In my role in Client Services, I am always looking at the experience our clients have when they engage us and, by extension, how our work impacts our client’s clients. A great analogy for these experiences recently dawned on me. Not at a seminar or in a process meeting. While I was playing blocks with our three-year-old.

We are building a lot at our house these days. Not anything large scale, just towers of blocks or LEGOs that our three-year-old daughter delights in crashing to earth. Sometimes it’s a well-placed ball toss that does the damage, sometimes it’s a full-on running smash through the structure. Always it’s followed by giddy laughter.

Once in a while, though, we focus on construction. When she wants to actually build upward, she gets disappointed when a structure inadvertently tumbles down. So I found myself trying to get her up to speed on the basic engineering tenets of structural integrity. Bear in mind that I went to art school, so this is not in my intellectual wheel house. But, she is only a toddler, so she believes me to be an authority on the matter.

“When you only have one pillar, it is very wobbly,” I explain. I stand up one block shaped like a thick, four-inch dowel on end and place a brick-shaped block on top. Not balanced precisely, it falls.

“When you have two, it is better, but still unsteady,” the lesson continues. Demonstrating, the brick piece falls sideways, off the two pillars.

“But three pillars are very steady, see?” I set up the pillars in a triangular configuration as you look down on them. The brick piece lies solidly on top.

She nods, grasping this concept.

I continue, “It’s like the tripod that we have for the camera.” For some reason, this tripod became a play-object for a few weeks in our house, so she knows what I am talking about. She would carry it around the house like a mini Ansel Adams, setting it up here and there, adjusting the leg lengths, and cranking the middle tube where the camera rests on up and down. You know, typical three-year-old fun.

She then knocked over the blocks and ran off to play with something else.

That’s when it hit me. In my role in Client Services at People Design, I am always looking at the experience our clients have when they engage us and, by extension, how our work impacts our client’s clients. Empathic Customer Experience Design is what we do, after all.

“Three pillars creating a solid base”  is a great analogy for the kinds of stories I share (with anyone who will listen) about the impressionistic experiences customers internalize from an interaction.

By my reckoning, you could say the three pillars for solid customer experiences are “good value,” “smart product,” and “rewarding service.” There are a number of customer-service models out there. This one makes sense to me and is pretty simple.

My broad definition of those terms…

Value: Cost relative to inherent worth

Product: The deliverable, artifact, or physical “thing”

Service: The feeling derived from the interaction

When all three are working together, you can feel pretty good about your client’s experience. Two, not so much. One is trouble.

Here’s what I mean (but I’m sure you can build your own equation scenarios)…

(Value + Product) – Service = The DMV. You’re number 86. Now serving 22.

(Product + Service) – Value = Beer at the ballpark. $8.50 for a cup of Miller Lite?

(Value + Service) – Product = Insert your most unappetizing fast food restaurant meal here. Mine involved “chicken.”

Worse yet…

Product – (Service + Value) = My recent cell phone experience.

(Empty Set) = The last minute flight I recently took on a small commuter plane.

So, we continue to do the right thing here—to shore up our pillars. Think about your company’s pillars—and what you can do to strengthen your base.

In the meantime, I will be making some stuff out of Play-Doh.