Don’t Outsource Service Design — Learn It!
Customer experience is so important that you should not assign it to a third party. A functional or ready product alone is not enough. You need a positive customer experience because the decision on the excellence of the product or service is made by the user or customer. In order for the customer’s experience to be as consistent with the company’s goals as possible, you need service design.
When you maintain both service design expertise and customer understanding within your own company, the knowhow does not leave the company, and you save money. Involving the customer in the product development process from the start is the surest way to reach the desired result. It is important to bring the customer perspective to all departments and learn to carry the service within the organization. Click here for five reasons why service design is important.
In order for the customer experience to reach its goal, the service design expertise within the company must be developed so that the customer’s ownership, including customer experience, customer understanding, and customer orientation, is taken into account from the early stages of the (product) development process.
Who would be the most capable for this task? We claim that you yourself are in your own company.
Different Ways to Respond to Service Design Needs:
An In-house Service Design Unit
If your company has a service design team that is actively involved in product development, product management and the customer interface, you are already a step ahead of others.
However, it is not easy to serve as an internal messenger between departments and get everyone, from developers to managers, to understand the customer’s needs. Contribyte offers assistance and coaching to strengthen the work of your service design team, either together with the team or by coaching the company’s personnel internally in service design and customer-oriented thinking.
We want to support the work of your service design team and help by coaching your entire organization in customer-oriented thinking. This helps enhance the service design process within your company.
Keeping Expertise Within the Company, Outsourcing the Implementation
Some companies have increased their service design expertise, but they do not have the resources to do everything. Incorporation of service design requires great adjustments to your practices and way of thinking, so it is only natural to get assistance. You should outsource the training and process development from outside your company.
Lack of Service Design
If service design is not your thing, consider whether it should be. If the word “customer” is included in your company values or strategy, it is time to put service design on the agenda. Instead of training service designers, we make the necessary knowledge available to other experts. Our coaching is always based on the starting points of your organization and its personnel. Adequate understanding of service design delivers results cost-effectively.
However, if it feels that someone outside the company would provide you with better service design more quickly, you should at least learn to buy it by understanding what it is about. While learning about service design, you are making it a part of your core concept, even if you outsource the implementation. Establishing customer understanding and service design capability in a form that is perfect for you is half the victory.
Service Design Is Everyone’s Responsibility!
Success stories are created in companies in which the responsibility for customer experience is borne by the entire personnel. With this recipe, you can make your customers love your products by placing focus on customer experience from the early stages.
Our service design training is suited for companies or teams that want to take the customer perspective into account as early as possible and when your company wants to become truly customer-oriented. We also guide the staff to ensure the smooth progress of the service within the company and, if necessary, also outside the company until the creation of the customer experience. The result is a genuinely customer-oriented company that produces customer experience cost-effectively.
Originally published at contribyte.fi on March 5, 2018.
