What Is Service Design?
Service Design has gained a lot of attention and traction over the past couple of years in the Asia Pacific region — yes we are a bit behind the US and Europe but finally we are catching up. Its effectiveness is being understood by local organisations more and more, yet there is still some confusion about what it truly is. So we thought we’d give some clarity and answer some typical questions about what Service Design is really about!
Traditionally, services are classified as ‘products’ and have been the responsibility of ‘Product Managers’. Think about applying for a credit card or mortgage, taking out insurance (health, car, contents) or even paying a gas bill — these services are normally under the control of Product Managers.
Nothing wrong with this, but does typical product management cover all the elements of the entire experience end to end? And should it?
Typically, a service is created (or re-designed) based on a customer need, every channel the customer wants to use is known and designed for, what the customer does before and after using the service is included, how employees deliver the service is unpacked and the processes and systems required to support the service are also created or modified. The end goal is to make sure the experience is consistent, regardless of the channel chosen. Perfect world stuff I hear you say? Not really.
Understanding your customers is complex because they now expect to choose the channel that works best for them — and this can mean they use various channels and touchpoints for the one experience.
Therefore, Service Design involves designing for multiple channels — this could be a physical retail store, contact centre, mobile app, website, webchat and more. Touchpoints can be physical, digital (across multiple devices), aural, face to face, sensorial (think hotel linen or fragrances designed for retail spaces) — and more.
Best practice Service Design must include the customer AND employee experiences. We’ve all heard the saying ‘happy employees, happy customers’ yet the employee experience is often excluded from the Product Managers’ remit. Customer journeys are critical to unpack current and future state service offerings, however transformative opportunities can come from linking both employee and customer experiences. A huge customer pain point is likely to correlate with an equally large employee pain point and solving the second can often solve for the first.
Often, poor employee experiences are due to the processes and systems (or lack of) that support both employees AND and customers. Processes can be unknown, poorly designed or been created as work-arounds by employees who are forced to create their own solutions to deliver good customer service. Systems may have become outdated software or platforms, or vital customer data is not effectively integrated between them. We have all probably seen contact centre employees staff juggle multiple screens and use multiple systems to answer one customer query. That is not very efficient, can distract the person from really listening to the customer and is stressful for the employee. At times, different departments or business units within an organisation simply don’t or can’t easily communicate with each other.
Underpinning all of these elements is the company culture — and this soon becomes evident as all the customer, employee, systems and processes are observed, insights are gained and the total experience is mapped to provide a deep understanding of what is going on. This is where Service Design positively impacts company culture, feeding into change management or internal transformation programs.
There are many elements to Service Design and to create an impact and to be effective beyond the initial design phase, it must include include implementation and adoption activities to deliver real value into in the workplace AND the market.
In future blogs we will start to explore some of these elements in more detail.
