Niels Corsten: Explaining the Value of Service Design

Koos is a service design agency located in the heart of Amsterdam. It helps organizations create a better business by improving customer experience, designing new services and making organizations more customer centric. I have visited their office and talked to Niels Corsten, Senior Service Design Consultant. We discussed the design process at Koos and how they explain the value of service design to their clients.

Niels, what is your role at Koos Service Design?

I work at Koos as a Senior Service Design Consultant. This practically means that I am responsible for the project quality. I lead projects from A to Z being involved in the actual process of making proposals and thinking out the entire project. I am also executing the project, leading one or two service designers in a project team. In this way, I can assure that project quality is delivered.

What kind of organizations do you work with at Koos?

We strive to work with top level companies in the Netherlands and abroad. Our clients range from all types of industries, including telecom, banking, insurance, healthcare, hospitality, and mobility. Also, we are involved in the development of governmental services.

Koos has been around for 8 years now. When it was started, the market here in the Netherlands was not mature enough for specializations such as service design. Now here and especially in the UK, the market of service design is maturing. I think that will cause agencies to move towards specialization in certain industries or expertises. Currently, we just keep in focus the process of service design and apply it throughout different industries.

There are many digital agencies on the market. They provide a broad range of services: from making websites and creating identity to strategy consulting. How do service design agencies differentiate from other design companies?

I think the biggest difference is that we as a service design company are more placed at the beginning of the design process. We are involved much more in strategy than in execution. Digital design companies normally have clients who already have specific needs. They hear “we need a website or app” and take that as a starting point. But we at Koos have a more strategic and holistic view on services. We take the service experience as a starting point and start orchestrating the different touchpoints accordingly. This is not only a different approach from most digital agencies but requires other expertise as well. Organizations come to us with undefined and fuzzy assignments and questions.

One of the examples is a telecom provider who tells us “We’d like to know how to improve the customer experience of onboarding for a certain type of clients”. Each service innovation that was generated during the research and creative phase can go into the digital landscape, but can also go to other areas. The outcome can range from creating an app to training customer-facing staff. We are not necessarily focused on just digital matters. We start from more strategic questions looking at current challenges in the company, analyze those and use strategic tools to give directions for service improvements or innovation.

Service design sounds like something ephemeral. How do you show the results of your work to businesses?

I believe service design is everything but ephemeral. More and more companies realize that services need to be designed, just as products are. Nowadays, a great customer experience is a real differentiator and factor that is important to customers.

Our results depend on the question of our client. Often a deliverable can be a customer journey map to show the company how the service is experienced from the customers’ perspective. It’s important to keep in mind that a customer journey map is a tool for innovation, not an end deliverable. But the deliverables can go in more depth, like creating an app. In this case, we end up with wireframes and visual designs.

How do you explain the value of service design to potential clients?

If we need to show the financial value of service design, there is plenty of research on the market. They show that companies that use design driven methodologies in management have higher results in company growth and customer satisfaction. The second way to show the value is to present our own showcases of projects executed before.

Beyond that, we always try to find a right person in the company who understands what service design is about. We need to give this person an ability to use tools and methods in order to spread the service design state of mind throughout the company.

We strive to find right people who are able to change the company culture from the inside. If you meet the wrong people upon the project’s initial phase, you will hit the wall pretty soon.

What are the tools and practices that help measure service design and show the value to the business?

The number one measurement tool that is used in service design is Net Promoter Score (NPS). In most cases increasing the customers’ satisfaction is the main goal and that is measured by NPS.

We also use Customer Effort Score to look into how much effort the customer should apply in order to get to his service goal. That’s not focused on customer satisfaction but rather on efforts needed to accomplish actions during the service.

We’ve also done some projects that focus on customers’ financial value (CLV), trying to increase the amount of money spent with the service. In this case, we are looking for the ways to cross-sell, up-sell, etc. When it comes to customers retention, the Churn Rate is the key metric. The last often seen metric that shows results from service design efforts is simple cost reduction.

In service design projects most of the time the goal is to increase the customers’ satisfaction, create a better experience for customers and increase their loyalty. That’s why the NPS is the most used tool. The only problem is that many companies don’t properly measure their NPS. In this case, it’s hard to measure our impact as we don’t have the initial data to track improvements.

The outcome for service design is often a set of recommendations, blueprints and other documents describing the business process. But all these deliverables don’t have value until being implemented to business processes. How do you think, where is the optimal edge for service design agencies between consulting and guiding the implementation?

Service design companies need to be aware that the implementation of services can take quite a long time. Designers are not the right people to lead the implementation process. We are very fast paced, we do projects in a matter of weeks or months, but the implementation itself takes months or years.

Within a project we do a lot of co-creation, trying to involve stakeholders from different departments that will implement our ideas. We let them understand not only what we are doing but also why we are doing so. There must be people inside the company to lead the entire implementation. Not only because they have more knowledge of the company and the barriers but also because it’s the goal of the company itself to implement the improvements.

We are more involved in the innovation cycle and we give the project team tools to increase the rate of success for implementation. Sometimes some culture change is needed, so we make training in the company. We teach people to apply service design by themselves.

For example, NOS is a telecom provider in Portugal. We did 7 projects with them on different customer journeys, innovating the customer experience. Next to that, we have trained 300 people from the company to let them apply service design methodology and tools by themselves. We taught them how to do customer research, design research, how to make proper journey maps, how to create service blueprints.

One of the directors that hired us 2 years ago is now pulling the implementation train inside the company. He took our role and started selling service design to other people in the company. Now they have a service innovation factory where they continuously innovate their own customer experience without needing us too much.

One of the challenges for service design agencies like ours is that you need to be in the forefront of what service design is about. By training people within the client’s company you make yourself redundant. To stay relevant on the market you need to make things better or different, to push the limits of what service design is about.

You work for a design agency, so you provide services to businesses. How do you design your services?

In Dutch we have a saying “The shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot”. It’s not to say that our services are not proper but I think there’s always a tension between trying to add value to clients and trying to add value to our own services. It’s about a balance.

In Koos, we have 4 hours a week to work not on clients’ projects but on the improvement of our agency. From there we have a lot of standardized tools and methodologies that we use in projects. For example, within the last 6 months, we’ve implemented design sprints in the company. It took us some time to understand it and to make use of it.

We regularly invite external experts in different areas and learn something new from them. Besides that, we have a lot of creative brain power in the company. For us, it’s not that big of a challenge to improve our services, as this is what drives us every day; it’s in our nature.

What is the main challenge for service design industry right now?

Service design in the Netherlands and UK has gone much further than in other European countries. The biggest challenge on the Dutch market is to stay relevant as a service design consultancy to those companies that already have service designers in-house.

Sometimes people from our department work in-house within the client’s company for up to six months. That’s a different business model compared to the consultancy and we are experimenting with it. While being inside the company for much longer than one project, we can see the value that service design can offer in different landscapes of the company. Suddenly we see all opportunities within the company where we can apply service design methodologies. That helps us initiate new projects.

The second challenge is to keep pushing forward the understanding of service design. Lots of companies are able to create their customer journey maps. There’s a big difference between creating a customer journey map and understanding what a proper customer journey map is about.

There’s a big difference between creating a customer journey map and understanding what a proper customer journey map is about.

People think that creating a nice looking poster is enough. We are often asked by our clients to create a customer journey map. But they don’t even realize that the CJM is not even a deliverable. It’s merely a tool to come to customer experience innovation. They talk buzzwords but weakly imagine why one may need a customer journey and what to do with it.