What is Service Design?
Service design takes a holistic approach to optimize the delivery of services. It involves understanding customer needs and designing the entire service ecosystem (including processes, touchpoints, interactions, and people) to align with those needs.
The work of service designers involves optimizing internal processes, policies, and structures to align both back-stage departments (e.g., IT, Finance, Accounting) and front-stage departments (e.g., Sales, Customer Service) with the specific needs of the customer.
A prominent example of service design is Starbucks! The brand focuses on creating a welcoming in-store environment, with well-designed layouts, cozy seating areas, and relaxing music. Starbucks also emphasizes personalized interactions, where baristas dedicate time to understanding customer preferences and crafting customized beverages. Given that, Starbucks has built a loyal customer base and created a distinct brand identity centered around the coffee shop experience.
Principles of Service Design
In the service industry, service design thinking is crucial and can be the determining factor between success and failure for organizations. The service design thinking emphasizes the strategic organization of resources and the planning of business activities to enhance both consumer and employee experiences.
In the book "This Is Service Design Doing", the authors outlined 5 core principles defining service design thinking:
- Human-centered: The experiences of all stakeholders, including users, customers, employees,... must be taken into account. To design services, designers need to gather stakeholders’ viewpoints to identify users’ feelings/expectations about the service, and what should be changed to improve,...
- Collaborative: All stakeholders should be actively involved in every step of the service design process from design to development.
- Iterative: Service development takes time. This approach involves starting with small experiments and prototypes, allowing for learning from mistakes to refine processes.
- Sequential: A service consists of a sequence of interconnected actions, visualized by using customer journey maps. Designers should look into each step of the journey to understand how it works, what might go wrong, and how it can be improved.
- Holistic: Service design is not about addressing isolated issues, but holistically designing the entire service. The focus is not solely on meeting customer needs but on aligning those needs with the company's goals and internal processes.
What are common Service Design tools?
To do service design best, designers need to empathize with both businesses and users/customers, define, iterate, and address all their problems holistically. Throughout this iterative process, designers employ various tools to aid their work, some of which some common tools include:
1. People
A persona is a fictional representation or reference model that represents a specific type of customer based on various characteristics. These characteristics can include Demographic characteristics (e.g., name, age, gender, occupation, etc.) or Behavioral characteristics (e.g., preferences, needs, motivations, goals, and pain points, etc.).
By creating personas, organizations can develop a deeper understanding of their customers and, hence, tailor their services to better meet customer expectations.
2. Journey maps
The journey map is a sequential description of a customer’s interactive journey with a service. It describes what happens at each stage of the interaction, what touchpoints are involved, and what obstacles and barriers they may encounter. It also represents the level of emotions (positive/negative) that customers experience throughout the interaction.
3. Service blueprints
A service blueprint is a diagram that maps out the entire process of service delivery, listing all the activities that happen at every stage above and below the line of visibility. The service blueprints help visualize all of the components of service encounters:
- Actors: people delivering the service (e.g., Service representatives, technicians, etc.)
- Location: an environment where customers receive the service (e.g., stores, offices, websites, apps, social channels, etc.)
- Props: objects used during service delivery (e.g., catalogs, POS systems, Information kiosks or touchscreens, etc.)
- Associates: other organizations involved in providing the service (e.g., Suppliers, Financial institutions, Logistics service providers, etc.)
- Processes: workflows used to deliver the service (e.g., Order fulfillment process, Customer onboarding process, Complaint resolution process, etc.)