Have you ever wondered why you visit the bank less or why we now order a product from our device and it arrives the next day instead of going to look for it in the physical store? Have you noticed how the digital world has been integrated into our lives, facilitating many daily activities that were previously physical? All of this has happened thanks to collaborative work teams that, through methodologies such as service design, have managed to improve this experience, making it smoother, lighter, and more fluid.
Service design is a term that encompasses an organizational approach focused on delivering the best customer experience. It offers an omnichannel perspective that extends beyond just tech companies, aiming to make any service from any business suitable for its consumers and for the business itself.
Service design can help our organizations innovate customer experience and build brand loyalty. In other words, service design is great for business!
Service design is not exclusive to tech companies or corporations; it’s so simple and dynamic that it can be adapted to any business or company of any size and at any stage of maturity. Moreover, it’s not limited to service-based businesses; if you sell products, this methodology focuses on all activities you undertake to get these products into your customers’ hands.
Think about how Netflix found a better way to rent movies. The movies are their products, as they were for Blockbuster, but their service was the differentiator.
It is not essential to be an expert in the field, although you always have the option of hiring one to guide and implement this methodology on the first occasion until it becomes a natural practice. The noble aspect of service design is you can apply it while acquiring knowledge. You will find that you will not only learn a methodology, but you will also better understand your business, and you will see how it grows and improves with the implementation of service design.
Most importantly, service design is friendly and fun because it is collaborative and co-creative. So grab a pen and paper, start thinking about the people who are in and around your business, and make a list because soon you will have to contact them and invite them to co-create the service that your consumers deserve and expect.
By applying service design, you will see that it will result in a better concept of your business, where you will get closer to the needs and desires of your consumers and a better organizational strategy. This will help you discover how your service should be configured to deliver more value and benefits to your consumer, reducing processes that cost the organization money and that are not beneficial to customers.
You will also realize that you are building a collaborative design culture where you not only focus on the customer, but also on what happens within your service structure and how you make decisions about your products, business model, revenue stream, innovation, etc. All this aligns the thinking and activities of each area in your business.
What you can expect as a result is to see a complete map of your business, where the main objective is to show the customer the best, most beautiful and efficient path to navigate your business and get the best experience from it:
So, service design can help companies adapt and respond to changes in customer needs and expectations in a constantly evolving business environment. This can be crucial to maintaining long-term relevance and competitiveness.
There was a pet shop that offered grooming and beauty services for pets. Their main focus was on the services they provided to pets, using manual methods and operating through telephone appointments and a paper agenda. Although they also sold products, these were secondary and not related to the care and beauty of pets, and their quality left much to be desired.
The vision of the business was limited; they’d never considered innovation or improvement of the existing model. The use of technology was minimal, limited to basic channels such as instant messaging to communicate with customers. Furthermore, customer feedback was never sought nor was their return incentivized.
This small business was stagnant, without understanding why its growth was minimal or non-existent. Despite trying to encourage customers with promotions and advertising, the business did not improve. This was the perfect time for this business to adopt a Service Design approach that would help them better understand what was happening and find more effective ways to incentivize their customers by offering them a better experience.
Through service design, they realized that pet beauty services could function as a first stage for positioning and selling additional products to pet owners. This reversed the revenue stream, generating more revenue through product sales than from services provided to pets. Additionally, they adapted a process that ensured constant customer visits, transforming this service into a “Win-Win” for both the customer and the business.
To achieve this, they used the following service design methodologies:
This methodology involves exploring a particular experience for oneself and documenting it using field notes, audio recordings, videos, and photographs. This practice, also known as autoethnography/documentation, allowed the pet shop team to dive directly into the customer’s experience and capture in detail their interactions, emotions, and needs throughout their visit to a similar store.
By documenting customer experiences, the team was able to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities customers were facing, which further enriched the service design process and helped identify key areas for improvement and innovation.
Journey mapping helps visualize specific experiences of a key actor over time, allowing for a better understanding of interactions and touchpoints with customers throughout their pet shop experience.
Mapping systems is visualizing the ecosystem surrounding the services and products offered by the pet shop, which help identify interactions with other market actors and integration points.
A theatrical method is used to deeply understand and explore behaviors and processes through iterative rehearsal sessions, allowing for a deeper understanding of clients’ needs and expectations.
They used classic experience visualization tools from service design to generate ideas around the experience and process, which helped identify opportunities for improvement and new ways to deliver value to customers.
These tools and methodologies were instrumental in identifying areas of improvement and designing customer-centric solutions that allowed the pet shop to improve its experience and generate greater value for both customers and the business.
How did the pet shop accomplish all this with just service design? Let’s break it down with the steps service designers use for success.
Understanding the value your business offers to your customers is essential. By knowing your business in depth, you can identify areas for improvement, reduce costs, and potentially improve the efficiency of certain activities. Mapping your service processes allows you to identify where you could make improvements, taking into account both business and consumer needs.
Service design provides tools that allow you to see the business from different perspectives. For example, using the Business Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas, you can organize and define your company’s business model, as well as ensure that your product or service is aligned with what your customers really value.
This initial step is crucial as it helps you identify and define the right problem before designing any solution. Understanding business objectives is fundamental before seeking effective solutions.
First, let’s approach customers with in-depth research. You can do this in a variety of ways, from direct observation to surveys and interviews, to begin uncovering customer needs. This research can help identify patterns, behaviors, and customer preferences.
Then, you can use this knowledge to personalize services and/or products, adapting them to customer expectations and even surprising them. This contributes to creating greater value, increasing satisfaction, and generating long-term loyalty, in addition to encouraging recommendations.
In this stage, it is not necessary to follow a rigid structure. One of the best recommendations is to engage in conversations with customers, listen to what they have to say and observe their actions during all service touchpoints as if you were their shadow.
If you decide to conduct direct interviews, prepare a semi-structured interview. This involves generating questions that customers can casually answer, and encouraging informal chat that helps the customer feel comfortable and open up more easily.
Here are some suggestions for questions:
It is important to pay attention to “artifacts” — that is, the objects that customers interact with while receiving the service. These artifacts can be physical, cognitive, emotional, or social, and understanding their function is essential to understanding the service environment.
In the case of the pet shop, service design helped identify multiple improvement points at different moments in the service process. This included the implementation of technological tools, process optimization, and the elimination of unnecessary activities. There was even a restructuring of the business model, focusing more on care products and improving their quality and offering.
Documentation and analysis are fundamental pillars in the service design process. Systematically organizing research findings ensures that customer needs and expectations are adequately addressed. In addition, analyzing the collected data allows for identifying patterns and trends, offering valuable information for the effective design of services.
During this stage, cultivate empathy and deep consumer understanding. Beyond listening to what customers say, it is about understanding their emotions, motivations, and needs. Empathy is key to designing solutions that truly solve problems and improve the customer experience significantly.
Once you’ve collected enough information about consumers and the business, it is time to collaborate as a team with key stakeholders and collaborators. Working together, you will be able to generate ideas, map them, build them, and test them before implementing them in the business. Prototyping plays a crucial role in this process, allowing ideas to be tested economically to determine their viability in the real world.
To visualize, synthesize, and analyze the data you’ve found, use specific methodologies and tools. These tools not only help organize and make sense of the information but also serve as a basis for continuously iterating and adjusting the service. Some of these tools include:
Journey maps allow us to visualize specific customer experiences over time:
System maps provide a view of the ecosystem surrounding the services and products offered:
Empathy maps help us understand the emotions and needs of customers:
Now, a service designer typically runs some workshops to deep dive into research.
Workshops are crucial, as they ideate, define, design, and test service prototypes, allowing iteration and adjustment until they are ready for real-world implementation directly into the business.
You need to have the right people in the room, with different profiles that bring diverse visions to the business ecosystem. All exercises conducted in the workshops are highly visual and interactive. This means everyone can see and interact with the tools that help organize information and ideas:
Remote workshops are equally effective. Service Designers use tools such as Miro, Whimsical, or Mural to carry out these sessions. These platforms are intuitive and provide a similar experience to in-person sessions.
The typical structure of a service design workshop is as follows:
It is important to limit the time of each activity. Although passion may lead to wanting to explore ideas for a long time, the most creative moments usually last between 15 and 30 minutes. Typically, a brainstorming workshop lasts around 60 minutes, although it can vary depending on the complexity of the problem and the motivation and experience of the group.
The outcome of consumer outreach and research should help validate assumptions about customer needs and uncover new pain points. In this stage, the problems that consumers face and the needs they might have when consuming the business’s products or services are defined.
A useful practice at this stage is to formulate problem statements using the structure “How might we (problem)?” This implies that solutions exist and encourage collaborative creativity. Avoid general questions and focus on specific problems detected by you and the team.
Some examples could be:
Brainstorming is an essential process that creates a safe and creative environment where people feel free to express any idea without fear of being judged, thus encouraging the generation of new ideas. Therefore, it is essential to create a work environment that encourages creativity and active participation. This can be achieved by considering the layout of the space, lighting, comfort, and the provision of necessary resources such as whiteboards, paper, and markers.
Designating a trained facilitator to lead the brainstorming session can be very helpful. The facilitator can keep the ideas flowing, ensure that all voices are heard, and help maintain focus on the session’s objective. It is important that the facilitator encourages people to come up with all kinds of ideas, from the most logical to the most extravagant and crazy, as this can trigger creativity and active participation in the team.
In these sessions, there is no specific target number of ideas; the more ideas generated, the better. The goal is to obtain a wide variety of different proposals:
Avoid becoming obsessed with a single idea since service design is about listening, observing, and co-creating ideas together.
For example, some ideas that emerged to address the questions posed in the pet shop could be:
Once the brainstorming session has generated a wide range of concepts, it’s time to bring those ideas to life through tangible prototypes. These prototypes can vary in complexity, from simple sketches to interactive simulations, but they all share the same goal: to create visual and functional representations of the proposed solutions to test them and obtain feedback.
During this phase, it is essential to involve real users as much as possible. User testing using the prototypes allows direct feedback to be collected on usability, effectiveness, and customer satisfaction. This feedback reveals aspects of the design that may require adjustments or improvements before final implementation.
Note that the prototyping and testing process is iterative. As you obtain feedback from users, you make adjustments to the prototypes and retest it until you reach a satisfactory design. This iterative methodology guarantees continuous improvement and ensures that the final service meets the needs and expectations of customers.
The ability to quickly iterate on prototypes is essential to this process. This may require an agile and flexible approach that allows for continuous adjustments and improvements as the design progresses.
During the brainstorming phase, have the participation of the entire team in the prototyping and testing process. This involves not only service designers and developers, but also representatives from customer service, sales, marketing, and other relevant departments. The inclusion of diverse perspectives and knowledge enriches the process and increases the chances of successful implementation.
Once you’ve finished and finalized the prototype, it is time to bring these solutions to the real business environment. During this crucial implementation phase, clear and effective communication becomes the key to ensuring a smooth transition. This involves keeping everyone involved, informed, and providing the training and support necessary to make the process successful.
However, implementation does not mark the end of the work. Continuous service evaluation is essential to ensure its long-term success and continuity. This involves actively monitoring service performance, collecting data and feedback from customers, and making adjustments as necessary.
To properly evaluate service performance, identify and track key performance metrics, such as customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, profitability, and customer loyalty. These metrics will provide a clear view of whether the service meets established business objectives and will guide future improvements and adjustments.
In addition, continuous evaluation involves establishing customer feedback systems, such as surveys, online comments, or social media analysis, to capture customer opinions on a regular basis and in real time. This constant feedback is essential to identifying improvement opportunities and staying agile and responsive to changing customer needs.
To support this process, it is essential to cultivate an organizational culture that values learning and continuous improvement. This involves being open to feedback, learning from mistakes, and being willing to adapt and change as necessary to meet customer needs.
Maintaining effective communication at all stages of the process is another key aspect. This includes communicating openly and clearly with the internal team, clients, and other relevant stakeholders. Transparency and clarity are essential to building strong relationships and keeping everyone informed and engaged.
Finally, flexibility is essential. Service implementation is a dynamic and constantly evolving process, and it is important to be prepared to adjust course as necessary to achieve business objectives and meet customer needs.
The service design approach offers an invaluable opportunity for small businesses to improve their services and customer experiences. By synthesizing all information and agreements in a service blueprint, companies can define and version their services over time, adapting them to the evolution of their business.
The benefits of this approach are clear: it provides a deep understanding of customer needs and expectations, allowing solutions to be designed that truly solve problems and improve the customer experience. Additionally, by involving the entire team in the design process, you encourage collaboration and leverage the perspectives and knowledge of all relevant departments.
I encourage other companies to adopt this approach. By doing so, they will be able to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive market by offering services that fit perfectly with their customers’ needs.
Additionally, careful attention to service design can make a big difference in the success of a business. By focusing on customer experience and continuous improvement, companies can build strong relationships with their customers and stay agile and responsive to their changing needs. Ultimately, this can lead to greater long-term growth and success.
For a deeper understanding of the approach, as well as most of the tools and methodologies used in service design, it is recommended to consult the following resources:
“This is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World” – This book offers a practical and comprehensive guide on how to apply service design thinking in the real world. Provides an overview of the key concepts, tools, and techniques used by service design professionals.
“This is Service Design Doing: Methods” – This resource offers free access to a wide range of detailed methods and steps for conducting each service design workshop. It includes detailed descriptions, practical examples, and downloadable templates to make each method easy to implement.
“Understand the Service Design Process” – Service design process results in a system, a service concept, and a strategy for transitioning from the current system to the preferred system.
By utilizing these resources, service design professionals can gain in-depth knowledge of best practices, tools, and methodologies to address real-world service design challenges. These resources offer a solid foundation for those looking to improve their skills in user-centered design and create exceptional experiences for their client.
Header image source: IconScout
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