Using Service Design To Fix A Young Girl’s Car
My daughter came to a complete stop in heavy traffic recently on a jammed interstate highway when a white van slammed into her 2023 Subaru SUV from behind. The impact caused her car to rise up several inches, dislodging the bumper and carrying the car forward several feet into the stationary vehicle in front. A visual inspection revealed her plastic bumpers were cracked. Other than that, the car appeared drivable, even the airbags didn’t deploy. What she didn’t see right away, however, was significant damage to the engine mounts plus mangled pipes, hoses, and a manifold below the passenger cabin.
The driver in the white van jumped out right away and asked if everyone was okay, then admitting fault he allowed the other drivers to take cell phone pictures of his license, registration, and insurance card. While this exchange took place a state officer pulled up and wrote an incident report, tearing off copies of a printed stub with a police document number for the drivers to include with their insurance claims.
Like all accidents, it could have been a lot worse. Besides being unharmed due in part to the car’s safety features, she was able to drive home.
Putting all that aside, two months later her car was finally repaired through a process that demonstrated how service design helps connect separate services, creates efficiencies, and yields results for providers and users within hours or less.
Service design, a field of practice like industrial design and product design, is used to transform services into user-fulfilled experiences. It’s like ordering a hamburger at a drive-thru restaurant, paying around the other side, and finally getting your order handed to you prepared just the way you intended. The service begins when you drive up and order, that action triggers a touchpoint for generating a charge, after paying at the teller, your order is visible to the grill, for any special requests, and to someone in turn who pulls together your drink, fries and anything else.
Within that service system, the goal for a service provider is mostly about efficiency. Yet when the experience flows with efficiency, it’s much more likely to garner loyalty from customers or patrons. Skilled service providers are knowledgeable about pulling services together by integrating service components and know how to create touchpoints to join components for a seamless user experience.
My daughter’s car repair process, initially was quite frustrating due to the difficulty of getting the process started It took weeks for them to look at the car. Yet once that was underway, each phase in the repair triggered another touchpoint. Their insurance company coordinated an estimate for repairs using my daughter’s photographs. That activity in turn generated a recommendation the car was no longer drivable, which set in motion a trigger for a rental car service provided at no cost.
Each provider within the service experience — the driver’s insurance company, our insurance company, the automobile repair shop, the car rental agency, and even the state police — was connected by service design that allowed monitoring the repairs, keeping track of the costs, and managing unexpected occurrences. At each phase, the status was passed along to providers electronically so they could meet their obligations and resolve the needs of my daughter, the user.
The upshot was that my daughter, the user, did not need further and she received the results satisfactorily, which are the requirements of a successful service. In the not-too-distant past, before the inclusion of service design principles, a user had far greater responsibilities for managing and coordinating the entire process, often left alone to navigate unforeseen circumstances and to negotiate services, including fees from unexpected costs and reimbursements.
For providers, service design principles help prevent aspects of the user’s experience from failing.
Courtesy of the International Service Design Institute. internationalservicedesigninstitute.com
A career-building organization for service designers.
