The Ninth Face of Innovation: The Caregiver
Editor’s Note: This is part of a multi-part series about the book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, written by Tom Kelley. You can read other parts of this series here, here, here, and here.
If you made it this far in life — and I know you have because you’re reading this — you’ve been the recipient of a Caregiver. And probably a really good one. Humans are not like some animals who can swim, walk, or fly away after hatching and live by themselves right away. We need a parent, or at least someone or something to fill the parent role, for us to make it through life. Despite how independent we were growing up, or claim to be now, we still need attention, help, and caregiving. Maybe you make your own meals and buy your own clothes, etc. but we still need the expertise and caregiving of doctors, dentists, nurses, and a host of other people we actually depend on for care. Furthermore, many of us will, at an older age, return to needing someone to change our clothes and make our meals.
The ninth face of innovation, as discussed in Tom Kelley’s book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, is The Caregiver. Kelley starts this chapter off with a quote by Gary Comer, “Think one customer at a time and take care of each one the best way you can.” Regardless of your vocation, age, or life decisions, you have a customer in your life. Perhaps some of you are in a position (i.e. student) where it’s less clear who your customer is. But if you can’t think of one right now, then you can always consider your future self as your customer. For most of us, it may be a client, a supervisor, a team member, a spouse, a child, a parent, or, an actual customer of your business (see Who is Your Customer?)
It pays, and not just monetarily, to “take extra pains to understand each individual customer. [1]” Engineers or designers, who may feel many degrees removed away from customer interaction, are deceiving themselves. We should take on the role of Caregiver, this ninth face of innovation, and really see what we can do to make the experience better for others, through our products and processes.
One way is to make sure our products don’t inadvertently laud our expert skill, ingenuity, and knowledge over the customer. Our products should be approachable, clear, and enjoyable to use. Why do we sometimes feel compelled to make our customers know we spent countless hours making something very complex and brilliant just to continually remind them we deserve their eternal admiration? Good caregiving shouldn’t feel like painful, sacrificial service in the eyes of the customer. In fact, it might be completely negated if it does. Therefore, just like good design is sometimes hard to see (and bad design is easy to spot) good caregiving can also be harder to notice as it should evolve “from serving customers to helping individuals. [1]”
A great example of this is Peter Van Camerik’s shoe store called Archrival. (Pretty clever name, by the way). Peter encourages his staff to never sell a pair of shoes until they’ve learned “the story of the feet.” What does this mean? He will have his clients stand in their socks, look at their arches, have them walk, identify patterns or oddities in their gait, ask about all the sports and uses they seek out of shoes, watch you jog or run in the store, and many other things. His service and caregiving are so good, precise, and trustworthy that parents have been known to send their kids with a credit card by themselves. Other customers shop nowhere else for shoes and don’t even worry about the price. Why? Because Peter also doesn’t push the most expensive brands onto people. The individual service is more important than profits and scraping out that last penny from a customer. Of course, the huge profits follow but they shouldn’t be the first priority. A repeat customer is pure gold for a business, but it only comes after good caregiving. And the 20 or more referrals per day from podiatrists and other doctors are icing on the cake.
Later, Kelley discusses what he calls the Doorbell Effect. The Doorbell Effect is that awkward moment and time frame just after you’ve rung someone’s doorbell. There are a lot of unknowns during this time. Did the bell work? Should we ring it again? Are the people coming? Should we knock? Should I lean in and listen for footsteps? How long should I wait? How many times should I ring? Is three too many? Am I annoying them?
If we aren’t ringing doorbells often, we still have this awkward waiting time happen to us almost everywhere we go, both in real-life and online: restaurants, auto mechanics, banks, phone calls to utility companies, chats with “live-representatives,” websites that should have already started our download, etc. We’ve all had to wonder if we should call back, click again, refresh, or countless other things to remove this annoying Doorbell effect from our lives. What we really want is assurances that something is happening and the right thing is happening. This is why a part of good caregiving, when it comes to products and processes, is to let the customer know the current status. We all prefer that elevator that tells us which floor it’s currently on, which tells us the elevator seems to be working and is coming to pick us up. That changing number or digit puts us more at ease than a light glowing behind the button. After all, the light may be on but is the elevator working? We also like update texts or emails about when our packages will arrive, or the current state of our tax return. These all let us know something is happening and we respond better to this waiting game. What we can’t stand is the ambiguous and irritating statements like “A representative will be with you shortly” repeated every 5 minutes over the phone. More than once I thought the 45+ minutes couldn’t be classified as “shortly.” I still remember a particularly anxious time in my life when I was waiting for a passport and visa (and you probably can guess why), but there was no update, no communication, no caregiving - I just had to hope and really pray that “in 8 to 12 weeks'' was a true prediction. It was a very painful and anxious 11.5 weeks!
A large part of Caregiving may be that human touch. Automation is a great thing but chances are a company you’ve interacted with in the last year or two went overboard on automation. In my opinion, the key to automation is to automate the right things. The cost savings from automation are hard to resist but rarely do engineers and designers evaluate the hidden cost of replacing the human element. Sometimes we get too excited automating something resulting in an eventual experience that is a net negative. Why? Because the cost savings from automating and removing a human are rarely passed on to the customer and are even more rarely noticed, assessed, and evaluated as trade-offs. Think about it. The last time you had to listen to all the phone menu options, and wasted time navigating while a robot voice constantly telling you “Sorry. Could you repeat that?” did you honestly start thinking: “I’m so glad my electricity bill is 2 dollars cheaper because there is no human on the other end of this phone?”
Kelley ends his chapter on Caregiving with a discussion of smiles. The world could use a few more. This last year, during the pandemic, with all of our faces behind masks, we might have developed the habit to smile less. Since we all have customers, as mentioned above, we should try to give care in this way as well, and smile at them more, regardless of our type of interaction: online, in person, or at home. I don’t look at physical products and see actual smiles, but I think I’ll start imagining the design engineer behind them smiling at me. It’s a much better face to envision.
[1] Kelley, T. (2005). The ten faces of innovation: IDEO's strategies for beating the devil's advocate & driving creativity throughout your organization. Crown business.
