Designerless Service Design
How does Japan achieve service excellence naturally, without designers?
Japanese service is globally revered. Surprisingly, this often emerges without the formal frameworks of Customer Experience or Service Design. As a designer, I’m curious what we can learn, add to our methodologies, and achieve more natural and consistent outcomes. Here I explore how Japanese cultural values inherently promote human-centricity, offering insights that could elevate design practices in the West.
It’s not only about empathy…
If you’ve been taught Design Thinking, you’ll be familiar with the emphasis on ‘starting from a position of empathy’. It encourages sitting with those you’re designing for, and understanding their needs with real world context and perspective. Empathy is critical in design, but can easily be misunderstood, and devolve into mere emotional gestures.
What’s exceptional about Japanese service is their ability to understand and meet your needs so accurately. It’s surprising given the lack of verbal communication. And I’m not implying they’re non-empathetic, but they manage to achieve a good result without an emphasis on empathy. So I think there’s something we can learn from here.
What is Japanese service like?
In my quest to investigate what makes Japanese service so good, I’ve noticed (while trying to remain unnoticed) that Japanese will often anticipate my needs before I’ve said anything. They are good at reading your subtle actions and emotions and then responding appropriately. Furthermore, as an illiterate foreigner, this is all impressively achieved without words. And lastly, I would describe Japanese service as dedicated. I have experienced, and heard many stories, where staff have gone far beyond the call of duty to help. I’ll give my favourite example - my friends bought an apartment and needed to fill out some serious forms, by hand, in Japanese. The lady at the foreign citizens centre assisted them by filling out the form with a pencil, patiently waited for them to trace over every stroke, and then carefully rubbed out the pencil below.
Are Japanese taught this at school or something? Where does this type of behavior come from? After asking locals, it is clear that they are not aware of their acute level of attentiveness, ability to be sensitive and appropriate, or see themselves as particularly dedicated. However, many books on the topic of ‘the heart and soul of Japanese’ concur that these are fundamental traits in most Japanese people. While service excellence seems to arise naturally for many Japanese, it doesn’t for me. I’ll share how these traits originated, they might be a bit elaborate, but I find these stories helpful to make it more tangible and support understanding.
How Japanese developed traits that make them inherently deliver great service, and what we can learn from this in the West to improve our service and experience design.
Image by Masaaki Komori @gaspanik
Traits: Awareness and anticipation
Benefits: creates attentive service that makes customers feel surprisingly understood
High situational awareness is said to have been cultivated in the era of the samurai. The ability to sense danger was a necessary skill for survival. Not only this, but they had to read the opponent and gauge their intentions leading to this ability to read others' emotions; and, without words.
Non-verbal communication, such as a-un no kokyu (understanding intent without explicit communication) gives rise to service that feels subtle and sensitive. It also supports the ability to provide ‘anticipatory service’ where customers’ needs are often acknowledged before they even say a word. While this may be the norm in Japan, it was certainly a surprise to me, and also a relief to know this form of communication could work effectively.
By the way, Japanese have words that summarize really complicated concepts, and it does them injustice to substitute using a single English word, so I include the originals so you can look them up later.
Traits: Harmony and conscientiousness
Benefits: leads to subtle, thoughtful, and appropriate service
Great service not only efficiently and accurately identifies an issue, but also responds accordingly. Kikubari is the idea of paying attention, gauging the ki (energy) of one another, and handling it appropriately. This is all in the pursuit of wa (harmony) which is a value stemming from Japan’s agricultural history - a society where people needed to work well together. Today, this value still prevails as a modern desire to avoid troubling or inconveniencing others. In the service arena, this goes further, resulting in well-considered ‘ultra-convenience’.
Kikubari isn’t about passive conformity, it’s about proactively striving to understand the circumstances of the people around, and act in a timely and considerate fashion. For example, I recall the first time I ever went into a soba restaurant, the ones where you use the pictureless, translationless, ticket machine to order your meal - I had eventually gotten my ticket but did not know how to listen to my number being called out, let alone the name of what I had ordered. I sat down next to another customer at the counter and placed my ticket on the table. When my number was called (and I was listening intensely but not flinch), this fellow customer gently indicated to me, pointing to my ticket and then to the collection area. I was an obvious traveller who could have caused disruption to the whole soba system, but this was appropriately sensed and thoughtfully mitigated.
Reflecting on my soba experience, there was something endearing about this interaction; a common thread through many service experiences I’ve had in Japan. Firstly, I felt she cared enough to do her best not to embarrass me or make a scene; she did this through considerate timing. Secondly, I felt she was looking out for me in a sensitive way; I was trying to be quiet and discrete (even though the restaurant was loud and busy) and she prompted me in a matching manner. Although she was but a fellow customer, I feel these are traits that equally lead to thoughtful service.
Image by Leslie Jones @les_elizabethj
Traits: Discipline and self-restraint
Benefits: Produces patient service
A big disrupter to harmony in Japan are usually foreigners, like yours truly. Despite this, Japanese service staff often cultivate an impressive level of enryo (ability to show self-control, restraint and reservation), leading to respectful and patient service. While sure we know that omotenashi (deep-seated hospitality) is the goal, discipline is needed to sustain and execute it.
How is this discipline cultivated? In Japanese culture there is a strong desire to improve one’s spirit through kokkishini (self-denial). This involves daily effort to cultivate self-discipline and is exemplified in the ethos of martial arts, which is as much about training the mind as it is the body. Karate doesn’t end with a black belt; the training is lifelong. Valuing the michi (the path you travel on) is a deeply meaningful principle in the Japanese way. This trait was most noticeable to me when I joined a tennis school in Japan. I was headed to my second lesson. I missed the bus the first time because I stood on the wrong side of the road. So this time, when I saw someone with a big tennis bag I was reassured and decided that I would just follow wherever he went. We started talking, I asked how long he had been playing tennis, he said 70 years!…Since he was in college!… This must make him almost 100 years old?! I had never met anyone in my life who had played continuously for that long. Usually when I ask people this question in the UK or New Zealand, it’s not uncommon that people will have taken a break multiple times in their life. Later during my lesson, I looked over to the advanced court, and there he was, doing Federer style backhand slams! There is a certain dedication about the Japanese - a persistence to be able to do the same thing, over and over again, and be perfectly content every time - a tenacity that bodes well in service delivery. I read this example in Heart & Soul of the Japanese by Yamakuse Yoji and Michael A. Cooney, that baseball can be seen, not as a sport, but as a discipline - I had never thought from this perspective before. Perhaps equally, if we see service is a discipline, it may produce some different results.
How can we apply this understanding of Japanese traits, to bias our outputs towards service excellence?
Some design application activities:
During ideation, a popular technique is to apply constraints. What if our service had to be delivered completely without words?
If we thought about the ‘service system’, as if it were a society, how could the concepts of attention and thoughtfulness create more appropriate and harmonious interactions?
If we shuffled the timing of the sequence of events in a service blueprint or customer journey, what would that do to the experience? Are there subtle timing details that would be more suitable or appropriate, more subtle or more appreciated?
What is the michi (road) we can design for the server/staff, to help them be more satisfied and dedicated?
Image by @patrickperkins