The Client Is Always Right: The Importance of Engagement

Earlier this week, we posted an article about five local or global organisations that had redefined the customer experience, from a cinema chain to a grocery store. A number of people subsequently contacted us to ask whether we had seen the BBC series Mary Queen of Shops, and whether it was similar to the work we do.

We searched out the series and sat down to watch an episode, in which retail expert Mary Portas from the Yellowdoor retail marketing consultancy is parachuted into failing, local shops to turn them around, in the process of which she looks at their business model, store layout and service design: all elements we would indeed look at. What differs, very much, is the approach taken.

The episode we saw involved Portas working with a DIY store in Lightwater, Surrey, that had seen profits plunge 60% and had become more of a glorified pound store than a local DIY expert. Portas very quickly perceives its flaws and some quick fixes that can be made, but also encounters a bottleneck in her mission: the reluctant owner, pictured above, highly resistant to her ideas. She eventually gets most of her way, rebranding the store (with a name, Fix It Factory, that she decides on and the owner hates), redesigning it to be more customer centric, retraining and engaging the staff, and it does indeed look hugely different and to the customer eye, much better.

It is clear, however, that the owner, Tony, is not happy with a number of the changes, and within three weeks following the reopening has begun to dilute the branding away from Fix It Factory back to Lightwater Homecare, and is slowly beginning to recrowd the shop with non DIY product lines such as greetings cards. Portas shrugs this off with a “I did my best, it is probably the wrong person running the business”.

Dealing with Client Resistance

Let it be said that there is almost no design project we have ever worked on where some resistance has not been experienced. Particularly in our work with schools, it is common to find a number of staff, senior or junior, that like things the way they are now and see no incentive to change – and certainly do not like an “expert” coming in from the outside and telling them how the school should be reengineered and redesigned. In other organisational types that need, too, from highly hierarchical and siloed businesses to 19th Century libraries, resistance to change is normal, and there are only three approaches to dealing with it:

1. ignore it and impose ideas (as in this programme), which normally results in a pendulum swing back as soon as the designer leaves;
2. fire the staff and rehire people with a better fit with the new vision, not always possible and certainly not ideal if the resistance is from senior staff or owners;
3. create a positive engagement experience and work with, not do to, the staff – i.e. be a coach not an expert.

This third option is the way we work. It is slower and takes more time than going in and telling the organisation what it should look like. But every evidence suggests it is the only way that new ways of working are actually adopted and new types of environment are actually used.

In the 1970s, a number of schools were built around some progressive educational principles created by a number of educationalists and headteachers. The Open Plan schools were rolled out across the country, and many staff simply went in, rejected them and reverted to old practice, leaving a number of buildings “unfit for purpose” since they were designed differently to how the staff wanted to use them. The lessons learned were not just about retraining, but about engagement. These staff did not have buy-in, and buy-in is created during the design stage, whether that design is the design of the physical environment, or the service and business model, or even the vision.

DIY Tony rejected the ideas because:

1. They came from Mary, not him;
2. It was his business, and he had an emotional investment in every decision that had been made about stock and layout, since every decision had been made by him. Challenging those decisions was a personal criticism;
3. He was not asked what he wanted to create, he was not given the opportunity to co-construct a vision;
4. The first conversations were about space and business model, not about vision – that came later. Starting here makes it easy to be very defensive. Starting with vision or, even better, the customer experience, is where the true thinking is challenged.

Who Is The Client, Anyway?

In a way, the issue was that the designer’s client was the TV producer, not the store. The true client should have been the owner of the store, and they should have focussed on taking him through a slower engagement process that would start with vision, not with the store, and gently allow him to build with his staff a collective understanding of what they wanted the store to be and how it could make money in Lightwater. This would, however, not made as interesting a television programme!

I had the sense that actually if you asked him what kind of store he wanted to create, the answer would be “a local one stop shop for every non grocery need in Lightwater”. That might not be the case, but it was not asked, and it could have led to a very different solution. Indeed, a local interview with Tony afterwards yields the following very revealing quote:

“Mary Portas didn’t quite get what we do in Lightwater Homecare. We do more than DIY, we’re an old-fashioned local store. Her skill is in high street fashion retailing, I think our sort of store challenged her. Changing our name back to Lightwater Homecare is what our customers wanted.”

The client still thinks of his business as Lightwater Homecare.

It is easy to blame the client and say they were just too difficult, especially when it is clear the innovations made were good ones. But this belies the point: it is his business, he has to make it work, and if the designer has a different vision to the client, well, the client is always right. The designer always has an opportunity to provoke and challenge that vision, depending on the relationship with the client, but at the end of the day you need to produce something that works for them, regardless of whether you believe it is the best way it could be done. When you walk out that door, life goes on, and that is where true service, organisational and spatial design needs to be oriented.

So how could it have been done better? How do you innovate around the physical environment, making it better for customers or learners, when space and the way we use it is so culturally ingrained in an organisation’s behaviour? How do you challenge business models and the way in which a service model is created and delivered?

These are questions I’ve spent a number of years considering, helping organisations challenge the types of environments they create by building design processes incorporating visioning, briefing and designing, to reach innovative new solutions which are culturally welcomed and accepted. Next week, we will talk about how to build design processes that allow innovative outcomes in service, business models and design, but that are adopted by the people who need to make it work.