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There are some key concepts that lie at the heart of service design, and understanding them helps you get the most out of this book. In this section, we explain concepts such as design thinking, qualitative customer research, and visualization and how they form a base for the service design approach to business.

The Design Approach

Companies often struggle to solve problems with the usual analytical and deductive tools. The design process offers a powerful alternative, providing a generative and creative approach to finding solutions.

Thinking By Doing

In business thinking, the assumption is that the answers to most problems are already out there. It is a matter of finding and evaluating different solutions, and then of selecting the right one for the particular market.

Design thinkers start from the assumption that there is a perfect solution out there, but it hasn't been invented yet. The design thinking approach helps you to imagine and test and redesign a solution quickly, until it matches the reality of the market. In practice, service design combines analytical and imaginative thinking.

Human-Oriented

Another fundamental starting point in design is empathy with the human (customer) and their experiences. When a business challenge involves being successful with customers, or inspiring staff to adopt new processes or ways of working, this is a great advantage. Seeing the business through your customers' eyes can help people from the CEO to operational teams to make better decisions.

Creative Processes

Design as an approach brings a whole raft of visual and creative methods to solve business challenges. Over the past two decades design thinking has shown that design processes can be applied not only to chairs and cell phones but also to complex problems like planning international security operations, optimizing hospital processes, and innovating banking services.

Creative design processes can seem both frivolous and confusing at first, but prove to have massive impact on bringing innovative services to market and bringing the organization along on challenging change journeys.

Qualitative Research

The service design approach puts emphasis on complementing quantitative research with qualitative methods. This enables teams to combine strong subjective understanding of the human experience with predictable patterns that apply to most customers. The result is services that not only satisfy customer needs and wants but also delight, inspire, and empower.

Insight versus Numbers

Market research is typically quantitative, based on large numbers of respondents, and delivers a few statistical “truths.” Qualitative customer research can yield significant insight with a small number of respondents. Combining market facts with inspiring insights about the humans who actually buy your service increases your chances at achieving success in the market.

Understand Behavior

Qualitative research helps to uncover the aspects of human behavior that can't be seen in the numbers. Diving deep into a few customers' lives will reveal the motivations for their actions and expose other things they do that can't be explained in a questionnaire.

Observed customer behavior is a highly valuable source of information as it provides a clear picture of how customers really experience services in their everyday lives as well as their needs and values. This insight is useful in the creative process of developing services that work for customers.

When behavioral insight is combined with economics, the results can gain highly strategic impact.

Insights That Drive Success in Practice

Experiences are human and subjective and can't be quantified. This doesn't mean that customer experiences can't be approached in a rational way. A service design approach enables you to generate nonquantifiable insight with the same structure and rigor that applies to other research and development techniques.

Ultimately, knowing your customers as humans makes it easier to shape every bit of service delivery to meet their needs and expectations – and design the interactions that delight and create desire.

The Power of Visual Storytelling

Visualization can be a powerful tool to take an organization from insight to results. It's particularly useful to better understand systems, processes, and customer experiences. Simple sketches and drawings can help clarify ideas, aid communications, and support convincing superiors, peers, and implementation teams.

Understand Complex Situations

Service delivery in today's marketplace often requires a complex integration of in-house and external IT systems. It involves multiple business functions and depends on a variety of processes to be well coordinated.

Visualization allows you to map these complex situations and creates an overview of all the parts and relationships between them. Maps, diagrams, and system drawings enable teams to understand situations better, gain a shared focus, and bring clarity to confusing information.

Communicate Ideas

Visualization helps people think and communicate. In the information-rich environments of business, access to knowledge is rarely the main challenge. What consumes time, effort, and brainpower is making ideas simple and understandable.

Drawings and designs are quick and effective ways to represent abstract ideas and can become highly potent tools for anyone who picks up a pen and stack of Post-its.

Describe Customer Experiences

One of our great role models, IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge, wisely said, “You can't have an experience without experiencing it.” Meaning that when you develop customer experiences that are made up by how people sense colors, space, shapes, and interactions, words lack the means to describe a target experience accurately.

Visualization of customer scenarios, retail spaces, websites, and cell phone interfaces and advertisements in the early strategic phases of development help you specify and communicate the target customer experience in much more precise ways. This helps you gain precision around business objectives and helps to identify how you reach them in practice.

Designing with People, Not for Them

Co-creation, often mentioned in conjunction with service design, is an approach to actively involve customers and staff in the creative aspects of developing services.

More traditional design approaches founded in product-centric companies focus on determining needs as a starting point for the development process, and then engineers develop the product before they are tested with customers before launch. This is an obvious way to go about development when the organization moves in product cycles of 6, 12, and 24 months.

In the service sector, things are different. Services are redesigned, optimized, and improved on a daily basis, while the service is up and running and being delivered by staff and experienced by customers. In this situation, it pays off to continually involve customers in the process of imagining new solutions and getting them ready for market.

Pull Ideas, Don't Push Them

An approach to designing with people recognizes that customers have clear needs and often good ideas about how they can be met. Opening up channels for customers to engage with development teams in creative ways, makes it easier to generate ideas that meet actual demands and desires. It's also a cheap and quick way to innovate

Design Solutions with Customers

Service excellence is primarily about continual improvement. Businesses that win are experts at avoiding customer irritations and inefficient delivery.

Actively allowing customers to contribute design ideas and combining this with observing their actual behavior provides a powerful basis to improve, design, and deliver experiences that really make a difference.

Design Solutions with Staff

The true service experts are the people that deliver the service every day. Some might meet customers face-to-face in a store, while others work behind the scenes in a logistics department.

In both cases, service employees have extremely detailed knowledge about what creates value for customers and what works for the business. Involving customer-facing staff in creative design helps decrease your chances of failure. The significant by-product is highly engaged staff that will embrace the improvement and change they were part of creating.

The Service Blueprint as Framework

When organizations struggle to satisfy their customers, they need to analyze the experience they deliver, understand when and how it adds value, and identify opportunities to improve the experience. The service blueprint can help do this: it gives a visual overview of all bits that constitute a service. The blueprint helps people in different areas of the organization see their part of the whole and resolves service delivery issues in a customer-oriented manner.