Marzia Aricò: Service Design in Different Industries

As a Head of Insight at Livework, Marzia Aricò cross-pollinates design and business, exploring what’s next for service design. Before joining Livework she was mainly working with Fortune 500 corporations. She helped over 60 organizations across 21 different industries to explore the Future of Work through collaborative intelligence. In our interview we discussed the industries that are driven by service design the most and Marzia’s new challenges at Livework.

Tell us about your role at Livework.

I joined Livework 4 years ago as service design consultant. I always worked on strategic and transformative projects, following organizations in the long run. I am a designer by background but it is the organizational side of projects that always interested me the most.

Currently I am working on my Ph.D. on how to help organizations to implement service design. This is one of the most difficult tasks in the industry at the moment. Service design has become a buzzword. Everyone talks about it. But when it comes to implementation, many fail.

In the last 4 years, we have been witnessing many acquisitions of design agencies. McKinsey acquired Lunar, Accenture acquired Fjord and a bunch of other design agencies. To name a few. We have chosen to remain independent. Large consultancies are trusted to help organizations transform. They do understand organizations and they sell service design on top of it. Now we need to prove that we do understand organizations as much as large business consultancies do.

I am now heading a new department at Livework that we’ve started about six months ago. It is called Insight. Its goal is to reflect on the service design practice to advance our approach in projects. We are constantly trying to understand what is next in the industry. We crystallize our experience developed in the last 15 years into something more meaningful. To my knowledge we are the only service design agency in the world that has that kind of capacity internally. This is a sort of R&D in service design.

As a Head of Insight are you involved in service design projects or you stay apart?

I am currently involved into some of the projects but I have a specific role. I show clients possible future trajectories. Our clients are often already familiar with design research, ideation, and with most of the phases characterizing the service design process. However they often struggle to understand transformation by service design. That’s why I work with them to create a shared vision and to guide the process during the project.

What industries are currently more driven by service design?

Hospitality understands customer experience the most. It’s easier for them to grasp service design. Banking and insurance organizations are now heavily investing in service design too. Simply because they are extremely bad at delivering services that people can understand and like.

I’ve been talking to the CEO of a large European insurance company recently. He said, “If tomorrow IKEA decides to get into the insurance business, we’ll disappear within a month”. They understand that customers don’t like them and there’s a need to change, and they have money to invest. That’s the perfect condition to start a transformation.

If tomorrow IKEA decides to get into the insurance business, we’ll disappear within a month.

Telecoms are another good example. They are likewise bad at delivering quality services. Companies like Vodafone and T-Mobile have been investing into service design in the last decade. They also have internal service design departments.

B2B organizations are also starting to pop-up, especially manufacturing. They are product focused organizations. They focus on the quality of the product. Reality is that behind any second B in B2B there are always people. A large percentage of projects we run are in fact with B2B organizations.

What’s the main difference in service design for B2B and B2C companies?

It’s easier for B2C companies to understand service design because they get an immediate feedback. B2C organizations understand that customer experience is a key element to success.

B2B is often more complex. Change is difficult and often requires significant investments. It’s also a question of mindset. A lot of B2B companies we work with are product focused. The product is the king for them. To shift their thinking from product to service, from equipment to maintenance for example, is a big task for many organizations.

Think about automotive industry for example. Selling cars might seem the core of what they do. However, you could also argue that their business is not about selling cars, but providing mobility. That’s a massive shift in thinking for organizations. The automotive industry started that shift approximately a decade ago. B2B companies have generally started that process more recently.

Service design is often confused with customer experience design. Is there a difference?

There is a fundamental difference. The customer experience looks at the customer. Service design looks not only at the customer, but also at the consumer, at the user, and the human behind those three. On the other side, it also looks at the organization that delivers those services. Customer experience is integrated within service design. It’s like a matryoshka where one piece is placed inside the other.

Sometimes service designers are too religious with language. People get quite annoyed if you use one word over another. Though it’s not 100% correct, sometimes it helps to move the conversation forward. When writing an academic article or a publication, there can be no compromise in terminology. But if we have a conversation with a client, it’s okay to adapt to their language as we strive to achieve the same goal.

How do you create industry-wide insights?

There are three main sources of information. The first is existing market research. We don’t develop traditional market research. It’s not our business. Companies like Forrester and Gartner do a fantastic job on that. Such researches are a good reference to have, but we rarely rely on them for our insights.

The second source is our 15 years of experience in the field. We’ve done projects for more than 3000 companies across 21 different sectors. We’ve been working with these companies hand to hand, talking to people at different levels from CEOs to employees and customers. These projects are the main source of our insights.

We also have some advisors. Most of them were our clients in the past, some of them are consultants themselves. They have some deep knowledge in certain sectors. We often try to get their feedback and to reflect together on some pressing questions.

There are many consultancies like Deloitte, Accenture, PwC etc. who sell insights on what will come next. How do you show organizations the value of your insights?

We are fundamentally qualitative. It’s difficult for us to bring organizations the numbers. Companies like Accenture are great at it, but we tell stories. Most of these stories are created out of our learnings within a specific sector.

Business challenges are not infinite. There is a limited number of challenges organizations are facing at the moment.

We select the story to tell them on the base of our understanding of the challenge they are experiencing. Companies realize that we understand the human side of what they are experiencing. That’s where they see the value of our insights.

Quantitative research is useful to have. It’s a great tool to confirm or to disprove some facts found qualitatively. Though I would never start building plans based on market research. This is the major competitive advantage of our approach.

I would never start building plans based on market research.

It’s not for everyone though, as well as service design in general. Some companies are not ready for it. We need to accept it and to move on. As service designers, we should be humble and respect the fact that this is not something for everybody to embark on.

What is the main challenge for service design right now?

The pollution of the market. There are so many service design agencies starting everywhere. Some of them don’t have enough experience or deep knowledge. They end up working with organizations and fail to help them. This doesn’t harm companies too much but their perception of service design changes.

I’ve seeing people finishing an MBA thinking they can run a program on design thinking. The whole idea that anyone can do design thinking or service design is false. There are people who study and practice it for decades, and there is a reason for that.

Being humble and realizing your own limits is fundamental for practitioners of service design.

It has happened in the past that clients come to us saying “We’ve worked with an agency. Please, help us make any sense out of their outcome”. And we start to clean everything, create a realistic timeline and deliver it. Such cleanup is very stressful as we spend a considerable amount of time before we can start doing our job.

It’s important to help businesses distinguish a good service design from a bad one. They should always listen to different voices. Each company has a slightly different focus on different aspects. Some companies are better at research, rather than implementation. Some are better at digital, rather than face-to-face channels. There is no one size fits all in service design. Businesses should listen to different stories and choose which story fits them.