Service design is a process which helps businesses to organize their resources — people or stakeholders, infrastructure, communication, materials, and processes to improve its experience and interaction between the business and its customers.
Lynn Shostack coined the term ‘Service Design’ in 1982 to help organizations understand and unpack it’s behind the scene processes and the subsequent interactions between them. Focussing on the more comprehensive understanding through this birds-eye view framework provides strategic bonuses for business.
To elaborate on the concept of service design, let’s look at the example of Uber as a service. Imagine Uber with its multiple range of employees: drivers, designers, marketers, customer support staff, project managers, developers, accountants, and more. Service design would focus on how Uber operates and fulfills the service it guarantees — from sourcing new drivers and tech staff to onboarding the staff, to communicating new ride bookings to customers and drivers, to ensure the driver reaches the location and starts the trip on time, and also ensure the customer reaches safely and on-time, followed by collecting payments from its customers to rolling out payments for its staff. Service design would not constitute only the mobile app experience of Uber, but also the multiple interactions and processes that Uber supports as an organization to deliver the promised experience.
At voombaa, use service design tools to bridge organizational and experiential gaps by:
- Helping organizations identify and manage frictions in their experience design
- Helping organizations calculate time and resources for service delivery
- Helping organizations uncover frictions in their business model
- Drive challenging conversations around processes, policies, and management
- Review service actors understanding when there are multiple departments in an organisation participating in delivering a service
- Review for redundancy of processes and reduce wastage of efforts and resources
- Helping organizations transition from a high touchpoint service to low touch through design, for cost-effectiveness and lower audience volume
- Helping organizations establish relationships between internal service requirements, such as backstage actors, their roles, processes, and workflows.
While solutionizing a problem statement, our designers at voombaa unpack the service through tools such as the service blueprint to visualize the relationships between the different components associated with touchpoints in a specific customer journey. We work with many digital products delivering service as their value proposition and view them from the vantage point of multiple physical and digital touchpoints disseminated out across context and time, to address a contrarily invisible digital service feel tangible.
A service blueprint is an operational tool that describes the nature and the characteristics of the service interaction in enough detail to verify, implement, and maintain it. — Servicedesigntools.org
A service blueprint is contextual to a specific customer journey and supports specific user goals to the journey.
The elements of a Service Blueprint
There are six elements of a service blueprint, which are:
- Props: Physical and digital artifacts utilized in delivering the service.
- Processes: Workflows and routines developed by stakeholders or employees to deliver the service to the customer
- People: Includes anyone who builds or uses the service, including individuals who would be discursively influenced by the service
- Customer Actions: Steps, actions, and interactions that the customer completes while interacting with the service to reach the desired goal
- Frontstage Actions: Steps, actions, Interactions which take place in front of the customer which can be human-human or human-computer interactions
- Backstage Actions: Steps, actions, Interactions which take place behind the customers view to support frontstage actions and processes. These can be human-human or human-computer interactions.
Step by Step process for creating service blueprints
Step 1: Identify the scenario to expand upon
It is essential to focus on one scenario before expanding on its interactions and processes. In the above service blueprint for Uber, we have chosen to look at the scenario of booking a cab/ride, boarding the ride, completing the ride and making payment.
Step 2: Identify all the frontstage actors involved in delivering the service and recognize their actions, responses, and experiences.
The physical evidence and customer action rows represent the interactions and experiences exchanged between the customer/user and the service provider through the mobile application of Uber.
Step 3: Outline and link all background and backstage activities and processes
Includes all the backstage processes which the customer/user does not perceive but are crucial for the service to be delivered — Identification of the location of the passenger, displaying waiting time, and processing payment.
Step 4: Indicate Critical Moments
Add the critical moments for the user and the service provider such as excessive waiting time, user safety during trip, payment handling.
Step 5: Include Measurements
Include key KPIs for Uber which are used to measure its drivers on customer satisfaction and other customer-related measures such as Overall rating, surge rating, non-surge rating, acceptance rate, cancellation rate, fare reviews per trip, total 1-star ratings, total 5-star ratings.
Add other essential indicators in the service blueprint such as:
- Moments when the user/customer makes a decision
- Control points/ quality KPI measure points
- Cost-saving opportunities
- Potential and existing pain points
- Memorable moments for the customer
Voombaa is a leading design and innovation studio based in Gurugram, India, specializing in branding, strategy, UI/UX design, experience design, and digital transformation.
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