12 Things Service Designers Do to Fuel Business Growth

A few weeks back, I was having a conversation with the business head of one the largest fintech companies in India. As our conversation turned to design, I learnt how adding an interaction element to the QR code scanner icon (which is used to initiate payment transactions) caused a one second delay to customers. Which, in turn, led to a 25% drop in daily transactions.

This really got me thinking. Would such a situation have arisen had the business looked at all the moving parts of their service when making design decisions? When viewing design elements in isolation or things solely from a visual design perspective, we overlook vast areas of an experience e.g. infrastructure, back-end processes, and so .

In so many businesses, design work is approached using linear journey maps i.e. one only considers a very limited set of touch-points when building a user flow. Journeys, in reality, are non-linear and consist of many touchpoints across different parts of an ecosystem. Design isn’t as simple as a 1:1 mapping; it’s multifaceted and layered.

Why businesses need to adopt Service Design?

a. Prevention is better than cure:

Service design is holistic — encompassing the entire cycle from strategy, to how that strategy is internally brought to life, and the manner in which it is delivered to end-users across multiple channels. This way, it is easy to identify gaps in your complete lifecycle and formulate a plan to address them — thereby preventing slippages from occurring at various critical junctures of your service.

b. Service design breaks down silos

An unfortunate reality at most large companies is departments working in silos. Over time, all innovation in a particular department originates from “within the same group of associates”. People begin to see things solely from their point of view.

Service design facilitates the breaking down of these silos by exchanging ideas and ensuring that there is a smooth handover between different departments at the back-end

c. Designing experiences that are sustainable & scalable:

Customers today aren’t buying a product, as much as an experience. Managing their expectations entails building a uniform service quality across all the multiple touch-points.

Since there are so many variables involved, this isn’t a one-off exercise. It needs constant fine-tuning and improvization, which can only happen if service design is embedded as a core principle in your organization.

d. Delivering your business objectives

Service design doesn’t focus only on end-users, but also on your organization — ensuring that you don’t lose focus of your vision, goals, and resources.

The 12 Things Service Designers Do to Fuel Growth:

1. Service Audits

The purpose of any organization is to achieve a specific mission. In then follows that all services rendered by the organization must be a part of this broader mission. A holistic service audit helps answer several questions:

• Which services are aligned to the overall purpose of the organization?
• What are the end-user goals and how are they aligned to the services being offered?
• Which services seem to be working and which aren’t?
• Are there unmet needs of end-users and other stakeholders?
• Which services are causing the organization to bleed?
• Which are the ones that face the greatest execution challenges?

2. Aligning Services to Personas

When building personas, most organization simply stop at identifying user needs, and categorizing them based on certain commonalities. A service designer goes a few steps deeper by mapping personas to specific services rendered by the business. This process helps to break down silos by getting different departments to talk to each other, and see the bigger picture.

As an example, a smartphone customer’s touchpoints aren’t limited to retail store interactions. From advertising to supply chain robustness, chip processing speed, software upgrades, privacy matters, innovative phone applications, service support efficacy, warranty claims and compatibility with other gadgets in the tech ecosystem — all kinds of services impact a customer’s relationship with the smartphone brand.

3. Insights Gathering — across the entire service ecosystem

A big part of a service designer’s job is to do research. Depending on the time and resources available, there are all kinds of things we do:

• Interview based Generative Research
• Guerilla Testing
• Conducting Large Scale Survey Exercises
• Studying Service Support Tickets
• Analyzing Product Usage Data
• Talking to Customer Facing Staff

Research isn’t limited to just end-users but encompasses the entire ecosystem that helps deliver the service — be it internal staff or various partners & vendors in the supply chain. This way, every suggestion proposed by a service designer is backed by ground realities and data.

4. Service Data designing!

Once the research is done, data is collated to get insights into several questions:

• How are the various personas using services?
• What would they want done better?
• How likely will customers recommend a service to their networks?
• What are some of the low hanging fruits to increase revenue?
• What are the biggest gap areas in service delivery?
• Which parts of the broader supply chain & partner ecosystem need special attention?
• What are some of the biggest internal challenges to service delivery? Are there any change management initiatives that can resolve these?

5. Building connections & consensus amongst disparate teams

Another big part of a service designer’s job is to build consensus among large, disparate teams. The research data we collect isn’t specific to any department. It involves everyone — from product and R&D, to manufacturing, supply-chain, tech and customer support.

A great way to get everyone to talk and collaborate with each other is thru inclusive workshops. Now that everyone sees the big picture, they better understand the various interconnections and hand-offs between different departments. Regular brainstorming sessions help in building a holistic consensus on how to address challenges and drive change.

6. Mapping the journeys!

All the perspectives from research and brainstorming sessions help us build journey maps. A journey map from a service design context describes the step-by-step process of how a user interacts with a service.

What are the various user touchpoints, what transpires at each interaction, what are the obstacles encountered at each stage, what do users love, and what is the level of emotion (positive or otherwise) experienced throughout the journey — these are some of the insights that journey maps are able to provide.

7. Service Blueprints

Service blueprints are essentially part two of journey maps. The intent here is to storyboard a service — visualizing how the different service components come together at every single touch-point in a customer journey.

Speaking from personal experience, most executives are blown over when they see a visual representation of all the underlying resources (seen and unseen) that enable a service.

The key elements of a service blueprint include:

• Physical Evidence and Customer actions (Activities, interactions and choices that users make at each stage of the journey)
• Front-stage activities (occurring in the view of customers)
• Back-stage activities (that occur behind the scenes and are not visible to your customer — eg: kitchen staff in a restaurant)
• Processes (systems, tools and policies that enable employees to deliver a service)

8. Identify, Optimize & Experiment with Blueprints:

Service blueprints, when properly done, can be treasure maps for businesses. They help:

• Identify weaknesses — the weak link in the chain. A sub-optimal user experience can either be due to internal organizational shortcomings, poor front-end interfaces, inadequate tech capabilities, obsolete processes or a combination of all. It is only with a holistic picture of a blueprint that one can easily identify these weaknesses, and understand their interdependencies
• Optimize — the connections that one can find thru a service blueprint unearths several possibilities to automate processes, eliminate redundancies, standardize procedures, and build reliable back-ups.
• Experiment — whether it is a new program roll-out or an improvisation of an existing one, a blueprint allows you to see how different market segments will experience that program across all touch-points.

9. Designing Touch Point Plans

Across any lifecycle, users and services interact at multiple touch-points. Some of these touch-points might be about building awareness, while others could be key decision points in the user journey, critical actions that need to be performed to complete a service, or resistance points where users drop-off. There are also touchpoints where your users act as “brand ambassadors” to your service, and promote it to their ecosystem.

By designing a communication plan for each interaction, businesses are able to convert touch-points into sales conversions, listening opportunities, brand advocacy channels and cross-sell platforms.

10. Analytical Firepower Using Touchpoints

The feedback and input that a service designer gets from a touch-point plan is used to revise journey maps and user paths. By building an analytical listening engine, it becomes possible to ‘fail fast, fail cheap’, while continually using user feedback to modify services.

This is especially useful when automating processes, and simplifying choices for customers. In general, users begin to shut down when they are inundated with too many options across the purchase journey (be it in product variants, pricing, color options or offer packages)

11. A Makeover to Failing Services

Using various assessment models, a service designer does a root-cause analysis to understand the underlying causes for failing services. These assessments are broken down into governance, management and operations. They are invaluable for making improvements, identifying upsell and cross sell opportunities, or in combining multiple services into one.

12. Change Management

Harvard Business Review suggests that about 60–70% of all change initiatives in organizations fail due to poor change management. Designing a fresh strategy is all well and good, but if it isn’t communicated properly to employees, and they aren’t sufficiently motivated to adapt to change, that strategy will remain on paper.

A Service Designer’s focus on building collaboration and consensus across different departments, paves the way for more effective change management.

While I haven’t covered everything a service designer does, I hope the above summary provides an overview on the possibilities that service design can enable. The job of a service designer is to act as a connector — to find and build unseen connections that can tie together disparate parts of an organization, its stakeholders, and customers.

This isn’t a one-time job. With so many parameters involved that are constantly shifting, our mantra is to “rinse and repeat”.