Marketing isn’t enough to build a relationship with your customers
In the current, crowded world of digital marketing, startups need to exert substantial efforts to reach their users or customers. However, marketing isn’t enough for startups to create customer experiences that result in engagement and retention.
Not only is the competition fierce, but the online tools and resources available are easily copied and relatively not hard to implement. Customers have more power than ever to say what they think regarding your product or service, with the ability to state and communicate to others quickly about their experiences, whether it’s by writing a blog post or leaving negative feedback.
Service design could help create a more holistic communication stream between your business and your customers.
While marketing is used to identify the needs and wants of consumers, it firstly identifies who the consumers are based on a set of data such as age, income, occupation or behaviour patterns, then initiates and maintains a relationship with them through a variety of one-way content.
Service design on the other hand, is more about designing better experiences for your customers. It is concerned with iterating on problems and solutions your customers face and how you can solve them in an innovative manner.
It enables you to look not only at a service, but also a product’s customer experience to give you a better overview of how you can meet and exceed your customer expectations. It enables you to zoom out on the overall customer journey, resulting in the identification of which specific touch-points they might be facing a problem, providing you with actionable insight, and leading to higher retention and satisfaction rates.
However, the misconception that comes with its name — service and design — gives startups and business owners the perception that it’s only applied by designers to improve services.
Take this definition from the seminal book: “This is Service Design Thinking”:
“While colloquially the word design is used to refer to the appearance or styling of a particular product or outcome, the proper meaning goes far beyond that. In particular, the approach of service design refers to the process of designing rather than to its outcome. The outcome of a service design process can have various forms: rather abstract organizational structures, operation processes, service experiences and even concrete physical objects.”
Your customer journey, pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase touch-points, whether it’s a service being utilized or a product purchase, or how you interact with your customer during these stages, all affect how customers react to your product or service.
Understanding the concepts of service design and how they can help you is the first step towards establishing more innovative processes and ideas that bring more value to your customers.
The five core principles of service design
- One of the core principles of service design is that it is user-centred, meaning services should be experienced through customers’ eyes.
- It emphasizes the importance of including stakeholders in the process of designing the service, hence it’s co-creative.
- A service should be visualized as a sequence of interrelated actions; the rhythm of a service affects customers’ experiences.
- It’s evidence-based to make the intangible, tangible; how your customers feel after experiencing a service, determines customer loyalty and referrals.
- And last but not least, it’s holistic, which means the entire environment of a service should be considered when looking at the customer experience.
Service design and marketing should be used together
“…marketing on its own is just one element of any organization’s effort to innovate in services. It is a multidisciplinary approach combining marketing with other specialisms that serves to create value as services are designed and enacted in the interactions between individuals and organizations.” — This is Service Design Thinking. p.50
Service designer and partner at Studio Wé, Antonio Starnino, helped develop a new startup for a client offering smart energy services to small and medium-sized businesses, called Sensee. By using a service design process and understanding the needs of their target customers, Antonio and his team were able to design not only a service model, but also give a voice to the startup through branding and communication material that all aligned with the needs they had discovered while conducting their research.
Another perfect example of a service design implemented alongside marketing efforts is Airbnb. Airbnb innovates their user-experience through service design by using it to really understand their customer journey, and provide better experiences for their customers. This doesn’t stop them from implementing marketing efforts along their processes but it enhances the experiences for users, leading them to spread the word about the company and co-create value with the customers and stakeholders involved.
How do you implement service design for your startup?
Entrepreneurs tend to jump straight to the solution, and try to solve the problem they have identified right away. Service design is about discovering and gaining a holistic understanding of your service, your customers, and your market, before implementing a solution.
It might seem like it will take a long time upfront, but doing user research, mapping out your customer’s actual experience, and understanding the real reason behind key problems or pain points will allow you to develop more innovative solutions and a better user experience overall.
When learning about your customers don’t just focus on their experience with your startup, learn about who they are, why they used your service in the first place, and more about the problem they are trying to solve. Learn about what they were doing before they used your startup and what they did after. Getting this true end-to-end picture will expose you to many new opportunities and allow you to really harness the potential of service design. — Antonio Starnino, Service Designer
According to Antonio, one of the best tools for startups to use at the beginning is a service blueprint, particularly for startups whose offer expands across multiple channels. When doing a service blueprint, so many pain points, disconnections and opportunities arise. This PDF available by service, designer, Andy Polaine, explains the method, and the theory behind it.
These following concepts and frameworks can help in understanding your customers’ needs:
- Service design is an iterative process
At every stage of a service design process, it might be necessary to take a step back or even start again from scratch. Learning from the mistakes from the previous iteration will end up saving you more time and money in the future. The following proposed process is just a rough framework. The iterative four steps of exploration, creation, reflection and implementation are a very basic approach to structure complex design processes.
- The Double Diamond
Divided into four distinct phases — Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver — the Double Diamond illustrated by the UK Design Council, is a simple visual map of the design process. In all creative processes a number of possible ideas are created before refining and narrowing down to the best idea, and this can be represented by a diamond shape.
- The Customer Journey Map
An oriented graph that describes the journey of a user by representing the different touch-points that characterize the customer’s interaction with the service.
“The most value that businesses can get from service design is the ability to answer to the real needs of their users. If you understand your users’ needs, you can offer them better solutions, making you more aligned with your mission.“ — Claire Grillet, Service Designer.
What businesses need to achieve to retain and acquire customers, is a long-term relationship with their customers through providing them with better experiences. By keeping your customers’ needs and values in mind at every step, you are going to deliver solutions that better fit them and create better relationships, while also using communication and branding through marketing to give a voice to your mission, product and service offering.
If you’re interested in learning more about service design, here are some useful resources you can start with:
- “This is Service Design Thinking” by Stickdorn and Schneider. This book outlines the approach of service design, its applications, process, methods and tools.
- If you’re interested in connecting with service designers, these groups offer great resources shared by service designers in Canada and worldwide: MTL Service Jam, Service Design Network, International Service Design Network.
- Service Design Network: a platform that shares knowledge, events and conferences related to service design.
- Service Design Conference 2018 will be hosted in Montreal on November 29th & 30th. Submissions for proposals to participate are now open.
