Good Services

when new layers of technology get added to a service, we rarely turn the old ones off. This has the effect that each new technology adds an additional channel to our service where some services might exist as post, phone, face-to-face and chatbot simultaneously. When done well, each new technology is treated as a progressive enhancement on the last, meaning that when a user is unable to access a service using one technology, we can rely on the one that came before it to enable the user to reach their end goal. We can see this as a kind of a progressive enhancement in reverse, or a progressive degeneration of the service. At some point, this means that some services will need to operate what we can think of as a ‘service of last resort’–where, because a user’s circumstance is so complex, the service needs to be performed entirely by a human with nothing but their own judgement.