Exploring New Business Models in Traditional Industries
Sclable Insights — Interview with Stefan Pichler, Service Designer
In this edition of the Sclable Insights Interviews, we talked to Stefan Pichler, Service Designer at Sclable about the process of discovering new business models for Industries whose tradition was a none digital one.
This story is about #ServiceDesign #DigitalTransformation, #NewBusinessModel #BusinessInnovation
Hi Stefan, please tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m a Service Designer and started working at Sclable in July 2019. Before Sclable I’ve spent 4 years in London, first finishing my Masters in Design & Innovation Management and then working for a product and service innovation company. I’ve worked on projects in industries ranging from insurance, banking, healthcare, utilities and construction. Currently, at Sclable, I’m heavily focused on projects in the construction industry, as it still holds a huge potential for innovation.
So you are Service Designer at Sclable. Please explain a little further what a Service Designer is and does.
As a Service Designer, my aim is to create a meaningful customer experience across many different touchpoints and products of an organisation. Service Design is actually very intangible. Unlike a product designer who designs physical or digital products, service designers look at everything in between. People are used to having great brand experiences led by products and services offered by let’s say Airbnb, Uber, or Apple. They make every interaction look seamless and pleasurable for customers. Service Design plays a big role in making that happen.
Service Designers do that by truly understanding people’s expectations and behaviours and turning them into outstanding service experiences. However, not only is it important to create great experiences for customers, but it is also crucial to create the right environment for people who work within the organisation — the people who deliver the services and products to customers:
Creating a meaningful customer experience across many touchpoints
Understanding people’s needs and behaviours
Staff experience — experience for people who work in the organisation
What kind of project do you normally engage with?
I’ve worked on a wide range of projects in various industries. At Sclable, I’m mostly focused on projects in the construction sector at the moment. Because Service Design becomes increasingly more important also for B2B businesses.
As people are becoming increasingly used to great experiences in their personal lives, they also expect simplicity and ease when it comes to products and services they are confronted within their work environment.
At Sclable, we’re working with a range of clients that have realised that it isn’t enough anymore to create digital products such as apps and websites, but that they have to create a much more holistic service portfolio. Looking at individual products in isolation doesn’t yield the expected results anymore, so organisations have to think about how they can create better service experiences for their customers.
Are the projects you are working on always about turning something into a digital thing or does your work reach beyond the pure digital implementation?
Technology plays a big part in creating meaningful services, however, it can only be the means of getting there and not the result. What we really need to look at is what value we want to create for the end-user and for the company.
Digital technology helps us with automation and empowering users to self-serve. At the same time, it increases transparency for end-users and can drastically reduce waiting times.
But what’s important is that we first need to understand what customers expect and want. Maybe a physical interaction with a member of staff is much more beneficial to the business than replacing everything with an app. Service design looks at these challenges and aims to balance business expectations with customer expectations.
Give us a little insight on how such a project works. How do you engage and what are the steps that you walk through together with the client from the broad idea or hypotheses of a potential business case to actually executing the case?
Every project is different of course and there is definitely no one size fits all approach to service innovation. However, there are methodologies and tools that have proven to be valuable in the past and that can be used as a guideline.
The three key questions we’re aiming to answer for every project are:
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- Who are we trying to solve it for?
- How can we solve the problem?
One of the most important actions we take on every project is getting our hands dirty. What I mean by that is going directly where the customers are. What we hear a lot is: “We know our customer, they want this or that.” But when you truly listen to them and observe their behaviour you learn something new or different. That is very powerful.
We use the insights that we’ve gathered from interviews, observations and desk research and create concepts for how we can address what we’ve learned. These are very much hypotheses. Because at this stage nobody can actually know what will work in the end. So the key is to validate our assumptions. We often do that by creating prototypes and mockups and testing them with customers. Or we run what we call experiments to learn how customers behave and interact with a new service or product.
The goal of this really is to reduce the risk of running in the wrong direction too soon and therefore wasting time, money and effort that could be spent on other initiatives.
Once we get a good feeling for what could work and how we then start to become more concrete and refine our ideas. This is really where we can’t hide from what we don’t know because shit gets real and we actually have to build what we’ve imagined.
Digital technology often plays a huge role in that. At Sclable we really believe in working in multidisciplinary teams with technologists, designers, and strategists to create solutions that are inspired by customers, driven by data (things that can be measured), and enabled by technology.
So you come into play when it’s about exploring the potential of new business models in traditional industries. What’s the current state of digitization in different industries?
Especially organisations in traditional industries are used to selling products they manufacture. This has been their business model for decades. But increasingly they realise that in order to remain relevant in the future they have to rethink their value proposition — rethink what they offer to their customers.
One major shift that we have seen is from being a product company to becoming a service company. We’ve worked a lot on projects in the construction industry where little innovation took place in recent decades. Companies in that space are trying to find new opportunities to better serve their customers, but also to find entirely new customer segments.
One side is to improve existing business models by improving the customer experience through better touchpoints and digitalisation.
The other side is to explore entirely new possibilities. And I believe this is where it gets really exciting. But I think we’ll talk about that in another session.
In your role, you need to learn constantly, 24/7. What are the next big things you want to get your hands dirty with and learn?
As my background is in the field of design, I’m constantly trying to learn more about other disciplines like business and technology. My aim is to truly understand these other perspectives and languages to translate and coordinate between them to create better services as a result.
I think that the time for innovation theatre in organisations is over. Lots of money was spent on initiatives that didn’t show the expected results. My aim is to become more proficient in the language of business. Trying to get better in making ideas more measurable and thinking about impact and outcomes instead of outputs so we can actually show results that matter for organisations and their customers.
This article was written for Sclable’s blog on Medium.
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