Why we can’t afford to ignore Service Design at Sage
Discover how we’re using Service Design techniques to enhance user experiences, streamline processes and create seamless interactions within the Sage ecosystem.
What is Service Design?
Service Design is the activity of planning and organizing a business’s resources (people, props, and processes) in order to (1) directly improve the employee’s experience, and (2) indirectly, the customer’s experience. NN/g — Service Design 101
As user experience designers, our goal is to create intuitive, seamless interactions based on well-understood holistic experiences, real-world user needs, and interfacing with people and processes to be truly effective and valued.
We’re aware that Service Design can empower us to create experiences that are well-considered, streamlined and work across multiple channels. Ignoring Service Design and not considering the holistic experience, we risk missing opportunities; to understand user needs, to differentiate, delight and support those involved both internally within Sage and externally for the users of our products and services, and deliver solutions that align with business objectives.
Digital Legacy — an opportunity to utilise Service Design
Over the past 12 months, we’ve been exploring how Service Design can impact particular services and how to incorporate techniques and methods to advance our user experience offering. One service we’re looking to improve relates to our customer’s Digital Legacy.
A Digital Legacy is any information you leave behind online after your death. Your Digital Legacy could include social media profiles, online conversations, photos, videos, gaming profiles and a website or blog. We use usernames, passwords and privacy policies to protect sensitive data so only we can access it.
A Sage customer having a Digital Legacy correctly set up could help a colleague access payroll data to pay employees, or a family member access finance accounts to close the business.
We explored Digital Legacy as a service with the aim to help keep small businesses operating during the cost-of-living crisis, support vulnerable people by doing the right thing and align with two of our values — Human and Simplify.
Why a Service Design approach
- Service Design considers the holistic experience of the people, processes and systems involved in delivering the service.
- It’s a human-centred approach — that considers pain points and emotions both for the end users and internally.
- Data and insights are driven by regular engagement with those involved and impacted by the service.
Understanding the current experience
A multidisciplinary team of UX Designers, Solution Designers, Content Designers and User Researchers, working across multiple products and services kicked off the project. We kept the team small, but representative of our design team specialisms and included subject matter experts from different areas of Sage when required to allow us to collaborate efficiently.
During the discovery phase, we conducted a range of different activities:
- Desk research — direct and indirect competitor research to understand processes, scope and naming conventions
- Listened to customer support calls — to capture insights into the process, emotions, and needs of relatives of the deceased customer, professional calling on behalf of a family, and internal colleagues working on the case.
- Customer interviews — to hear first-hand experiences, including any frustrations with the current service.
- Focus groups with customer services agents — to better understand the internal processes and challenges the customer services team faces.
- Journey mapping exercises — to pinpoint the current processes’ shortcomings and highlight the underlying user needs of our customers.
The discovery data formed the foundation of the ‘As-is’ Service Blueprint — a tool we relied upon to align the team’s understanding of the current process and identify areas for improvement.
Ideating with Service Design
Next, we facilitated co-creation workshops with the team, writing a Service Purpose Statement to set the vision for the project — enabling us to prioritise our ideas by Value vs. Effort and Risk vs. Confidence relating to our vision and technical capabilities.
We revisited the ‘As-is’ Service Blueprint and created a ‘To-be’ Service Blueprint, addressing: pain points and bottlenecks in the frontstage customer journey and the backstage customer service agents’ experience.
With a clear vision and a map of a future customer journey, we ran a ‘DesignJam’ workshop, with stakeholders and Subject Matter Experts to gain diverse perspectives and ideas. Collaboratively, we ideated on features and solutions catering to the unique requirements and set out a low-fidelity proof of concept.
The participatory approach instilled a sense of inclusivity among those taking part.
Service Design as a deliverable
Using the low-fidelity clickable proof of concept for feedback and the Sage Design System in Figma, we quickly developed a higher-fidelity prototype to utilise in a demo video for senior stakeholders, aiming to get buy-in across Sage’s ecosystem of products.
The output of our Service Design project has provided rich data insights and a proof of concept that addresses user pain points and streamlines the process for both customers and Sage support staff — improving efficiency for everyone.
A Service Design approach allowed us to zoom out and visualise the user’s journey, rather than focusing on individual touchpoints. Both the ‘As-is’ and ‘To-be’ service blueprints helped us align internal processes and departments to create a harmonious, user-centric ecosystem. Without this approach, we may not have had the same buy-in to changing the business processes to support the experience or from colleagues who were sporadically involved in the project.
What we’ve learnt so far
- Service Design methodologies encourage you to think both internally and externally. So early on, a narrow scope will make it easier to access internal contacts and get set up.
- Utilise different research techniques when limited with time, resources and participants. Embrace what you learn, change the scope and don’t be afraid to pivot.
- Service Blueprinting will help you map an end-to-end journey and align your understanding. Find the best way to tell and sell your story.
- Be consistent. Set up dedicated time and regular check-in sessions (ideally, on the same day) to keep momentum and allow team members to ask questions and get comfortable with Service Design techniques.
- Direct your team’s passion for Service Design and what they’re learning into effective action. If you can frame the work as a voluntary, passion project — you’ll get people who want to be there and help!
- For remote collaboration, keep it simple, flexible and use small teams to help support ideation. Create a central war room to collate and collaborate. For facilitating hybrid sessions, assign a team member to lead the remote collaboration with another team member responsible for the in-person workshop. A third team member assigned to capture notes or talking points is helpful.
What we’ll do next
Building on the success and learnings of our Digital Legacy Service Design project and other examples within our Experience Design team, we are committed to integrating more techniques and initiatives. We’ll be collaborating with product teams and their disciplines to conduct workshops and ideate on opportunities to assess where processes can include Service Design techniques. We’ll be sharing more as we go.
By embracing Service Design principles, we’ll be better equipped to tackle complex projects and drive positive change for users and their customers.
This blog post includes content created by Craig Priestman and Joanne Richardson for UX Scotland, held in June 2023, with additional contributions from Kyle Mayne and Ben Wilson.
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