What is service design? And why should we care about it?

Introduction

What is design service all about?

As the name states, service design conveys the whole experience your customer has when interacting with your business.

It’s not only the experience he has when he buys your product. His experience starts way beforehand. It’s a long process of interaction, and depending on your approach towards it, you might (or not) create a lifelong customer.

Basically, service design is centered around customer needs. It focuses on creating the best service for the customer.

“When you have two coffee shops right next to each other, and each sells the exact same coffee with the exact same price, service design is what makes you walk into one and not in the other”

Everything is an experience

It’s more complicated than you think.

To get a clear view, let’s imagine the following scenario:

Susan is a 20-year-old student. She studies hard and she loves nature. Her experience starts one day when she feels stressed and she wants to study somewhere she can relax.

She grabs her phone and search on google for beautiful coffeeshops near her. Some pictures of a good looking coffeeshop with walls filled with green, bright moss grabs her attention.

She checks the Instagram account of the place. While looking through the photos, she can already imagine herself sitting there with a hot cup of coffee. Next, she searches for reviews on the internet. She reads only good things about the place, except that there is no parking place. “that’s an inconvenience” she thinks.

She decides to order an Uber to take her there, so she would not bother finding a parking spot. When she get past through the door, she is welcomed by a relaxing music suitable for study. A waitress asks her where she would like to seat. She asks for the best view spot, so she is invited near the moss wall with a view to a park.

She starts studying all day long, looking every now and then at the surroundings and listening to music, all while drinking her coffee. She even gets a small chocolate as a present from the staff. “what a great surprise!” she says.

When she returns home, she leaves a good review on the internet and calls a friend of hers to recommend the coffeeshop.

That’s how a service experience looks like.

Start with why

Why we should do all of this?

You have a business, a product, a service.

As long as you want to get money out of it, you don’t do it for yourself, you do it for the customer. It should bring value and it should be appealing.

That means, every time you want to make a change or to launch something new, you must involve the customer in the process. Without his feedback, you might never know if it is suitable for his needs or not.

Let’s imagine the following example. SEB Bank, one of northern Europe’s leading financial groups, wanted to launch a new package of services at a lower price, called “Enkla Vardagen” (everyday simplicity). This would be for the benefit of both 350.000 clients and the bank. The clients would pay less, and the bank would administrate easier and cheaper contracts.

It shouldn’t be that complicated right? The client has nothing to lose out of this.

What actually brings concern is the way the offer is delivered.

So they decide to test it, as fast and as cheap as possible. The methodology used was: PLAN; DESIGN; EXPLORE; REFLECT.

They thought first to have a banner with the offer on the first page of the bank’s website. They created a clickable pdf with the first page and tried it with real customers. Result? It was ignored. Another try and customers perceived it as suspicious. After several trials, they got valuable insight from the customers: they felt that they didn’t have to give their consent to have a cheaper option, with all their chosen services in just one package.

What’s the decision took? Just change the contracts and give all the customers an informative letter.

Lesson learned? If the bank wouldn’t have taken the customers feedback constantly, they wouldn’t just lose such an opportunity that would benefit both sides, but they would have spent lots of money along the way too.

How to do design service?

What’s the process?

The process of doing a design service could be split into 4 steps: Research, Customer Journey, Ideation&Prototyping and testing&Blueprinting.

1. Research

Just like in a project, you need to start with research. But in this case, there are several tools to do that. The most common are:

- Service safari
- Shadowing
- Contextual Interviews
- Mystery shopping

2. Customer Journey

Put on the paper all the process for your customers that go through when interacting with your brand

3. Ideation and Prototyping

Come up with as many ideas and creative solutions, as well as what-if scenarios

4. Testing and Blueprinting

Go with the ideas to the customers and test with them to see what’s relevant and what’s not.

Do the blueprinting to have a clear view of
the whole process and see where
are gaps that can be resolved.

Restart the process

Go again through the steps until you get to the best solution(s) that you can implement.

Go deep

Don’t rush the process.

Service design is one of the most important aspects that you as a founder have to do. As it involves exploration and discovery, you should better not rush the process. You need to have really valuable insights from the customers. Don’t transform some assumptions into facts.

There’s another aspect to take into consideration. The experience you give to the customers is influenced by the experience of the whole staff in the business. Basically, the business it’s like an ecosystem, every part of it it’s important.

Let’s look to another story:

Carnegie Mellon Design took a project to help the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) with improving wait time (some patients waited up to five hours), workflow for staff, and wayfinding.

They visited the space and engaged with patients and staff. The team spent many days observing clinic interactions and they’ve done one-on-one interviews with staff members and patients. They realized that the time for the patients to wait could not be reduced due to the physician’s desire to see many patients, so they decided to transform it into an opportunity. To understand the experience as a whole, the team mapped patient, staff, and physician interaction through a service blueprint.

Through the blueprint, the team could discover new ways of improving the services and the experience that the clinics offered. They went to a surgical operation, they talked to families and patients before and after examination, and they got to understand how the whole ecosystem works.

They created several scenarios, what if situation, checked them with the patients and redo the process again and again.

Finally, they have come up with a list of solutions that could be implemented sooner or later, to give the best service ever.

This is a model of how detailed should a process like this should be done. Only in this way you can understand truly what can be done both for the business and the customers to improve this ecosystem that we want to create.

Conclusion

A short review

As complicated and painstaking it might be, as insightful and valuable is the process of design service.

It helps you to keep on the right path
It helps you to let go of complicated approaches.
It gives you a better understanding of your customers
It helps you understand how your business should work to serve your clients.
It makes you stand out from the crowd

And finally…

It helps you to be successful.

Thanks for reading.