Service design looks at the service comprehensively from the customer’s perspective. In other words, service design applies to everyone and everything. Or, well, it should.

Concepts like customer experience, customer understanding, customer orientation, uniform service quality, service promise and value proposition are basic concepts of service design, without forgetting the business resources.

Benefit 1:

It Is Cheaper to Notice an Error at the Start

Service design ensures that the product and service is developed for users and the group of purchasing customers.

Service design ensures the delivery of value to the customer and the customer’s customer. Service design also looks at service development from the customer’s perspective. At best, it focuses on the customer in the early stages of product development. This ensures that the product and service is developed for users and the group of purchasing customers. Service design takes both the user experience and customer experience into account. User experience emphasizes functionality and ease, while customer experience leaves a memory. UX is therefore not CX.

The long cycle of service design starts from the functionality of the company’s customer orientation and internal service for ensuring customer orientation in service development and nailing down the customer experience of multi-channel customers. We think that service design is so important that you should handle it yourself, rather than assign it to any external party.

Benefit 2:

Service Design Breaks Silos

Service design is often described as a stage, with the customer playing the role of the audience. In other words, the customer does not know, nor do they need to know, what is happening backstage. The customer is not interested in what is happening within the company. Instead, the customer is aware of how things are done backstage. The nature of the company’s “internal service” is visible to the customer. At its most extensive, service design starts from the development of the work community experience and streamlining the activities of the teams.

Large companies in particular face the challenge that departments and employees may form a silo mentality around their own functions. In this case, development takes place within the same circles, without any fresh thoughts coming in. The risk is that people will only see things from one, i.e. their own, point of view. Another risk is that when tasks are moved from one department to another, they may drop into no one’s zone. Service design answers these challenges: it ensures that the boundaries of the silos are broken, ideas are exchanged and work goes smoothly without the customer even noticing the exchanges between departments.

Benefit 3:

With Service Design, You Lead How Customers Experience the Company

At best, a customer’s path is smooth and pleasant. In this case, the customer’s experience is also positive, and they are happy to deal with the company – perhaps even share their experience with their acquaintances. The world is full of services and products. Companies are now standing out through the customer’s experience of the product, service, company, person, or brand. People are increasingly buying experiences, not concrete things. Feelings affect people’s decisions more than seeing the matter be taken care of.  

Companies are now standing out through the customer’s experience of the product, service, company, person, or brand.

Operating through multiple channels brings its own challenges, as it is difficult for companies to manage all their channels. The power has shifted to the customers. In order for companies to keep the reins on leading customers, regardless of which channel or medium the customer uses, it is important to ensure the uniform quality of the service and genuine customer orientation, as well as understand the customer’s needs and identify their paths as early as possible. Going through all this once is not enough; instead, you need to lead it constantly, i.e. develop, edit and react. There are so many variables that if you want permanent and significant results, it is important for service design to be integrated deep into the organization’s core. True development is best achieved when the personnel have the tools and skills to primarily manage the wide field of service design by themselves.

Benefit 4:

By Delivering Value to the Customer, You Are Also Enhancing Your Own Business

The market is changing rapidly, and customers are responsive to it. The lifecycle of products and services is at risk of becoming shorter: companies must be more responsive to changes. For this reason, development must be continuous. The challenge is that customers may not even know what they want. One benefit of service design is that even though the customer is the focus point, service design does not bow down to the customer while turning its back on its own company; instead, it also takes the business goals and resources into account.

Benefit 5:

Companies That Utilize Service Design Are Customer-oriented and Provide a Positive Customer Experience

A successful customer experience can only be created in genuinely customer-oriented companies in which the basic concepts and philosophy of service design are part of everyday operations.

That is why it is important to involve the customer in the product development process and examine the operations by means of service design.

Despite this, many companies claim that they are customer-oriented while still producing products and services in a company-oriented manner: companies become so caught up in their way of operating that they cannot see themselves through an outsider’s eyes. A customer-oriented company is customer-oriented only if the customer is taken into account in all layers and phases of the company. It is too late to start including service design upon meeting the customer if the company wants to make customer orientation a permanent attribute. That is why it is important to involve the customer in the product development process and examine the operations by means of service design.

The Benefits of Service Design:

1. Products and services are designed for users and the group of purchasing customers
2. Closer cooperation between departments
3. Producing a positive customer experience
4. Implementing things sensibly while delivering value to the customer
5. Strengthening customer orientation

Please ask our service design consultant Maria Wan to tell you how your company would benefit from service design.