So What Really Is Service Design..?

Service design is a design discipline that emerged about a decade or so ago. Primarily originating from the Scandinavia practice of designing tourism sector services in the early 90’s. It is now becoming increasingly popular in management and the service industry.According to Service Design Network, Service design is the art of creating meaningful interactions, relationships, communication about service processes in the perspective of the customer. Service Design addresses the functionality and form of services from the perspective of the user. It aims to ensure that service interfaces are useful, usable, and desirable from the client’s point of view and effective, efficient, and distinctive from the supplier’s point of view.

Service design is about innovation. It aims to improve customer experience, efficiency and ease of use of a service. It is closely linked to the business objectives and innovation strategy of an organisation or service provider. It can help improve loyalty, retention and share of wallet. A service designer can visualize, express and choreograph what other people can’t see and envisage solutions that do not yet exist, observe and interpret needs and behaviours and then transform them into possible service futures.

Organisations such as Virgin Atlantic, Volkswagen and GE and IBM were early to understand the benefits of service design and its multi-disciplinary approach and were able to integrate them into their operations. 80% of businesses in Nigeria are service-oriented. This is in tandem with global business economies that is increasing in services. From our banks, stock exchange, cinemas, hotels, airlines and public services. I see the need for service design.

How do we create service-solutions and platforms that are viable, how do we design services that people will love, that negative complaints note will keep dropping, how might we satisfy the abundance of customers and restore citizen’s faith in public services. Everywhere you look in this economy, it is filled with services that are totally unreliable, that are totally the same and it is very disappointing. (Sucks)!

The problem is partly that we look for solutions in all the wrong places to start with.

When a customer buys a new product say a mobile phone, the moment he steps outside the shop what follows up is the service. That is as far as our service providers could see.

The service ecosystem is more complex than it looks. We never actually think about the pre-purchase process, the customer journey, the post-purchase and the entire lifetime of that customer. It is filled with opportunities to service, to satisfy and to exceed customers’ expectations.

Our customer service departments that is handling this process is not evolving as customer needs and desires are becoming complex and ever demanding. The current state of affairs is that customer service is all about handling complaints and customer queries, throwing questionnaire and customer satisfaction surveys that rarely have any effect in future service innovations. This is a very shallow thinking from customer service professionals, managers and executives tasked with service management.

Service design is concerned with ensuring that service processes are human, thoughtful, functional and fun from a strategic point of view while being socially-viable, affordable and sustainable from a business point of view. Service design also involves the design of strategies, concepts and business models and service environments.

Service design will involve both the physical and the virtual environment. Online, on the web and mobile. Systematically applying design methods and principles to traditional service environments. It starts by simply asking questions, and then it uses customer insights through qualitative research methods like observation and ethnography to uncover customer’s tacit needs.

Designing a new service with customers in a customer insight session

Historic Scandinavian practice have assumed that methods like observation are more likely to uncover consumer needs than traditional quantitative methods. For the obvious reasons which i fully agree with Steve Jobs, ‘that consumers do not know what they want because what they want does not exist’. Service design uses methods like customer journey mapping, service blueprinting to assess and uncover customers’ often salient needs.

Our customer service people believes that satisfying a customer means excellent service quality but that is where it all goes all wrong.

You can satisfy a customer at end of the day but what was his or her experience?. Is it after waiting 2 hours for what he should have done under 10mins? Or after shouting and getting pissed off? What matters is the experience. That is what determines whether that customer will keep coming, switch or recommend you to his friends.

Like i said when we set out to design a service we sought to know the whole truth, the entire context, the big picture, then we can sit down to design. Next will be the ideation phase. Generating service ideas will be largely influenced by customer insights and stories. Using traditional brainstorming techniques to generate lots of ideas in the process. The ideas need to be prioritized with consideration to business needs and the entire brand or service brand. Selected ideas will be prototyped. Tested and tested for reliability and modification with real customers before launching.

Just like great architects like Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind could design buildings that adjusts itself to future stress and natural occurrences. Services should be designed to address future challenges in the process while making incremental improvements in the service lifecycle. Launch your new service and take control of innovation in your service front. Improve customers experience and be sure to earn their loyalty. Service design is an emerging field proven to help you design the future for your customers.

  @apache22