A Servicescape for Mumbai Street Vendors
The purpose of writing this article is to document our learnings in the Service Design Module of the Master's Course at IDC, IIT Bombay. As the final output, we developed a servicescape for an NGO targeting the upliftment of food hawkers in Mumbai.
“So, What’s a Servicescape … Exactly 🤔”?
Before the introductory class, we had many misconceptions regarding what the module title “Service Design” actually meant. Turns out, it’s much more than ideating cool app solutions for some veiled latent need of the market.
With my limited understanding, the vast realm of Service design includes (… but is not limited to)
i) Identifying gaps in the contemporary ecosystem,
ii) the development of detailed service relationship maps between various touch points (interaction points) of users and service providers,
iii) its usability & desirability audits,
iv) recovery scenarios within its use case paradigms,
v) and the creation of an unabridged & holistic customer journey.
Read below to find out our work for an NGO targeting the street vendors of Mumbai.
The Brief -
How can we design a Food tech and catering service for the SPMESMandal
organization? Which will uplift the marginalized community of Mumbai through livelihood creation and sustenance.
The Present Ecosystem -
SPMESM is a well-known non-profit known for its exclusive and extraordinary need-based social projects and activities. It is serving the underprivileged sections of society by assisting them with a healthy and happy life.
SPMESM is active through its 42 social initiatives across 270 villages and 68 densely populated slums in Central Maharashtra. One such initiative is to train street vendors and other unemployed interested youth of Maharashtra in the latest culinary skills and techniques. The training has raised the financial level of hundreds of underprivileged youngsters in Aurangabad with the forthcoming model.
Problem Identification
The primary problem in front of us was to identify why street vendors are reluctant to enrol for the NGO’s programme even when it is free and the benefits are blatantly obvious.
We asked the same of a few local food hawkers and they all had attuned responses.
Based on our preliminary primary user research we were able to create the two personas.
Personas
Subsequently, we were able to identify that there is no lack of motivation or hard work among these ambitious young but impoverished entrepreneurs. So then what is the hurdle in their upward social mobility?
We tried to identify & map the problems that exist in a street vendor’s venture.
Existing Problems
As we identified the problems, we card sorted our goals for the NGO into the following 4 central services.
Goals
After sorting our goals, we again looked at the existing model of user interaction with the NGO service on a temporal dimension.
There existed many shortcomings with this model, namely:
- There is no scope for co-creation by the NGO and the enrolled junta.
- The customer experience is limited to just training, and their financial sustenance is dependent on the NGO entirely in the entire process.
- This is not an end-to-end service and there is no guarantee for ROI or an alteration of their status quo.
- The value proposition is low w.r.t the current course as the skills provided are limited to only cooking and not focusing on business and entrepreneurship.
Based on these shortcomings we envisioned a conceptual revamped model of engagement for the NGO.
Levels of Service Value Co-Creation
It’s evident that the value co-creation that is happening in this model falls into various levels.
Our service should be able to deliver upon these levels but there are also many cases with a variety of potential users who do not require the whole lot of the NGO’s service.
Hence these levels can be solidified into various plans and then communicated with the vendors to help them choose the amount of involvement they wish to have with our organisation in their business, right from the initiation stage to the community building. This we envisage will make our service more welcoming to different types of users and increase the satisfaction rate of our service.
Revamped Service Model
Following is the detailed description of the Service models we suggested as part of our assignment.
Customer Journey
The chart above summarises the customer journey for the NGO. Following is the Epmathy map for the various stages of the service interaction that we created to better understand the User, and analyse the hypothetical service ecosystem.
Empathy Map
This map helped us identify the various possible scenarios where the user might drop off in the various stages of the customer journey model that we designed. We coalesced these probable scenarios into a typical customer lead dropoff funnel diagram.
Funnel Diagram.
Service Constellation
After the research, persona creation, goal finalisation, conceptual journey mapping and auditing. We finalised the service constellation flow chart in detail for each of the 4 goals of the NGO in 2 parts i.e. one during the training process and one after that.
1. Teaching & Training.
2. Community Building
Service Blueprints
Service blueprints visualize organizational processes to optimize how a business delivers a user experience. It is the primary mapping tool used in the service design process. They are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey.
We created 4 service blueprints that enable us to discover weaknesses in the proposed service design, Identify opportunities for optimisation and bridge different departments to eliminate redundancy of efforts in the service constellation.
Service Blueprint #01 — Monetary Assistance
The following chart depicts the service interactions that will take place when a user (vendor who has completed the training) needs some funds to assist in his business. Here the touch points remain the NGO customer care team and the bank.
Service Blueprint #02 — Resource Collaboration
The following chart depicts the case when a vendor who is short on some ingredients seeks help from the community that we have created with our service. Here the vendor takes use of WhatsApp and Dunzo as touchpoints.
Service Blueprint #03 — Online Ordering App
This service blueprint depicts a typical case of how we plan to integrate the user (vendor) into the online food ordering and delivery ecosystem that is in the boom since the Covid Pandemic of 2020–21. Here we plan to develop an online platform which is easy and accessible to the street vendors and which will be taught to the vendors during the course period.
It's a one-stop simple order-accepting and delivering app which enables the merchant to just get the order, execute its production, and hand it over to the delivery partner. Rest all i.e. the management of the funds, tracking, feedback, offers, promotions etc. will be taken care of by the NGO tech team.
Service Blueprint #04 — NGO Event Organisation
This service blueprint shows how the community collaborates when there is an event that the NGO organises and how the community lends its service to the customer who wishes to organise such events where food catering is required.
This collaboration creates a new revenue stream for the vendors.
Service Recovery
Service recovery is the act of reaching out to customers who have had a negative service experience to rectify the situation. Recovery is an important aspect of a service design as the customers will likely leave upon a failed service recovery opportunity and which can have a devastating impact on the cause.
A successful service recovery gives companies the opportunity to meet customer expectations and prevent a customer from potentially churning. It’s a chance for the business to save a customer relationship and ultimately lead to more satisfied customers. This is called the recovery paradox.
Below is one such example of one such successful service recovery in blueprint #02 which leads to a more satisfied customer.
Reflections
This project was an exploratory exercise into the lives of the street vendors of Mumbai with the primary focus to implement various service design models that we learnt during the duration of this course.
We realised that these models which look very complex and sophisticated at the first glance are actually a bunch of puzzle pieces and are actually just tools to convey reasonably simple and obvious ideas. These pieces are extremely easy to understand when one understands the vocabulary of service design and are very effective in replacing huge paragraphs of knowledge into pictorial formats that are easy to analyse and work upon. These pieces of the puzzle come together and create a grand solution scheme i.e. the overarching service constellation which is free from all conceivable shortcomings.
I am thankful to my professor for introducing us to the world of service design and to my stupendously talented teammates Anjanesh, June and Sil for making every course module full of amusement and thrill.
