The Covid-19 pandemic supercharged us through the experience economy and straight into the convenience economy. The modern consumer lives in a world of what I want, when I want it, how I want it.

I no longer have to do my own grocery shopping. All I have to do to get a ride somewhere is open an app. So why should I have to dial a phone and wait on hold to schedule an appointment? Why should I have to search through lengthy provider lists to find an in-network dentist?

Many services continue to head the way of phone-to-door. Photos from Pexels.com.

The list goes on, and the organizations that leverage these facts are the ones that will create a distinct advantage in their industry’s marketplace.

But here are typically complex orchestrations of digital and physical interactions, people, and resources that need to be organized to eliminate these frictions and enable seamless experiences.

To make it happen, companies are focusing on service design to improve how we leverage technology, people, and processes to deliver products and services to digitally-savvy consumers.

What is service design?

Service design is a human-centered approach to planning and organizing a businesses’ people, technology, data, and processes to enhance an experience by integrating products and services, both front and backstage.

And it goes beyond the user experience — recognizing that connections are person-to-person, not just between a consumer and a device.

When was the last time you called customer service — for anything — gave your personal info and described your needs, only to be transferred to another agent asking you to repeat the exact same information you already provided?

Photo by Alex Green

This is an example of a pain point that stems from an internal process flaw, produced by a lack of service design and leaving individuals to manage the pieces — rather than the whole. By not rallying around the entire end-to-end consumer experience, companies risk creating services that react slowly to market needs and opportunities.

Service design provides organizations with the confidence to evolve. While staying aligned to business goals, it encompasses all touchpoints of the consumer-to-user end-to-end experience as well as the business surface-to-core support functions.

As a result, end-users can participate in a frictionless, holistic, and superior experience.

If we dissect that same phone-based contact center example from earlier, we’d realize that the service experience was flawed before the human-to-human interaction ever began. Telephony-based services often rely on IVRs, or phone trees, that place the burden of finding the correct path to help on the consumer, hoping that they choose the right option and punishing them for incorrect paths with extended wait times, cold handoffs to other departments, or even an exit point that doesn’t always lead to re-entry or leaves the consumer searching for answers on their own.

Photo by Alex Green

Just like in the common stakeholder-to-designer relationship: Consumers with customer service-based needs should only be focused on bringing their problems, and customer service agents should be focused on solving them. Period.

In design, we see the term “problem” as an opportunity to make something better. That’s no different than how we should be viewing service-based consumer problems.

What does service design look like?

In service design, we typically divide different perspectives into three main stages: The frontstage, the backstage, and behind the scenes.

The frontstage (left), the back stage (middle), and behind the scenes (right) of a service blueprint

All three stages must work together. For example: The backstage is where the service provider team lives. So when backstage problems exist, they have frontstage consequences: Like poor service, which leads to customer frustration.

But streamlining backstage processes improves the service provider team experience, which, in turn, allows them to create better user experiences for the consumer. Connecting the two makes the consumer-to-service team connection stronger.

The primary artifact is a service blueprint: A holistic end-to-end (start to finish) and surface-to-core (top to bottom) visualization that documents all of the relationships and interdependencies between the components of an experience — people, assets (physical and digital), as well as processes — that support each touchpoint in the consumer journey.

Mapping these touchpoints when documenting current-state experiences allows us to find opportunities to improve future-state experiences, in addition to things like planning for gaps and even considering the consumer’s emotions and thoughts, which lead to service-related goals.

Bringing everything together

4 reasons why service blueprints are important

1. A blueprint provides a comprehensive and exhaustive understanding of an experience—all experiences—and the underlying resources, technologies, and processes (seen and unseen to consumers ) that make the service possible and successful.
2. But it’s also an artifact that helps businesses discover problem spaces and document potential solutions that remove friction.
3. Blueprints orchestrate cross-department efforts by aligning and coordinating business units across an organization to provide a clear line of sight to potential overlaps and organizational dependencies.
4. And — and this is a benefit that I particularly appreciate for product design teams — it helps architects and engineers understand not only what they are building, but who they are doing it for and why.

8 tips for making your service design a reality

1. First, start with the customer needs. Generate problem statements from them. Consider the possible problems to tackle: Which ones have the most significant impact on the consumer experience first.
2. You can co-design with consumers, stakeholders, architects, and support staff — whoever has a valuable perspective to provide so that your service phases have tangible outcomes.
3. Create a vision around meeting customers, and their needs, where they are. And stay consumer-focused when crafting solutions.
4. Design every touchpoint — the ones visible to consumers and those that aren’t — to eliminate friction. When you’re done, you can prioritize what to tackle first and what warrants longer-term consideration.
5. Look to analogous industries for ideas. It’s often easier and faster to solve a problem when looking at how others have solved it first.
6. And, over time, reshape organizations to obsessively focus on consumer pain points with the goal of delivering better experiences.
7. Your service blueprint should always reflect a future-state experience. So when your future-state vision catches up with your current-state offering, it’s time to start looking for opportunities again.
8. Last: Hire designers who are thinkers rather than makers. Service design does not equal interface design.

Because I always enjoy a good book recommendation, here are two excellent resources on service design: This is Service Design Doing by Marc Stickdorn and Good Services: How to Design Services that Work by Lou Downe.