Arla project

Arla Project

Everything has prepared us for this. All the lectures and the Service design conference have led to our final experiment. I’m talking about a project where we can put all the things we have learnt to the test. That test is a project with an interesting commissioner that makes dairy products, Arla Oy.

So why are we doing a service design project for a company that is known for its milks and yogurts? Even though we connect Arla to products and not to services, service design is a capable tool for every company.

Arla’s Consumer Engagement Manager, Ulla Jones, gave us the instructions via video. Project assignment was pretty vague, but the main points appeared clear. The target group was young people in their early or mid-20s. We were guided to look into our peer’s everyday behaviour. In addition to that we should think about service opportunities for the company. We were told that we could do this in teams of two or three so I teamed up with Kalle and Petri.

Everything sounded simple and clear, so we started planning. We wanted to use research methods that we had learned in the course and for that reason we decided to go with service safari, interviews and autoethnography. Journey map was also considered, but we didn’t see a real use for it in this project.

In order to gain information on our peer’s dairy product consuming habits, we formed a questionnaire. The interviews were conducted via phone, online and also face to face. In the end we had managed to gather 10 interviews all together.

The main things we learned from the interviews were:

• Price is very important for a young consumer
• Packaging is the most important source where to receive information about the product
• Arla has mixed image among young people
• Our target group weren’t consuming Arla’s products consciously
• People don’t go to websites that are on the product (QR codes don’t work either)

When I studied my own behaviour and my habits regarding consuming dairy products, I discovered that I had been drinking Arla’s milk for almost a year at the moment, which was a complete surprise to me. I didn’t know that until I checked the label on the milk found in my refrigerator. I was drinking it because I was used to it and it was reasonably priced. I should say that it tastes good as well. I learned that when it came to buying milk, my actions were almost automatic. I wouldn’t have thought of that if it wasn’t for this project.

Okay so I mentioned that the research methods we decided to use in the project included a service safari. For that reason, we headed to the supermarket right next to our school. It was a good place to observe Arla’s products and their appearance and how they are placed in shelves compared to other brands in the store.

 

We wondered around the store for an hour and came up with following notes:

• Confusing brand image
• Sometimes Arla, sometimes Arla Ingman and Ingman
• Most of the milks were Arla’s (about 50 %)
• Same design language among the products

Based on the information we gathered, we came up with two service opportunity ideas. First is a mobile application that you can download to your mobile phone. It could include information about Arla’s products for example nutritional information and some cooking recipes. I think it would be a valuable application for young people, as they already spend plenty of time with their smartphones. The second idea was to have brochure holders inside any store that sells Arla’s products. It might contain the same information as the mobile app.

Arla workshop

In the beginning of the Arla workshop all teams presented their project process and results they got from it. Other teams had done excellent work and I enjoyed watching their presentations. Ulla Jones also gave some really valuable feedback to every team.

After presentations we discussed how to get valuable information about a target group. Good way to do that is to do an interview where the person, that you are interviewing, has an opportunity to speak his/her mind on a subject that the interviewer has defined. No assumptions or a questionnaire with strict question would be involved. This way you can learn how this person truly thinks and feels. You can start by asking for example what he/she does in the mornings and then you just let them speak while you observe. If the conversation steers of the tracks, the interviewer can steer it back to the wanted subject. It is that simple!

One really fascinating conversation that we had in the workshop was about assumptions. I didn’t even realize that how much we generally assume things. We think that we know something and it affects our ways of doing everything. For example in the beginning of Arla project, we assumed that we know everything there is to know about our peer’s everyday behaviour, so we didn’t bother to look into it that much. Our research was focused on the product consuming habits instead. In order to have a meaningful research, we need to free ourselves from those assumptions. Let the person explain what they do and what for, instead of assuming that we know it already.

The workshop got me to wonder, what should be done differently next time I’m doing a similar kind of project. Well there are a couple things, for example:

• More precise and comprehensive service safari. We should have treated it as a real shopping experience and observed the whole process.
• Open interviews without direct questions, where the interviewee could freely talk about the subject. It would have been more revealing perhaps.
• Focus more on the target group’s everyday lives and not on the consuming habits.

All in all Arla project and the workshop were very good learning experiences. It was fun that we were allowed to do anything within certain guidelines. Nobody was saying what we needed to do and that was also the biggest challenge. Keeping that in mind, I think we did pretty well. We managed to open our way of thinking to Ulla and share our thoughts in a meaningful way. I also really appreciated the workshop we had after the project. Some worthy mentions from the workshop are the open interview method and discussion about our assumptions towards everything.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1296085/How-milk-drink-For-years-weve-told-good-bones-studies-prostate-cancer-link.html

Bridging the Gap Between Intent and Excecution by Richard Newland

Here is a closer look to one of the keynote speeches in the Service Design Global Conference. Richard Newland’s speech “Bridging the gap between intent and execution, by creating brilliant customer experiences” was inspiring, fresh and funny at the same time. Richard has a natural ability to give interesting talks and really simplify things, so that even someone who is not familiar with the topic knows what he is talking about. In my opinion he was the best speaker of the conference’s final day.

Richard talking about quality of life

Richard Newland is a practical man. He has worked more than 25 years in multiple companies and in different fields of businesses from retail to digital payments sector. He mainly develops strategies and communication plans that reflects company’s ideas and insights into its target market. His goal is to have more customer centric companies and great services for customers. One of his best skills is the ability to explain theories and strategies easily and simply.

Richard had many good points in his speech. I picked the main points here:

·         How to make sure your killer idea gets executed

·         Choosing the right partners internally and externally

·         Use common sense and logic in customer services

You might have superb ideas how to change and improve a customer service, but how to make sure your idea gets executed. Richard Newland believes that a great and simple brief is the key in this matter. It’s not enough to be right, you have to sell your idea to the people you work with. The brief should be detailed enough where everyone knows their role to make the idea successful.

The second main point that Richard talked about was, how to choose the right partners to work with you. One good criterion to select a partner in addition to basic criteria CV, body of work, how they work with other is also the chemistry between you two. By selecting the right partners Richard meant both internal and external partners.

Lastly he talked about using logic and common sense to design customer friendly services. This basically means that you should focus on the things that are important. Ultimately this is what service design is all about, finding the right problem. Picture below represents this idea pretty well.

Combine these ideas and as a result, you should have great customer services and experiences.

More material and thoughts about Richard’s speech:

http://conferences.service-design-network.org/sdgc14/richard-newland-bridging-gap-intent-execution-sdgc14/

Here are Jeff Howard’s thoughts about Richard’s keynote speech:

https://designforservice.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/richard-newland-on-the-gap-between-intent-and-execution/

What can I personally get from Richard’s ideas? How can I apply them into practice?

I think all of the things that Richard Newland talked about are going to help me in the future. I totally relate to the importance of a good brief. Many times in project work I have had good ideas that I couldn’t put into simple words and form an understandable brief. That means that my killer ideas have gone to waste. Same thing have happened to project team members as well. It is frustrating and I’m happy to work on my briefing skills in order to get my ideas into execution.

Usually in school or work life projects you can’t really choose with whom you work with. Although sometimes you can and then you should be able evaluate your potential partners. Choosing the right one is crucial for the end result. In those cases Richard’s tips about forming partnerships can come in handy.

Richard’s last advice that you should use common sense and logic is a good thing to remember regardless of what you do for a living. Sometimes it’s good to take a step back and look at the big picture. Ask yourself what am I doing and what for. When you use common sense and logic you usually make things a lot simpler, which is good.

Below you can see Richard’s own thoughts about the things he talked in the conference.

Service Design Global Conference 2014 (Stockholm)

http://conferences.service-design-network.org/sdgc14/welcome/

Before the conference:

I’m really excited about the trip to Stockholm. Service Design Global Conference seems like a high quality conference and very professional event. The topic “Creating value for quality of life” is a current topic and well-chosen for this kind of conference in my opinion. That’s what service design is for after all, to create services that improve quality of life. I’m also looking forward to get to know my fellow students better who are participating on the student trip and of course people who are attending the conference.

For the actual conference and Service Design, I have a few expectations. I want to dive deeper into the world of Service design by listening what the experts of the field have to say. I expect to participate on interesting lectures, share ideas with new people and most of all to have meaningful and fascinating workshops. I want to meet inspirational people who can broaden my way of thinking and my knowledge about service design. So far I have only scratched the surface of service design and now I’m ready to expand my knowledge about the subject.

Things I would like to know after the conference:

·         How to become a professional in the field of service design

·         How widely it is used in companies and for what purposes

·         How well it is known in different countries

 

During the conference:

Sunday Oct 5^th

My adventure started by flying from Helsinki to Stockholm. The flight departed at 9.30 and arrived to Stockholm about an hour later. Next step was to get to the hotel. I had compared ticket prices for a bus and a train from the internet and bus was a clear winner, so I took a bus from the airport. It took me to Hornstull and from there it was just 5 minutes by walking to my hotel.

The hotel was fairly easy to find and it was located in a small island. The surroundings were great, but the hotel wasn’t as great. It was relatively shabby and dirty, but the most important thing, my room, was alright. Even though my own room was clean, common areas were not and I didn’t have my own bathroom so I had to use those common bathrooms. In the end I didn’t have much time to spend at my hotel and I slept well there, so I had nothing to complain about. I didn’t expect a five star hotel anyway, so there was no point feeling disappointed.

Hotel room

After finding the hotel, I headed to our group meeting at the Scandic Grand Central hotel. Although I had found my hotel, I had to take my luggage with me to the meeting, because my room wasn’t ready at the time. Luckily I didn’t have big luggage so it was no big deal. We met at the Scandic hotel at 1 pm Swedish time. The purpose of that meeting was to get ready for the conference, share some expectations for the conference and get to know Ulla Jones, who introduced a company called Arla to us. After the meeting we had time to chat with our peer and do what we wanted for rest of the day.

Monday Oct 6^th

On Monday we had a student day at Hyper Island. In the morning we participated on “Everything you’ve always wanted to know about service design but never dared to ask” workshop. There were professionals to answer our questions and I believe we all learned a lot from that. We were asked to evaluate our knowledge on service design before and after the workshop and the average score was much higher afterwards. It was especially interesting to hear what kind of tools there are to measure service design’s success and where service design belongs in a company. The latter was a question that I was searching for an answer from this trip and it was nice to get the answer on the first day. The short answer to that question = everywhere.

 

Hyper Island

 At lunch time we went to the city centre of Stockholm. That was an adventure where we had fun exploring Stockholm and ate well in a kebab place.

After lunch we had a workshop, where we planned social, sustainable and groovy services for a city called Vallastaden. We were divided into teams of 4 to 6. Our team’s idea was to create a trading place where people from different generations could meet and trade their own personal items. Our idea had a great reception when we pitched it to other teams. One bonus in that workshop was, that we could craft a Lego building to represent the trading place. We truly unleashed our inner children there.

At the end of the day we set our course to the city centre again and got some dinner and drinks, which was a nice way to end the day.

Tuesday Oct 7^th

This was the day when the conference actually started. There was just one problem. It was a nightmare to get to the venue! I had printed a map where the route seemed pretty clear, but when I walked there it was a real pain in the ass trying to find the right path. I don’t understand why there weren’t any signs indicating which way we should go. The road I was walking was really near the place, but it took almost half an hour to find that place. I also should mention that it was pouring rain and I was hoping to find the venue in a short period of time. In order to do that, I asked a stranger, if she happened to know the way to the München Bryggeriet (place where the conference took place). To my surprise she knew where it was. In fact she was also going there as a guest, which was a funny coincidence. She offered to walk with me to the venue. As we walked there, we got to know each other a little and I learned that she was from San Francisco, United States. She told that service design was fairly new concept there and she was looking forward to learn more about it in the conference. As we approached the venue, we had major problems finding the entrance even though she had been there the day before. I saw many others who were lost too. At last we found the right door and we were at the venue. I was quite amazed that almost every other person who I talked to said that it was easy to find. I guess I chose the wrong route to get there.

Okay so my morning didn’t go as planned, but everything from that on went brilliantly. The München Bryggeriet was simply elegant, stylish and worthy of the conference. There was a nice gift bag waiting for all of us and food service was very well organized. Everything that I saw there, gave me the impression that they had put a lot of effort into putting it all together.

First keynote speaker started at 9.30. He was Mark Levy from Airbnb and that speech was awesome! He talked about the story behind Airbnb and how it all started. This conference is going to superb if the other keynote speakers are as good as Mark, I remember thinking to myself. Next speaker was Stan Phelps. He had great ideas how to get publicity to a company and how to make successful company in the first place. He talked about a purple goldfish and how every business should have their own purple goldfish. By purple goldfish he meant something extra that gets the company to stand out from the crowd. The speech was really inspiring and at that point it was clear to me. This is going to be a wonderful conference and I’m certainly going to learn a lot from these inspirational professionals and people.

 

Stan Phelps

The rest of the day went nicely by listening speeches at the main stage and enjoying the conference’s unique atmosphere. People were generally in a good mood and very open minded. You could have talked to anyone there and they would have been happy to chat with you.

In the evening we had SDGC14 party at Stockholm’s old town. I was pleased with myself, because I found the party place really quickly even though the route seemed like a small labyrinth on the map. The party was a great way to relax and forget about service design for a moment. I talked to a guy who was from India originally, but nowadays he lives and studies in Finland. Quite a coincidence, am I right? All in all the party was fun and it made the whole trip feel more relaxed and casual. When it was time to go I had a tiny problem. Metro was not running at that time anymore, although I had asked if it runs at that time and I was led to believe that it will. In the end I took a taxi with Timo, Kalle and Petri and I got back to the hotel conveniently.

 

SDGC party

Wednesday 8th

Second and final day of the conference. Feeling tired from the trip and last night’s party, I was really happy to start my morning with relaxing meditation. Meditation was guided by Tenzin Shenyen, who is a Buddhist monk. I have never tried meditation before, so it was a pleasant new experience. I didn’t focus on the religious part of it, but I enjoyed the peaceful state of mind that it created. It felt very soothing and calming after a wearing trip. Mr. Shenyen continued with a speech after the meditation. He is very intriguing person and it was nice hear his thoughts about the world and his way of life.

 

Tenzin Shenyen

Perhaps the best talk of the day came from Richard Newland, who talked about good customer service and how apply logic and common sense into services. It’s not always enough that you have a killer idea, because without a good brief that idea is going nowhere. You have to make sure that your killer idea is going to be executed. That was simply the message that Mr. Newland wanted to pass on.

 

Richard Newland

 That ended up being the last speech I saw at the conference, because after lunch we had to head to the airport. We had plenty of excitement for the way back home as well. Amazing race from Stockholm to Porvoo began. We had two teams, team boys who were flying with Norwegian and team girls + I were flying with Finnair. The team which was first in Porvoo won and unfortunately due to our delayed flight we lost. We had fun though and that sums up the whole trip pretty well. Even when things didn’t go always as planned, I had fun and learned a lot. I got so much out of the trip and I’m really glad I was a part of it.

Reflections:

I got good answers to my questions that I had before the conference, although one question remained open.

Things I would like to know after the conference:

·         How to become a professional in the field of service design

o   I didn’t really get a straight answer to this question. Service design is still quite a new concept and only a few schools teach it. That means today’s professionals in the field service design have learnt it through different paths. That is the answer I guess. There a lot of options how you can become a professional in service design

·         How widely it is used in companies and for what purposes

o   It is used and it can be used throughout the whole organisation. It belongs everywhere in the organisations. That is a challenge in service design. When different people in different levels in the organisation are involved in service design, how do you get them to work for a common goal? People with different titles have different goals of their own and they still need to stick together to have meaningful results from service design. If you eliminate different levels and involve just people from a small group to work with service design, you are not able to have winner results in the end. That means that it is important, that you involve employees from various sections and levels and with different titles to make something good for the company

·         How well it is known in different countries

o   Nordic countries have been talking about service design for a while now and the concept has just spread into United States and in all over the world. So we could say that Finland and other Nordic countries are leading in this field at the moment, but it is spreading fast all around. Perhaps in a decade it’s going to be something really big and everyone has heard of it, but for now it is still quite unknown and new despite the country

I’m actually going to use my knowledge of service design and apply it into a project we are currently working on. We are using customer stories and journey maps in order to create ideas for Estonian company, which operates in health sector. So I’m putting theories into practice and I can’t wait to see how much service design is going to help us in that project.

Probe

Journey map

You can see below a journey map of me getting to the SDGC party on Tuesday.

Customer journey and customer profile

Who are our customers, what are they like and what do they want? Those are important questions for every company and business who are trying to be competitive and serve their customers well. One way to answer those questions is to compartmentalize your customer into main categories, profiles. It underlines the main characteristics of the customers dividing them into different customer profiles. You could have four customer profiles or dozens depending on your business. The aim in customer profiles is to identify what kind of customers use the company’s services so that it is possible to design services for specific customers.

How is it done? How can companies know what their customers are like? Companies have few tools to gather information about their clients. When a client buys from e-commerce, he or she gives a lot of basic information to that business. It is the same thing if you buy something from a store and you use your membership card or a discount card. Company can then analyse for example what type of customer buys Coca-Cola. But that is just basic data about the customer, where he or she lives and how old he or she is. It doesn’t give any answers to the questions: what the customer wants from our services and what are they like.

Here qualitative research comes in handy. Interviewing people is a great way to reveal a lot of important information about the customers and the current state of the offered service. Interviews can cover people from potential customers to staff of the business. When you have a wide view about the service and about different customer profiles, it is easy to design a service for your intended audience.

Let’s have an example. Even in this economy some people buy cars so let’s think about for example Volkswagen dealer. They have a widespread of different models that people buy from different reasons. Their customers also expect different kind of services. Some might be just browsing and they are not seriously considering on buying so they might look at the cars and leave. A different customer is a serious buyer and wants to take the car to a test drive and the third customer is a person who wants to have a meaningful conversation about the mechanics of the car with the salesperson. These customer profiles are very diverse from each other and the company has to take that into a count. The company might focus on one important customer profile so that their needs and demands are met, or they could design services for all of the profiles or a few of them. Either way it is always important to know your customer.

http://www.andertoons.com/car/cartoon/3220/i-like-it-but-im-looking-for-more-of-status-symbol-any-way-you-can-double-price

One way to understand your customer is to make a customer’s journey map. It is a representation of a customer’s trip to use a specific service. Journey map basically breaks customer experience into small pieces. It shows step by step what the customer goes through in order use your service. It has a starting point and an end, both which you determine however you like. For example the journey could start from having a need and it ends when the need is fulfilled. When you are doing a customer journey map, you should always ask yourself what happens next. It is as simple as that.

A great thing in journey maps is that, when you break down the path you can design specifically for one moment in that path. For example if the customer has to walk across a busy street in order to use your services, what can you do to ease the access to your business? Maybe you can’t do anything but without the journey map, you might not even know that there was such a problem.

Below is an example of a journey map, where a customer buys a mobile phone.

http://customerexperienceplanning.com/2012/04/11/customer-journey-mapping-part-i-the-basics/

Sources:

Moritz, S. 2005. Service Design. Practical access to an evolving field.

http://vimeo.com/78554759

Solutions mean nothing if you are not solving the right problem

For countless times in work life and in school life, we have countered this problem. People are trying to solve a wrong problem. Perhaps they think that they know a lot about some area and they want to solve a problem regarding their strengths. Some might just start solving problems that they feel like solving or maybe they don’t really know what the problem is. This is all in vain if the right problem isn’t taken into consideration.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1998-10-13/

Everything should start from finding the right problem. That actually is the core of service design. Before you start solving any problem, take your time to define the right problem first. When you do that, solutions come fairly easily for most of the problems. As Albert Einstein once said, if he had an hour to save the world he would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.

Let’s think about a usual everyday problem for many people including me. How to wake up in the mornings, having slept well and feeling fresh? This is quite a common problem, am I right? I have been trying to figure out solutions for this problem for a long time. I have come up with solutions like counting sheep, going to bed early, trying to be as tired as possible so I would fall asleep quickly and so on. None of those have offered me a sustainable solution to wake up feeling fresh. Why is that? Most likely I have approached the whole thing from the wrong perspective. Perhaps I should have tried to define the right problem from the beginning. I have always just assumed that I know the problem, which is that I don’t know how to sleep well. That is most definitely true, but I could ponder that a bit deeper. Maybe the real problem is that I don’t relax early enough that my brain can go to sleep when the time is right. I am usually quite early in bed but it takes a long time to fall asleep. Even though I sleep roughly 8 to 9 hours a night, I often feel that I’m tired and I should get more sleep than I’m getting. That might also be the right problem that I should get more hours of sleep than on average, which is not happening at the moment.

It is generally acknowledge fact that we should have a regular sleeping pattern. Many people try to get rid of their sleep debt on weekends by waking up later and sleeping couple of hours more than on weekdays. Physicians typically don’t encourage us to that kind of behaviour. Altering our sleeping pattern on weekends can harm our weekdays’ dreaming. For some time now, I have practiced this method to get steady hours of dreaming every day of the week. It has worked to some extent and nowadays it is not that uncommon that I wake up feeling well rested.

Even though I have learnt to control my sleep pattern and I’m not as tired as I used to be, I might take a different approach to this problem. Perhaps the real problem is my attitude towards my sleep debt. I could change the way I think about those days that I feel tired by finding more positive things about those days. I tend to think that this must be a bad day now that I only slept 6 hours and I don’t get anything done because of sleep deprivation. Instead of thinking that way, I could focus on making the best out of that day and hoping to sleep better next time. 

Service Safari

Service safari is a practical method to research how customer service works in a real life situation. If you want to use this method all you need is a volunteer customer and a researcher. The researcher observes the whole customer experience and records it. Service safari can reveal some important information of your company’s customer service because the information is received from an authentic situation. Though in order to use this method you need to have permission from the customer and the service provider.

Let’s try this in practice.

My girlfriend Minna and I went to Amarillo to dine. I was the researcher so I observed our customer experience by taking notes and pictures. The first thing we noticed was that the atmosphere was quite cosy. Almost only lights they had were on the tables and otherwise the restaurant was pretty dark. Interior decorations were fairly classy and all in all it was a pleasant place to dine.

Restaurants customer service worked really well too. We were noticed very quickly as we came in and we were allowed to choose the table on our own. Once we sat to the table a waiter came promptly to us to ask what we would like to drink. She was very friendly and made us feel welcome to the restaurant. After she brought our drinks we had some time to think about our food choices. The waiter also helped us by recommending some dishes and we felt that she did her job very well. We would have ordered some starters but to our surprise we got free nachos right in the beginning so there was no need for any other starters which was nice. Food came quickly to our table and we were having a great time enjoying the atmosphere. Then we had a small problem. Minna’s food was too spicy for her even though she made sure that the food wasn’t supposed to be spicy at all. She discussed this matter with the waiter and she reacted to our problem very professionally. She said it would be all right if she wanted to switch her dish to something less spicy which was very nice of her. That was a huge relief and a great sign of good customer service and food was really good eventually. At the end of our dinner we asked to have the check. Although we couldn’t see the waiter who was serving us some other waiter brought the check to the table. She was as friendly and professional as the other one. The other waiter wished that we would have a nice day and that was a delightful ending for the dinner.

The whole experience was very pleasant and we would be happy use their services again. The customer service was superb and there was very little to complain about. Perhaps our waiter could have recommended some of their least spicy foods to Minna at the beginning but in the end we left the restaurant feeling truly positive. 

Customer service story

Today’s competitive markets it is very difficult to compete with only good products. There is always some other company that produces almost the same product as you so you really have to make a difference with customer service. Well executed customer service is the key to success these days because a happy customer equals money for the company. Even if that a customer wouldn’t buy a lot from the company he could still recommend their services to others if he had a pleasant customer experience. When a company does appreciate its customers and treats them well it usually improves the image of the company and that way attracts more paying customers. On the other hand one bad experience can overcome many good ones which means that companies can’t afford bad customer experiences.

Here is one example of my own customer experiences. This was little more on the negative side but it eventually ended happily.

It all started when my phone started playing tricks on me earlier this year. I started searching for information about new phones on the market and I actually spent roughly a month doing that which is weird I know. After reading all those phone reviews and watching countless videos on that subject I was pretty sure what phone I was going to buy. After I made the decision about which phone to buy I started looking for good deals from online. I picked out a store that had the lowest price and headed there the very next day.

So there I was at the store and the first thing I noticed was that the price was about 60 euros higher that it was supposed to be. It was disappointing to see that because I wasn’t willing to spend that much money on a cell phone. At that time the salesperson came to me and asked if I wanted help with something. I explained the situation about the price and he said that they have different prices than the website. He didn’t want to give me the phone at that lower price so I was ready to go home disappointed.

As I was walking away he quickly changed his mind and said that the price is no issue. It was a nice surprise that he was willing to give the discount after all. But when I came back he gave me a sales pitch about this other phone that he though was much better than the phone I wanted. It felt really odd because he had a customer who was ready to buy a phone and he didn’t want to sell it. It took some time to convince him that I really do know what I want and it’s not the phone he recommended. Finally he listened to me and agreed to sell me the right phone. Then he focused on extra sales and he was eager to sell me anything he could. He wanted to sell every accessory that they had for example screen protectors, cases, extra warranty and so on. I only bought screen protectors but he was very stubborn and he basically told me I was crazy for not having that extra warranty which was very expensive. Luckily for me he didn’t have anything else to sell me so I purchased my new phone and screen protectors and left the store.

This was not the best customer experience that I have ever had but in the end I walked out of there with the phone that I wanted in the first place. Some sales persons can be like that and you have to stand behind your own decisions or else you are going to buy something that you don’t want and need. It was a good lesson for me and nowadays I never buy anything without doing some research by myself.