Service Design #101
— and why you should care.
--
Outline
- What is service design?
- How does service design add value?
What the #☠️%!€💣! is Service Design?
You may have heard about customer journey mapping or service blueprints and thought to yourself “aha, that’s what service design is.” I am here to tell you it’s not. A customer journey map is to the service designer, what a hammer is to the carpenter. A very useful tool indeed, but not an end result in itself, and definitely not a deliverable.
Service design has yet to fully establish itself as a recognized discipline considered crucial to success in business on the same level as accounting, legal, and management.
Service design is critical in today’s globalized world where technologies are here one day, only to be replaced the next. In a world where customers can, and will pick and choose from a plethora of similar, competing services and offerings. And a world, where customer loyalty cannot be bought, but has to be earned through painless, value-adding experiences.
If happy, satisfied, returning customers are important to you, service design is worthy of your attention, and I advice you to engage on sight.
Before we get to the point of engaging with service design we need to establish a shared understanding of what service design is and how it adds value.
The Architecht👨💼
In order to simplify things, we might as well use the understanding of an established discipline such as architecture.
An architect is brought in when you need a physical area transformed. The most common example would be the need of a new building.
So, what happens?
You call the architect. Now what do you expect of him? To begin a process. What process? A process of understanding who the building is for, what people will be doing there, who else will interact with it, etc.
- The architect will seek to understand the purpose, long before building.
- The architect will seek to come up with numerous solutions that may fit the purpose.
- The architect will not singlehandedly choose a solution, but do so with relevant stakeholders — and preferably with the people who are envisioned to use the building.
- The architect will only then specify the chosen solution through various methods and tools used by architects.
I think you get the idea that service design is not much different from architecture. Except from the final output which is not a building, but a service — and unlike service design, architecture has only one shot at building the right thing.
The process is nearly identical, going through a framework of inspiration and ideation, to implementation.
In short:
Service design is the act of designing new services, or optimizing existing services, digital or analogue, with the aim of creating new ways for people to interact with each other and the world around them.
Stop trying to DIY. Start getting results 📈
Could you not have built that building by yourself, you ask? I’m sure you could. I am also confident you could cut your own hair, sew your own clothes, conduct your own dental checks, and diagnose your illness from a series of symptoms.
But you don’t, and why is that?
Because you acknowledge the fact that there are professionals who are educated, trained and experienced in doing these things on a daily basis. Professionals who apply a tried and tested approach that will yield results if given time, space and resources to unfold.
Service design is thus valuable in the sense that services will be better designed with a direct impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty, simply because it solves real problems, for real people.
Your clothes fit and your teeth shine. Life is good.
Well thought out, meticulously designed, and properly implemented services will have a direct, measurable impact on the success of any business.
The return on investment you’re looking for is right before you.
What is your excuse to invest your budget elsewhere?
Andreas is partner and CEO in Agile Squad — a full stack service design agency based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Opinions are his own.
