Sofa Conversations with Marc Stickdorn
Marc is well-known in the global service design community. His award-winning books ‘This is Service Design Thinking’ and ‘This is Service Design Doing’ are foundational texts for service designers around the world
He is also the co-founder and CEO of ‘More than Metrics’, a company that creates software for service designers, such as Smaply and ExperienceFellow. With a background in strategic management and service design, Marc consults organizations on how to sustainably embed service design in their structures, processes, and culture.
We caught up with Marc before his talk on Service Design day at SofaConf.
Thank you for joining us on the sofa Marc, what have you been doing during this unique time?
:D Besides taking turns with my wife in daycare for our daughter, I was actually very busy. We gave some talks, training and coaching sessions remotely all over the world. I’ co-founder and CEO of More than Metrics, a software company for service design software. As a software company, we always encouraged home office as an option. So we were able to change from office work to remote work immediately, but folks are really enjoying now slowly getting back to the office. We all feel a bit the Zoom fatigue. In particular, since communication with our customers and users increased a lot at this time.
Can you briefly explain how your career led you to being a consultant and book author.
I was teaching service design at the Management Center Innsbruck in Austria from 2008 and there was no textbook about service design, so Jakob and I published the first one “This is Service Design Thinking” in 2010. We never expected that it became a worldwide bestseller, but rather thought of a small group of lecturers and students as the audience. With the success of this book, my consulting grew and suddenly I was working with governments and multinationals all over the world. I saw that all were struggling with the same problems when they started embedding service design. Based on this experience, we founded Smaply — our journey mapping software. This became a real business and I stopped doing project work since also many agencies and consultancies use our software and I don’t want to compete with our own customers. Nowadays, besides being CEO of our software company, I only offer coaching and consulting services on a rather strategic level helping organizations to embed and scale service design.
Your award winning book This is Service Design Thinking is a staple read for any service designer. It has been published for ten years now and has been very successful within the design community. If you were to do a revision of the book would you change or adapt any of the content? If so, why?
We were thinking about this but decided to leave it as it is. The idea is that it reflects quite nicely how we thought about service design back in 2009/2010. I think this is valuable to be able to go back and compare with how we see things now. Some stuff changed, a lot remains still valid. Instead of revising it, we’ve recently published its successor “This is Service Design Doing” and its companion “This is Service Design Methods”. This book is much more about how to actually “DO” service design, including step-by-step descriptions of tools and methods, how to plan and manage service design processes and projects, how to facilitate and how to bring service design into organizations.
As an expert within the Service Design discipline. What is the most common question you get asked and why do you think that is?
I think one of the most asked questions is “What is the Return of Investment of Service Design?” It’s a stupid question just like “What is the ROI of Marketing?” or “What is the ROI of Management?”. It’s too general. Of course, we can and should calculate the ROI of every single service design project and, hence, we should be answering just like a marketer would answer to the ROI question with examples of their campaigns: “The three best projects last year were…” I guess the reason is that I am often working with higher management and while they all know how important customer experience is, they always want numbers as proof before they engage in wider initiatives to embed and scale service design within their organizations.
How do you define the success of a project?
That varies a lot from project to project, but in general, I differentiate between the actual impact of the project itself and the wider impact of this project on the organizational culture. The actual impact of a project could be, for example, reducing the number of support tickets regarding a certain customer pain point. Besides the improvement of CX, from a business perspective, this also means a reduction of costs through fewer support tickets. Likewise, you can almost always translate success into a monetary value, like reducing churn, increasing revenue, decreasing costs, and the like. From a strategic perspective, however, I think the wider impact across multiple projects on the organizational culture is much more important. We change how people work, how they plan and do projects, how they work with users, customers, employees. This pays off long-term since organizations can adapt faster and become more resilient.
What are you currently working on?
Journey Map Ops: Using journey maps as a visual management tool connecting the silos of an organization. A hierarchy of digital up-to-date journey maps that are linked into each other allows you to switch between the various zoom levels of your maps and to zoom into details. You can see how all projects and initiatives in your company impact your customers’ experience on one map. This helps you to find overlaps and contradictions between projects early on — saving time and money for your organization.
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing those in service design disciplines?
It’s probably still the question of how to really bring service design into organizations so that decisions are made on data (research, prototyping) instead of hippos (highest paid person’s opinion). For some people in an organization that means giving aways personal power and this is always a challenge. For some folks, power is more important than actually making decisions that positively impact their organizations. This is a challenge.
What do you see as the biggest opportunity for designers right now?
A lot of services need to be redesigned and adapted to a new reality. The current situation will change awareness and behaviour patterns of customers. We need to understand that and adapt to it. That all is a service design challenge and opportunity — both in private and public services.
There have been many book clubs that have arisen over the last few weeks. If you had to select 3 books for a book club, what would they be?
Yvon Chouinard: Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
Lou Downe: Good Services: How to Design Services That Work
Michael J. Metts & Andy Welfle: Writing Is Designing: Words and the User Experience
Lastly, what are you going to be talking about at SofaConf?
I’ll be talking about how to embed and scale service design in organizations. I’m helping teams and organizations on their journey to bringing service design –or however, they call what we’re doing– into their way of working. In my talk, I share 20 lessons learned on what works and what doesn’t.
