This semester, I took a class called Designing for Service to gain a better understanding of the value exchange process of human interaction. This is a four weeks project, with the goal to analyze one adult learning service provided in class. We were separated into group of three people, and each group was assigned to different service, and my group is responsible for Molly’s Music.
Molly’s Music provides music lessons for people in all ages, and we’re focusing on the context of adult learning. It partners with music instructors to teach music for both beginner and experienced learner.
The value of their services is the atonomy and the flexibility for the adult learner to meet their goal through personalized lessons. The customers can choose the topics they are interested in, such as vocal or other instruments, and even the style of the music, such as jazz or pop-music.
For the flexibility of location, they provide online channel, in-house, and the studio at California for customers to attend. After taking lessons, the customers can choose to perform at local performance venue.
To purchase the service, the customers can subscribe different packages from the website.
Reflection
Reflect on the deliverables that you’ve used in this case study. Which ones were useful for which reasons? How did they help you to tell the story of your company?
By applying the Ecosystem Map, Channel/Touch Points Map, Customer Journey Map and Business Model Canvas, we can decompose the service structures of Molly’s music with a human-centric approach, and discover more design opportunities with a cross-functional, and cross-channel perspective. It’s interesting that we were quite confused when creating these maps, but when presenting and writing reflections, each of the maps does create a new perspective for us to discover the service of Molly’s music.
The Ecosystem map helped us consider the channel, the interaction itself and the needs underneath the actions by phases. I like how it mapped out the possibilities with a more holistic perspective, and guided us to look into the why behind the actions.
With the understanding of ecosystem, we then mapped down the interactions within each channel in the channel/touchpoints map. The map helps us clarify what channels do the company provides. In this stage, we also found that although Molly’s Music provides a lot of physical channels, the interaction of their virtual channel is weak and the information is unclear.
Later, when moving onto the customer journey map, we chose a specific route to map on the service. While the customer journey map can only illustrate one specific scenario, I did find it the most helpful as it provided a clear journey to communicate with visual elements. And it’s also a great tool to reach consensus. If I am using it again in the future, I would first ask my team to vote for the most critical path from the channel/touchpoints map and pick the most critical journey to present to bring out the most effective result.
The business model canvas illustrates the organization’s value from a business perspective. By considering the business and services together, it enables us to generate ideas considering a business operation. I’m curious if it would bring out a completely different result if we haven’t done the business model canvas in the practice, as the canvas reminds us of the business constraint before digging deeper into the opportunities.
Review the case study documents posted by your classmates. Write a reflection on opportunities and areas of curiosity that emerged through the case study exercise. Refer to the work of 2 other teams in your reflection.
Our purposed opportunities for Molly’s Music focus on the awareness and purchase phases of the customers. After listening to the sharing from the class, I’ve found that there are more opportunities in Molly’s music after the customers purchase the service.
For example, literacy Pittsburgh provides alumni networks for their customers to engage and continuously learning. With a large number of students in Molly’s Music, according to the google and yelp review data, Molly’s Music can also encourage the alumni to connect with the current students and offers learning supports. The presentation of Literacy Pittsburgh inspired me that the customer journey shouldn’t end at the phase when the customers finish the purchase, there should be a new phase for further engagement and connections or the journey could be a circular concept instead of a linear one.
I was also inspired by the presentation of opportunities of Joann. As they pointed out the creative communities, the artists, and influencer as their stakeholders. Since learning music and learning sewing is somewhat creating a form of art, those stakeholders are also applicable to Molly’s Music. I believe there are a lot of music communities and online music influencers that Molly’s Music can connect with to provide different kinds of lectures. And the customers could gain deeper connections through this new opportunity.
As Molly’s Music focuses on providing music courses to all ages, the customers might not have the customized experience based on what they’ve provided on their web page. I like how the Farmer Veteran Coalition specified its target audience to veterans, as they can also provide value that is more unique and irreplaceable on the business model canvas. For Molly’s Music to target the adult learners, adult music choices and the all-adult performance opportunities are not strong enough to attract them. I would suggest that they should classify the adult into different types of music learners and provides specific packages to fit individual needs, instead of overwhelming the customers with all kinds of choices.
