In the last few years, complaints to the UK Financial Ombudsman have increased fourfold. In 2009 they considered 127,000 cases, and in 2014 this leapt to 512,000. It’s saddening to think that we have so many un-resolved issues between consumers and the financial services industry. The sales culture they have bred emphasises the on-boarding of users over the closure experience of a service – the ultimate delivery of the service.

I was flattered to be asked to speak at Glug recently. Its a great event, hosted in a nightclub in Shoreditch, London, with a smart savvy crowd from the digital/start-up community.  Below is the SlideShare of the deck I showed at the event:

The simplest type of waste is the visible kind. It is easy to identify rubbish on the streets, or fly tipping on a country road, but as we engage in progressively more complex systems - mechanical, chemical, digital, we experience increasingly more complex forms of waste that are harder to identify.

With the first week of the year being one of the busiest for divorce lawyers its a good time to reflect on reasons why people end their marriages and what we can learn for designing closure experiences.

Listed below are 6 reasons people end their relationships according to Daphne Rose Kingma a relationship councillor.  Lots of parallels for us to consider in the breakdown of service relationships or creating closure experiences.

We have created a poster showing the variety of customer experience processes and how each of them end. From the marketing guru Philip Kotler to Colin Shaw and John Ivens' Great Customer Experiences, and Ron Zemke's Service Recovery. Contrasting these we show Daphne Rose Kingma's stages of people's love lives falling apart. Together they show opportunity areas for closure experiences to be created for customers.

Pensions are having to evolve with working practices. 80 years ago people would have a job for life. That job providing a pension that would grow as you aged. As few people moved jobs, tracking people would only need to be done by the employer.

Consider for a moment the first time you created an identifier online for yourself. For me, it was the first time I signed up with a Internet Service Provider. It was so long ago, I had to supply my details by fax. 20 years later, I am still signing up for digital services or products, thankfully not with a fax. 

Death has changed its focus in the last 300 hundred years. In the past the elderly, ill or injured would lay on their death bed surrounded by family and friends tending to their comfort. Mutterings of the dying person would be heavy with emotion and philosophy. The experience for people in attendance was intense and conclusive, providing an opportunity to reflect and justify ones life.