Service Design for Business. Løvlie Lavrans

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.