What is service design?

If you asked 10 people what service design is, you would end up with eleven different answers – at least.

- This is Service Design Thinking

Service design helps to innovate or improve services to make them more useful, usable and desirable for clients; and efficient and effective for organizations. It is holistic, multi-disciplinary and integrative.

- Stefan Moritz, 2005

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What is service design?

Service design is an approach to understanding your actual service, as opposed to your documented or aspirational service, and finding meaningful ways to improve it.

A design approach to service improvements is inclusive and holistic. By knowing and understanding each stakeholders’ role in the service delivery, you can identify areas for improvement that positively impact the entirety of the service relationship; improve customer satisfaction, enjoyment and retention; and increase efficiency, profitability and sustainability.

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What is service design?

• Actual service: The service as experienced by those delivering and using the service. This is discovered through user research, interviews and journey mapping.

• Inclusive and holistic: the approach must include perspectives from a wide array of Stakeholders in the service, from customers to front-line and backstage staff, from IT to marketing, and from C-level to entry level. This helps to ensure that you are discovering actual service experiences and problems.

• Service relationship: delivering services should be about building relationships with your customers, not just transacting with them. A service design approach can help you understand what your customers really want from you and what would constitute a “relationship” from their perspective.

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What is service design?

• Service design isn’t a specific toolset or methodology as much as a way of thinking about the product or service you are delivering to your constituency.

• Service design is about being intentional in defining and designing the experience you want your customers to have, and being operationally and culturally capable of delivering that experience.

• Service design thinking can be used within your current planning, development and change management processes. It is complementary, not competitive.

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Why use service design?

• The “service industry” accounts for around 75% of the Western economy

• Services are rarely designed with the same care and attention as products

• The service provided, not necessarily the product being sold, is what differentiates companies selling similar, commoditized products.

• Better designed services lead to greater customer loyalty – from higher-paying customers – and more efficient business processes.

• Service experiences and relationships cannot be copied• 80% of employment is service related• Happy employees stay longer and are more productive

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Service design considers

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Enjoyable

Easy

Effective

How effective were they at meeting your needs?

How easy were they to do business with?

How enjoyable were they to do business with?

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

Service design is iterative and tool-based

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• Stakeholder and customer interviews and maps• Shadowing• A day in the life• Personas

• Service scenarios• Storyboards

• Service prototypes

• Service blueprints• Customer lifecycle

mapping• Process modeling• Success metrics

• Reporting and Analytics• QA • Service delivery

interviews

How does design improve customer experience?

• Everyone wants to provide a good “customer experience” but it’s not always clear what that means to your customers.

• Service design is an approach to discover what your customers really want from you, how and when they want it.

• Once you know what your customers really expect from you, you are better able to deliver it.

• You will be surprised. Improving customer experience often means making changes that benefit the customer tangentially, but directly involve operational changes: staffing, management, IT, incentives, etc.

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Case study from Forrester

10Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

When Adobe redesigned its agents’ desktop software, the payoff was enormous: a 15% reduction in average handle time, a 400% acceleration in training time due to an interface that guided agents on what to do next, and huge uptick in agent retention.

Resources

• This is Service Design Thinking (book and website): tisdt.com• Service Design Tools: servicedesigntools.org• Design Thinking Network: designthinkingnetwork.com• Service Design Network: service-design-network.org• Slideshare.com: search “service design”

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Laura AndersenCustomer Experience and Service Designla@lauraandersen.com@LA0811+1 612 839 6770

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