understand customers well and have insight into their experiences and needs. Often, though, you struggle to turn insight into action. You struggle to develop designs for improved customer experience, to generate concepts for how to compete for customers' attention and loyalty and to make these ideas tangible and realistic.
You may also struggle to connect customer insight to change in the organizations we work for. Great ideas fall on deaf ears and either fail to get support or get watered down in implementation when they encounter the challenge of changing the way a business operates. This can be due to the challenge of communicating to others, collaborating on a shared vision, or understanding the mechanisms that need to change.
For you, this book starts on familiar customer territory. It also gives you insight into how to better structure insight into service experiences in order to manage improvement and innovation through the business and organization.
If you are in a strategic or commercial role, such as sales, retention, or growth, your focus is on performance and business results. However, understanding customers, their behaviors, choices, and needs are critical and have a big impact on performance.
In services, performance is dependent on customer behavior. Strategies flounder on the reality of the marketplace, and business models work in the abstract but do not always translate into results. Strategy needs to be more experimental to interface with the customer's world. Business objectives require successful engagement of customers to meet desired outcomes.
This book helps you discover levers that move customers in positive ways. It also offers new and more action-oriented service design tools for business people to develop, test, and implement strategies that are effective in the market.
Our third group is people who are more internally focused. You work in a part of the organization that maintains business as usual and also receives requests for change and improvement from the business. Working in IT, HR, or operations, you may feel that there is a lack of clarity and joined-up thinking. The silo factor, which most large organizations describe, is most keenly felt internally.
In these roles, you need to understand what the goals are so you can support them with the right solution in your area of expertise. You need to know what the other moving parts are in the business so you can integrate effectively, and you need to keep the business-as-usual lights on.
All parts of a business have one thing in common: the customer. This book helps you see the organization through the lens of the customer. It provides service design tools that can help internal teams take more control of the demands that are made of them – the tools can also help to connect to colleagues on the business side and manage prioritization and change.
How to Navigate This Book
We have structured this book around 12 challenges where we have seen service design have business impact. These challenges are grouped into three areas: “The Customer Story,” focusing on service design impacting on customer experience, “Business Impact,” diving into how service design can be used to address business challenges, and “Organizational Challenge,” where we go deeper into how service design can be used to work with the people, structures, and systems of organizations to help move things forward.
Before we get into the challenges, we set the scene in two ways. First, by introducing the basics that cover the key trends that we see as the conditions we live and work in, which provide the context for the emergence and value of service design. Second, we cover some of the core concepts of service design that are useful to understand before tackling the challenges.
After the basics we go into some more detail on foundations. This is an overview of what we see as fundamental aspects of services and how we can understand them better in order to innovate and improve service by design.
Finally, we finish the book by unpacking some of the key tools we use in day-to-day practice with the aim of leaving you better equipped to start your service design journey.
Chapter 1
Why Service Design
Service design has emerged in the early twenty-first century for a number of reasons, some of which we introduce in a driving trends section below. Service design also has a heritage that gives it a background and inheritance. Some of this is from older design approaches designed for mass manufacturing or communications. The arts of industrial design and of branding have influenced the thinking and practice of service design. Another strong influence has been from service marketing, which is where the first service blueprints were developed.
These two elements together – the why and the what – should provide a clear view on why service design, why now, and how it is relevant to you as a manager, leader, or business.
Three Trends That Make Service Design Relevant Today
It is not a coincidence that service design has emerged in the twenty-first century. Just as industrial and product design emerged with the development of mass manufacturing, service design is responding to some significant economic, social, and technical trends. Three trends, one in each of these categories, set the context for why service design is a growing discipline and of growing interest to more and more businesses and organizations.
As economies mature, they move from agriculture to raw materials to manufacturing to services. This trend is a macro one and has already taken place in much of the world. Services comprise 70 to 80 percent of the economies of mature countries and are growing rapidly even in big producer countries such as Brazil. This trend should be thought of as less a replacement of the previous situation but a layering where services add value to manufacturers. Many industries are seeing services as higher-margin businesses than manufacturers.
As differentiation in products reduces with the maturity of industries, services prove to be the area where there is higher potential. Services have the additional benefit of supporting customers to get the best from products and drive loyalty. Service design was invented to respond to this trend, to bring the best design methodologies to bear on a new challenge. The achievement of design in manufacturers is well documented – in industries from automotive to electronics. Design needed to develop to offer these qualities to a new market.
Consumers are expecting more as they value their own entitlements more than previous generations. Where once people accepted what they got, market economies have trained individuals to expect more. This is accentuated when leading brands create excellent experiences that lead consumers to think, “Why can't all my experiences be like that?” Service providers that were one-size-fits-all, and you get what you are given, have to rethink their approach as customer expectations grow. Government services need to keep up, too, as politics drives them to improve customer experience through national surveys and directives.
This trend in consumer expectations bleeds into the business-to-business arena. Workers used to put up with experiences that were suboptimal and take the brunt of the pain with the logic that they could learn their way around and it was a part of the job. Now the example set by the best consumer services leads people to expect the same at work.
As expectations rise, the need to understand customer needs and expectations develops in parallel. Service design is one strong way to bring the new customer power into the design and improvement of services in a structured and productive manner.
