Demonstrating the service design value

Service Design working group notes

This week we undertook the challenge of designing an activity that would help us demonstrate the value of service design to a potential client.

As you might imagine, selling service design can be harder than selling water to a fish. In fact, one of the things that makes it harder is even trying to ‘sell’ it. We shouldn’t be trying to sell service design, we need to sell the outcome that service design will help you to achieve.

Ok, but how do we demonstrate to clients that these outcomes are something they need? It’s a little bit too vague when I think of myself saying to clients, as people can commonly do, that service design will:

• Help them understand how their business operates at a holistic level
• Provide alignment and break organisational silos
• Help them prioritise opportunities

This requires a certain level of design maturity on the client’s part to understand how important and necessary these outcomes are when designing a new service or improving an existing one. It’s all pretty vague and intangible, and fails to answer the question of why they should care — of what they can expect in terms of meaningful outcomes that will actually improve their business, and the service they provide.

So how else might we describe the value of service design to a client? Recently, we proposed a one hour workshop to show why they could benefit practically from a service design approach. The client is a high street retailer going through a big transformation to achieve their mission of expansion across Europe, by developing a leading experience for customers on its digital channels — classic!

Our goals were to:

• Introduce the workshop participants to service design and rapidly demonstrate our capabilities
• Help them make their service tangible and consider the resulting impact of these potential changes
• Get participants on the same page about how the strategic goals might actually change their business

To achieve these goals this is how we structured the workshop:

• Building the as-is journey: focusing on a pre-defined use case, asking the participants to rapidly build the current user journey from both the customer’s and the frontline staff’s perspectives
• Setting the north star: asking participants to explain what their business strategy (eg. mobile first) might mean for the business, customer and employee. We want them to get specific and objective, using a template we provide — no room for ambiguity, we need to ground their blue-sky thinking to be set out clearly in tangible actions
• Rapidly envisioning the new strategy: similarly to the first activity, asking the participants to envision how the as-is journey would change to achieve the new strategy

We did a dry run of this workshop during our weekly service design team session, and got some interesting reactions during the process. Some of those reactions were exactly what we wanted to happen because it showcased the challenges service design tackles in a project.

Looking back at the outcomes we outlined at the beginning, we noticed that during the exercise the team would often forget the bigger picture and got distracted by other small details, even though it was not relevant to the goals. This was a useful reminder of the keep the customers overarching value proposition front and centre, so that it’s obvious to the group how all the activities throughout the end to end process contribute to it.

In terms of providing alignment and breaking organisation silos, we quickly noticed that each person in the team had a different approach to the presented use case and made different assumptions.

For example, in the space of 10 minutes the teams mapped two completely different journeys, where thought it was a remote experience, while others thought it was in person. This discovery and misalignment around the next steps from the same northern star demonstrates the benefit of a rapid mapping exercise, as apposed to a prolonged series of steering meetings.

Lastly, during the north star exercise, the team realised how difficult it is to ideate and bring their strategy to life, finding that this can take so many different shapes and forms. This highlighted how important it is to ask how teams want to prioritise their approach.

So next time, instead of scratching my head trying to define what service design is, explain its value and the outcomes it delivers, I will try to have clients experience and see it for themselves. No more selling water to fish.

Our Design Practice is growing. We’re a 70+ strong team of designers covering a wide range of design specialisms, from Service and Product Design to Brand Experience and Content Strategy. We’re organised in PoDs — People of Discipline and we meet regularly to grow our capabilities and advance our service offering.

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