Service Pulse Base began because too many reports about “the customer journey” were written from meeting rooms on the other side of the city. The people who actually lodge forms, take a ticket, and wait under a buzzing light were described in language they would not use. We wanted application analytics that still smelled of the waiting room.
The practice sits at Level 7, 38 Castlereagh Street, Sydney NSW 2000. From there it is a short walk to the kind of shopfronts we study: permit counters, clinic intakes, library membership desks, visitor-information windows. When a site is in Parramatta, Liverpool, or a coastal town, we take the train with the notebooks.
How the work is done
We still use paper on the floor. Laptops change how a room behaves; a lined book does not. After the last observation day we type the notes at Castlereagh Street, argue over wording, and send a report that a duty manager can read in a lunch break. Service usage insights, in our house style, are sentences about chairs, stamps, and the line on a form that makes a pen stop.
We do not train staff in motivational talks. We do not rewrite your brand. If a sign is in the wrong place, we say so. If the stall is a rule you cannot change, we say that too.
People who take the chair
Rowan Hale keeps most of the council and library desks. He spent years on the public side of a inner-city lodgement window before he started writing about other people’s windows.
Priya Nair takes clinic waiting rooms and enrolment weeks. She notices companions — the person who fills the form while the applicant holds a child — which many floor plans forget.
Tomás Varga runs silent visits. He has a talent for looking like he belongs in a queue. He refuses jobs that ask him to bait staff.
How we treat a site
We are guests. We introduce ourselves to the duty manager. We stay out of tea rooms unless invited. If a visitor is distressed, we stop taking notes and we do not write that scene up as colour. The point of application analytics here is the ordinary hour, not the crisis.
If this sounds like the sort of watching your desk needs, write from the site you want us to sit beside.