Many marketers spend all their money into getting you to use a service. They celebrate when people buy something new. They make it all sexy and dandy. (1) But what if we celebrated when people bring something back for repair instead of making it very annoying or just an after-thought. We could use all our marketing tricks, emotional design skills and storytelling hacks to make maintenance moments beautiful.

Think about an electronics store. The selling area is what shines. With great lighting, music, and space. But ask to go to the repair part, you're then sent to the back, through a crappy lit corridor, to a space with cardboard boxes and employees in weird uniforms. No music, no emotion, just huge waiting time. Which part would you prefer? Buying with all the crafted emotions or going to the repair section that feels like a chore? But both could be the same.

Action question

How can you use your product or service's selling techniques to make maintenance more emotional, rewarding, and exciting instead of a moment that people hate?

Footnotes

(1) Joe Macleod is the endings nerd. He wrote two books and created a consultancy all about to create ending moments that don’t suck.

One thing I learned from him is that we put so much effort into making the start of a service all sexy and emotional. But what if we put the same amout of energy that we put into getting people into the service (that’s what smart people call “onboarding”) into making the endings of service sexy, emotional and just working without sucking (that’s what smart people call offboarding”).

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

• Written with AI help: This principle draft is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand.