Redesigning later living to empower seniors
Guild Living UK aimed to transform the way people think about what we commonly call, the Third Age. They wanted to empower seniors and create a home away from home, that provides a sense of belonging, security and purpose.
Client:
Industry:
Hospitality
Later Living & Care
How might we redefine later living to create communities in the heart of towns and cities where people can live better?
Creating an end-to-end service experience for the third age. Bringing to life the new generation of age friendly communities.
The aim of the project was to help the third generation experience later living in a way which is familiar, yet empowering. We envisioned this. and created the end to end experience of their life in a newly imagined retirement village.
The Process
Our team embarked on the project. We developed a series of customer personas showcasing the lives of 5 different seniors who would be the ideal users of Guild Living. These set the focus of the five experience journeys we co-created, along with the client. To ensure there was alignment across the board, we defined five key principles and Guild principles. Finally, along with these, a delivery and operational focused service blueprint was created to guide the staff's service delivery.
Outputs
Customer personas
5 Key principles
5 Experience journeys
Service blueprint
Developing the Guild Living Experience
Through extensive research and interviews with people entering their later life, we created customer personas. These communicated the behaviours, needs, challenges, habits and personalities of the users. We also understood their relationship with technology to establish its incorporation, if at all, in this new space.
Customer Personas
We realised that there are seniors from all walks of life;
Some who have just entered retirement and are self-motivated to seek for a purposeful later life. (top left image)
Others who seek companionship with their loved ones and envision a shared later life. (bottom right image)
And others who are struggling with accepting a later stage of their lives and need more care, guidance and support. (bottom left image)
These are moments from when the team was working with the client to design the customer personas and experience journeys during virtual workshops. The journeys looked at the various personas and their Awareness, Engagement, Purchase, Move in and End of Life phases, as part of the Guild Living experience.
It was extremely useful that the clients were forthcoming and open to working as a team on a platform that was new to them.
Experience Journeys
A brand new vision required milestone setting, and a breakdown of concrete steps that would allow for the service experience to come to fruition. We worked with several stakeholders, including the Corporate client teams, the Operations teams as well as the F&B teams to identify their involvement at the different points of the blueprint.
Service blueprint
The engagement with us enabled the Guild Living team to work with the various departments and leaders to articulate their vision of a seamless service experience for the third age.
Through the integration of hospitality, care and age-friendly design, we co-created an aspirational and tangible blueprint. It has helped create alignment across the business and its strategy as well as defined both the training internally and the marketing direction externally with key customers and stakeholders.