Look at the structure of a typical organisation.
Departments arranged neatly by specialism. Marketing, Sales, IT, Product, Support etc. This maps along a “value chain”. Customers go through a funnel, starting with Marketing, Sales, all the way to Customer Service.
This might make sense from an organisational standpoint. But from the perspective of a customer, it can lead to a fragmented experience of a service. As services tend to span different teams, each with their own goals, processes, and systems, the experience can be disorienting.
How often has this happened when you’re phoning customer support with an issue:
The first representative picks up. After explaining your issue, they pass you to a different team saying they “don’t have visibility of your record in their system”, or “another team deals with this”. The next representative then passes you to a “specialist” as they’re not an expert on your case. All the while, you’re requested to repeat the same information over and over. How can this be so hard? You wonder.
What you’re experiencing here first-hand, is the manifestation of that company’s siloed structure.
Ultimately, customers don’t care how the teams are structured, or how responsibility is divided. To them, they are interacting with one company, so expect one unified experience. This highlights a gap. A gap between the way that companies are organised, and the expectations of customers.
It’s this precise gap, which a growing field called “Service Design” aims to bridge.
What is Service Design
Let’s start with a definition. According to the Nielsen Norman Group:
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.
Products vs. Services
Products and services are very different beasts. Yet companies often treat them in a similar way.
Products are tangible things that you can touch and have a physical presence, like a chair or a fridge. But services are intangible, and are realised through a series interactions with the end user(s).
Whereas products tend to be static, services take users on a journey. So when a user experiences a service, they care not only for the quality of each interaction, but also how they come together as a whole.
Design as a Practice
The purpose of design is to create products and services that deliver value to users.
Methods such as design thinking encourage feedback loops between key users and stakeholders. This is then taken as input to shape the design of products and services.
By involving a wider set of stakeholders, the design process can take into account these broader needs and help to validate assumptions.
As services are often complex and involve a range of different teams, these design practices can prove particularly useful.
Putting it Together – Service Design
In summary, services take the user on a journey and can be complex. It may involve many people, processes and systems to make it happen – many of which aren’t even visible to the end user.
Additionally, because of the siloed nature of organisations, people delivering the service tend to lack an end-to-end view of it, and how they fit in to the bigger picture.
Service Design therefore provides tools and techniques to make this service visible, with the involvement of the different stakeholders that comprise it.
It might involve first zooming into a particular part of the service e.g. customer onboarding, as customers had found it problematic. You would then bring all groups involved or affected by the service together to map the end-to-end scenario in workshops.
In doing so, you would look to discover the main pain points or inefficiencies in this journey, as well as how users are feeling at each step. Eventually, you would prototype service options in collaboration with these stakeholders.
The end result could be a service that delivers greater value to end users. One that improves the day-to-day experience for employees. Or one that involves less redundancy and is more seamless – ideally all the above!
As you can tell, the practice of Service Design is a highly collaborative one. It’s a method that promotes empathy towards users (customers and employees included), helps those who make up the service see it in its entirety, and work to continually improve it.
For a visual example of Service Design, here’s a short illustration involving two Coffee Shops:
Conclusion
The aim of this article was to introduce what Service Design is, and some of the problems it addresses. As ~75% of GDP in developed economies are already made up of services, methods like Service Design will likely become increasingly relevant and embraced within organisations moving forwards.
This might just lead to a world where we experience a bit less frustration with the wide range of services we use day to day. Whether this be in healthcare, the financial sector and beyond.
In future articles I will dive deeper into how Service Design might be applied in practice. As well as how it complements, yet sets itself apart from, other customer-centric design methodologies like Design Thinking or UX Design.
