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Connecting Customers to the Business and the Organization

Service design offers a perspective, method, and tool set that enables an organization to realize business ambitions as well as a way to deal with internal and external challenges. It offers an approach to deal with strategic initiatives as well as operational challenges by asking three fundamental questions:

1. What does this do for our current and future customers?

2. How will our business be impacted?

3. Which capabilities are needed by the organization to respond or to drive the initiative?

The main objective of the approach is to resolve customer-related challenges, but balance them with business drivers and the organizations' capabilities. Other times, understanding the customers' perspective will provide clarity and direction needed to achieve business results or to drive organizational change. It is important to separate business concerns from the people, structures, and capabilities that make up the organization. In all cases, service design starts by taking an outside-in perspective, and drive this through real business objectives while considering an organization's capabilities.

Customer-Business-Organization

Understand Customers and Build High-Value Relationships

Seeing a business through customers' eyes offers powerful insights that make customers' expectations, experience, and behavior more tangible. It exposes customers' pain points and provides deeper understanding of their emotions as they interact and transact with a business. This enables companies to identify clear intervention points that can be leveraged to increase value for customers and deal with challenges, typically to:

● Increase customer satisfaction and improve the level of adoption

● Reduce customer irritations and prevent costly service failures

● Improve service experience for customers and build better customer relations

Service design can identify exactly which actions will make a real difference to customers and helps execute improvements in a way that bring people real, tangible value.

Business Can Win with Customers

Business objectives such as operational efficiency or higher market share bring many internal complexities with them when approached from the inside. A service design approach identifies key customer drivers that impact customers' behavior and finds customer-centric ways to achieve business objectives:

● Lower cost to serve existing and new customers.

● Increase customer retention.

● Create new sales or upsell opportunities.

● Successfully launch product and service innovations into the market.

Solutions to business challenges can be surprisingly simple when taking an outside-in approach to expose what is really relevant to customers and when used to find solutions in other sectors and businesses. A service design approach can help both to imagine radical solutions to complex problems and to implement many small incremental improvements that together create massive top-line and bottom-line impact.

Align the Organization around Customers

Aligning departments, channels, partners, and stakeholders requires management focus, as does the need to optimize and adjust the internal workings of the organization. This creates a strong internal focus and many organizations lose sight of the fact that the most important customer is the external customer. This results in practices, systems, and processes that do not serve customers, or worse, create obstacles for staff and customers. Understanding customers – especially their needs and expectations of the organization – translated to the reality of how the organization operates and runs enables organizations to achieve:

● Internal understanding and alignment

● High staff engagement and participation

● More customer-centric focus, leading to increased market agility

A service design approach provides the customer as an outside reference, not only to align people in an organization, but also to deal with internal challenges around systems, processes, procedures, and policies.

The concept of service design as a way to approach customers, the business, and organization is a model we refer to in many of the chapters in this book as we go about explaining how.