Service design.
80% of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience, but only 8% of their customers agree. Service design helps organisations bridge this gap by optimising and enhancing service delivery.
As an approach, service design draws on user-centred design philosophies central to Digital work, applying them to human experience of the service as a whole and in detail. A crucial difference from traditional top-down change programmes is that service users and service providers are actively engaged at early stages of design specification. This collaboration drives out the real and pertinent issues and ideas, whilst also improving the prospect of sustained buy in to the agreed solution.
Service design methods achieve this by rendering the service tangible and visible. Graphical, linear narratives of the customer journey are created, with no separation between people, process and artefacts. This helps cut through complexity and maintain focus on the customer’s experience.
As a result, service design provides the means of inventing new service components and concepts, as well as enhancing existing ones. The goal is always to balance customer need with organisational intent.
As a means of organisational change, the potential impact is enormous. Organisations like the NHS are discovering that, as well as delivering greater efficiencies, the changes invoked by service design prove far more sustainable, driven by a highly motivated team of the service providers themselves.
If you’d like to learn more about Service design, contact Jason Mesut at jasonmesut@theteam.co.uk. You might also want to check out our opinion piece on the subject of Service design.
(Thanks to Mance for sharing the above photo on Flickr)