Name: This is Service Design Thinking
Rating: 4.3 (98 reviews)
Author: Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider

What’s in it for me? Enhance your customers’ service experience with service design.

Imagine you’re a car manufacturer. Each time a customer settles into the driver’s seat, she will see your brand logo on the steering wheel, reminding her of the company whose product she’s using – your company. And if you sell phones, shirts or books, the story is much the same: your product is a subtle reminder of your company.

But what if you sell haircuts, bus rides or some other, less physical product – in other words, what if you offer services? How do you go about designing those? What should you keep in mind? What keeps customers coming back for more?

These blinks explain the basic principles of successful service design and provide you with methods and tools to enhance your service. You will learn how to create a good service experience, how to interact with your customers and how to make those customers come back for more.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why quantitative data cannot distinguish between Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne;
why service design is like making a movie; and
why the service experience begins well before you offer your actual service.

Service design should revolve around customers, while keeping in mind their potential differences.

What is service design? Well, there’s no single definition; it’s an evolving and interdisciplinary approach that combines multiple methods and tools to design new services.

However, there are five common principles that most everyone agrees on.

The first is that the process of service design should be user-centered. Or, to put it another way, when designing a service, the customer should be treated as a crucial piece of the process.

Unlike a physical product, a service is a process – an interaction between the service provider and the service user, the customer. So any successful service will recognize the customer as a central part of the process.

For instance, let’s look at a public transportation service, such as a bus. This is a valuable public service that benefits countless customers; the service would be of little value, however, if the bus didn’t stop at and travel to locations convenient to these customers.

Okay, so what if you’re trying to design a successful service of your own. There’s one pitfall, in particular, to be wary of: an overreliance on quantitative data, such as statistics.

Statistics are undoubtedly a great source of information, especially for discovering popular trends, such as when during the day people are most in need of a bus, but this isn’t enough to provide a valuable service.

Let’s say there are two people with very similar traits. They’re both married and financially successful men, they’re both around 70 years old, and they were both born in the United Kingdom. But based on these statistics alone, you wouldn’t know which one is Prince Charles and which one is Ozzy Osbourne, and it goes without saying that these men are quite different from one another.

This should remind you that no two customers are exactly alike. Each one has a culture, a set of habits, a range of motivations. If you want to fully understand your customer base, you can’t underestimate these differences; this qualitative information must be considered in combination with statistics in your efforts for a successful service design.

Use things such as souvenirs to extend the service, and think holistically to find new ways of improving.

Now that we’ve covered the first three principles of service design let’s turn to the last two – evidencing and holistic thinking.

When designing a service, it’s good to think of a tangible item, or physical evidence, for your service. This is something that can prolong the service and act as a reminder for a customer after they’ve used the service – a sort of service souvenir, if you will.

A customer journey map helps you see the grand design of your service as well as isolate individual features.

A stakeholder map isn’t the only tool that can help you see the big picture of your service. There’s also a tool called the customer journey map that works as a great visual aid for service designers.

A customer journey map can be created by listing and connecting all of the touchpoints and interactions that you make with a customer.

Key ideas in This is Service Design Thinking

About the Author

Marc Stickdorn, a service-design consultant, is the cofounder of Destinable, a consultancy firm that specializes in designing tourism services. He is also a professor and lecturer at MCI Management Center Innsbruck, in Austria.

Jakob Schneider is a German visual designer and the creative head of the design agency KD1. Together with Marc Stickdorn, Schneider has cofounded two start-ups, ExperienceFellow and Smaply. He also works as a consultant for brands such as Volkswagen, Deutsche Telekom and Siemens.