas gave us a list of main problems people had cleaning in their house.  So, we started distributing coupons in neighborhoods and supermarkets directed to those areas.  These areas were: carpet, mattress, and furniture washing. This gave us the chance to appeal to our  customers main concerns and show them that solving those problems could be done by using our  services without the hassle of doing it themselves.

Our sales team then had another tool when people called by seeing our coupon and requesting an  estimate, we showed empathy by understanding their situation and offering them the exact solution  for their problem. People felt comprehended and where happy with the service.

We discovered that generating an appealing story for our clients, left a positive impact in the way  they perceived us and where keen on hiring us again once they knew we had other services. We  appeal to the emotional side of everyone of the and that made a big difference. Once we get to  know our clients, we can start to customize services for them, and we learn from them. What works  for one client might work for another one. So, we have started to develop a database that gives us  the trending services requested and new services that are being asked for in order to investigate on  the viability of offering it to other customers.

