Service Design

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of service design as a human-centric approach for creating, describing, and operationalizing new or improved services. It outlines how service design relates to topics such as service innovation and new service development, as well as the key characteristics associated with the concept today. The service design process including a selection of specific methods is introduced and illustrated.

Review Section

4.1.1 Review Questions

• 1. Remember a disappointing service situation you experienced yourself and reflect on why you were disappointed. What was worse, the fact that something went wrong or the way the service provider reacted to your complaint?

• 2. What could the service provider have done to fix the issue in a satisfactory way? Do you see a possibility how a service provider could turn the unlucky accident into a positive experience for the customer?

• 3. What types of education that business students as well as technical students typically do not receive do bring designers to the table when it comes to designing a service?

• 4. As discussed in the chapter there is no standard template for a persona. What pieces of information would you include in your template and why?

• 5. Where exactly do you see a difference between the typical description of a customer segment and a persona? What do you reckon is the ratio between a customer segment and the number of personas needed to represent the segment? Is it 1:1?

• 6. What are the pros and cons of the various customer journey maps as shown in Fig. 4.8?

• 7. Can you think of any downside of deriving ideas for innovations from the customer journey?

• 8. Thinking about the Kano model, do you expect the association of a requirement to type 1, 2, or 3 to be stable over time?

• 9. Explain how service blueprinting achieves the following goals: map the value exchanges and identify touchpoints; explain the interactions between customers and provider’s staff; and expose how interactions are supported by backstage activities.

• 10. Self-service technologies are technological interfaces that enable customers to co-produce services without a direct employee involvement (e.g., ATM, gas pump terminals, and hotel check out kiosks). Can blueprinting also be used to model the services provided by self-service technologies? If the modeling is feasible, explain any adaptation that needs to be made to the method. Otherwise, justify why blueprinting is not adequate to use with self-service technologies.

4.1.2 Project

As a challenge, imagine you were asked by your local public transport company to overturn ticket sales. Try to improve the existing ticket sales process or develop a new one by applying service design methods. Start by building a team of three to five students, conduct a short workshop, and brainstorm on ideas for an improved ticket sales process.

Next, put those results aside and start applying the service design methods: sketch a stakeholder map for your challenge. On the customer side there may be the young Generation-Y student, the pensioner, the business person, or a parent with kids. Can you think of other typical customers? What are further stakeholders do you see, who are not customers? After drawing the stakeholder map, pick two types of customers and try to create a persona for them. Try to make them as real as possible without exaggerating or even turning them into ridicule. Start building the personas in a brainstorming session at your desk. Then go out, observe, and interview people who are similar to your personas and incorporate your observations into the persona maps. How did the picture of the personas change during this exercise? Did they get richer? Did some of your clichés of a persona turned out to be wrong?

For both of your personas start creating a customer journey map for the existing ticket sales process as outlined in the chapter. Take a camera or your smartphone, go out, observe, and interview people alike to your persona. Pay attention to the timeframe you cover in your journey map. After completion and review of the journey maps start generating ideas for improvement of the ticket sales process again by conducting a brainstorming workshop.

Finally, take out the idea map you generated at the very beginning and compare it to the result of your second brainstorming session. How do they differ?

4.1.3 Key Terms

Service Concept :

The service concept describes in detail the needs of the targeted customers, what actions to take to meet these needs, and how to operationally implement these actions.

New Service Development :

Describes the process of developing a new service from the early development stages to its market introduction.

Service Design :

The systematic application of design methods and principles to the creation of service concepts for new or improved services.

Stakeholder Map :

A visual tool that allows to represent groups or individuals who either affect or are affected by an organization’s objectives, their level of commitment with the organization, and their relevance to the organization.

Persona :

A fictitious representation of an individual that puts a face on an archetypical member of a group of people—mostly users. It serves as a memorable design target and, therefore, helps to guide design decisions.

Customer Journey Map :

A diagram that illustrates the steps customers go through when participating in service delivery. This map provides a structured visualization of a service customers’ experience.

Service Blueprinting :

An operational tool that describes graphically the processes, activities, and roles of services’ interactions in a level of detail which enables implementation, verification, and maintenance. The output of the tool is a service blueprint which contains a process model-like structure.

4.1.4 Further Reading

Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason. Service Design. Rosenfeld Media, 2013.

Anna Meroni and Daniela Sangiorgi. Design for Services (Design for Social Responsibility). Gower Publishing Ltd, Farnham, 2011.

Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider. This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases. Wiley, 2012.

The bootcamp bootleg. http://dschool.stanford.edu/use-our-methods/the-bootcamp-bootleg/. Stanford D. School, 2014

The virtual crash course in service design. http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/. Stanford D. School, 2014