Service Design
A Co-Creative Design Technique that focuses on creation of a holistic service that is of benefit to both the users as well as the clients (organization), Focuses on transactions more than experience.
“Service Design helps to innovate(create new) or improve(existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for clients and efficient as well as effective for organizations. It is a new holistic, multi-disciplinary, integrative field.”
Nature & context
Co-Creative, Design Technique
Resources
Customer journey maps, expectations maps, stakeholder maps, service blueprints, tools for modeling and simulating the service, notes, recorder, camera.
Procedure
Before: Understand the context and conduct ethnographic research to gather the expectations of all stake holders involved namely the customer as well as the organization i.e., the service provider. Curate the list of design attributes as well as performance standards & metrics. Based on research and initial insights, map out customer journey maps and simultaneously curate the service blue print. Follow this by generating design concepts.
During: Based on the concept generated, develop specific design details for the service followed by simulating and modelling the same to give the feel of the service. This is followed by implementation of the service, the final deliverable..
After: Service management is key even after implementation. The steps after implementing service design involves assessing performance and satisfaction and work toward improving the performance, iteratively.
Use Case
While working for Microsoft, I designed a customization for “Outlook” that was called “Mail made easy”. The intention behind this, in my opinion, resembles service design. A customer support engineer’s daily routine includes sending out periodic emails to customers checking in about the status of their technical issue. While some of them are specific, most of the emails are generic except for may be the customer name. As a support engineer myself, I wanted to ease the process of regular drafting of generic emails for the engineer while also helping them maintain a unanimous, humble template that represents the company well to the customers. And the resulting service managed to achieve that.
Sense Making Data
A holistic design approach that gives equal value to each stakeholder and not just user centric. satisfying all stakeholders involved. But since it evolves with its usage, a service requires extensive maintenance.