Service Design looks at designing the end to end journey a customer will experience when purchasing and using a product or service.
“Service Design is a collaborative process for researching, envisaging, and then orchestrating experiences that happen over time and multiple touch points.”
– Oliver King
What is a service?
Services are intangible economic goods — they lead to outcomes as opposed to physical things customers own.
Outcomes are generated by value exchanges that occur through mediums called touchpoints.
Why invest in Service Design?
- Understanding an entire service ecosystem
- Knowing who is experiencing the service
- Learning the context in which service problems occur
- Identify opportunities to improve services or products
The value of Service Design
- Greater understanding of people and their experiences
- Retain the customer perspective in the delivery of complex services
- Drive all business decisions from the customers’ perspectives
- Visualisation, customer journey mapping and scenario-making provides a richer understanding of the organisation
- Co-create with customers to test, learn and to improve the service experience
- The customer experience becomes an organisation-wide responsibility
Creating and improving services with Service Design
You can create value for organisations by ensuring Service Design is:
- User-centred
Bringing customers into the process to build empathy. - Co-created
Improving the experience must involve employees and stakeholders. - Sequenced
The services need to be visualised as a sequence of related actions. - Communicated
Can an intangible service be visually communicated? A post-it sketch is worth a thousand words. - Holistic
The entire service environment should be considered.
If you’re interested in learning the skills needed to become a Service Designer, I recommend the Service Design course at Academy Xi.
