What is Service Design?

Service design is a human-centered design approach that places equal value on the customer experience and the business process, aiming to create quality customer experiences, and seamless service delivery.

Service design is not simply designing a service that addresses the touchpoints that create a customer’s journey, i.e. “experience of the customer”. Service design also addresses how an organisation gets something done, i.e. “experience of the employee”.

Service design examines value and experience from a multi-user perspective (i.e. customer, staff, and business), and is largely agnostic to channel and medium, and connects experience delivery to the operations and technology that produce it.

Even-though service design shares many tools and methods with other human-centred design methods, its additional perspectives and approaches help manage the complexity that comes with multiple dimensions of service experiences, such as experiences with multiple physical and digital touch-points or experiences that cross multiple channels and business silos.

Most organisations overlooked the interactions between their customer-facing and internal processes. These organisational gaps can trigger negative perceptions that “one hand does not know what the other is doing”. Service design helps bridge such gaps by:

• Surfacing conflicts by aligning the service that the organisation delivers with the business model throughout the entire life cycle.

• Focusing discussion on procedures and policies that exposes weak links and misalignment of cross-functional activities.

• Mapping out the end-to-end cycle of internal service processes and gives companies a bird’s-eye view of its service ecosystem. This helps pinpoint where duplicate efforts occur, causing employee frustration and wasted resources.