For additional content on the topics discussed in this book, case studies and service design tools and approaches, visit: www.liveworkstudio.com/SDforB
Copyright © 2016 by Livework Studio Ltd. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Reason, Ben, 1972- author. | Løvlie, Lavrans, 1969- author. | Flu,
Melvin Brand, 1966- author.
Title: Service design for business : a practical guide to optimizing the
customer experience / Ben Reason, Lavrans Løvlie, Melvin Brand Flu.
Description: Hoboken, N.J. : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2016] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015032743 | ISBN 9781118988923 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Customer services. | Customer relations.
Classification: LCC HF5415.5 .R435 2016 | DDC 658.8/12— dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015032743
Cover design: Wendy Lai
Cover images: Peshkova / Shutterstock; Anna Frajtova / iStockphoto
Illustrations: Melissa Gates
Editor: Wendy Van Leeuvan
Photographs: Livework
ISBN 978-1-118-98892-3
Design is trending in business. Business gurus are writing about design and the value it offers to more traditional business practice to enable innovation, collaboration, and creativity. Forrester Research describes service design as “the most important design discipline.” Businesses like Apple, Dyson, and Philips have raised the awareness of the value of design to business. Other major businesses are bringing design capabilities in-house. IBM is building its Design Studio. Capital One Bank acquired leading design agency Adaptive Path. Mayo Clinic has its own design practice. The U.K. government is hiring designers in areas including tax and revenue and justice. Leading management consultancies are recognizing the value of design, too. McKinsey has bought design studio Lunar. Accenture acquired Fjord in the digital design space.
In light of these developments, we want to help business and government organizations understand what design can do for services—but what is service design? Service design is the design of services. When we started Livework in 2001, we wanted to have a positive impact on the way people live and work. Service design is helping us make that impact—it improves and innovates the services we use day to day. Banking and insurance, health care, transportation, business services, and a wealth of government activities are all services.
Organizations spend significant time designing tangible products. Services receive less design attention; however, to succeed in today's marketplace, this needs to change. Generally, services are less productive and cause more frustration to customers than products. We love our BMWs more than our banks. Service design addresses this quality and productivity gap.
Service design has been around for 20 years and has matured from a niche design discipline to a more comprehensive and accessible way to tackle customer, business, and organizational challenges. However, it is still under-recognized and undervalued by businesses. This book aims to address this in two ways: first, by putting the value of service design into business terms, and second, by showing how service design can connect to core business outcomes and capabilities.
Reading this book should give you a clear understanding of how you can use service design for specific challenges in your organization and what results to expect from doing so.
This book is for people in businesses or large organizations. It aims to be valuable to those involved in business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and government services. As all services ultimately service human beings, there are common principles and tools that can be used across all sectors.
Service design can help start-ups, small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs), and large organizations design better services. In this book, we focus mostly on challenges faced by many large or established organizations. Start-ups can use service design effectively, but we have focused on challenges that we see faced by our clients in large or established organizations. These are the challenges of change, collaboration, innovation, and customer focus that many big outfits face.
We identified three types of audience that we think will benefit from this book.
Our first group is people who care about customers, or who are in a role where customers are a key consideration. You work in customer experience, insight, marketing, customer service, innovation management, or digital roles. Or you may be a leader who understands the importance of customers to your business and strategy.
Many people in these roles understand customers well and have insight into their experiences and needs. Often, though, you struggle to turn insight into action. You struggle to develop designs for improved customer experience, to generate concepts for how to compete for customers' attention and loyalty and to make these ideas tangible and realistic.
You may also struggle to connect customer insight to change in the organizations we work for. Great ideas fall on deaf ears and either fail to get support or get watered down in implementation when they encounter the challenge of changing the way a business operates. This can be due to the challenge of communicating to others, collaborating on a shared vision, or understanding the mechanisms that need to change.
For you, this book starts on familiar customer territory. It also gives you insight into how to better structure insight into service experiences in order to manage improvement and innovation through the business and organization.
If you are in a strategic or commercial role, such as sales, retention, or growth, your focus is on performance and business results. However, understanding customers, their behaviors, choices, and needs are critical and have a big impact on performance.
In services, performance is dependent on customer behavior. Strategies flounder on the reality of the marketplace, and business models work in the abstract but do not always translate into results. Strategy needs to be more experimental to interface with the customer's world. Business objectives require successful engagement of customers to meet desired outcomes.
This book helps you discover levers that move customers in positive ways. It also offers new and more action-oriented service design tools for business people to develop, test, and implement strategies that are effective in the market.
Our third group is people who are more internally focused. You work in a part of the organization that maintains business as usual and also receives requests for change and improvement from the business. Working in IT, HR, or operations, you may feel that there is a lack of clarity and joined-up thinking. The silo factor, which most large organizations describe, is most keenly felt internally.
In these roles, you need to understand what the goals are so you can support them with the right solution in your area of expertise. You need to know what the other moving parts are in the business so you can integrate effectively, and you need to keep the business-as-usual lights on.
All parts of a business have one thing in common: the customer. This book helps you see the organization through the lens of the customer. It provides service design tools that can help internal teams take more control of the demands that are made of them—the tools can also help to connect to colleagues on the business side and manage prioritization and change.
We have structured this book around 12 challenges where we have seen service design have business impact. These challenges are grouped into three areas: “The Customer Story,” focusing on service design impacting on customer experience, “Business Impact,” diving into how service design can be used to address business challenges, and “Organizational Challenge,” where we go deeper into how service design can be used to work with the people, structures, and systems of organizations to help move things forward.
Before we get into the challenges, we set the scene in two ways. First, by introducing the basics that cover the key trends that we see as the conditions we live and work in, which provide the context for the emergence and value of service design. Second, we cover some of the core concepts of service design that are useful to understand before tackling the challenges.
After the basics we go into some more detail on foundations. This is an overview of what we see as fundamental aspects of services and how we can understand them better in order to innovate and improve service by design.
Finally, we finish the book by unpacking some of the key tools we use in day-to-day practice with the aim of leaving you better equipped to start your service design journey.