Service Design Can Greatly Impact Businesses, and We Can Show You How

Daily, almost everyone consumes different kinds of services without really paying attention to them. What we know is that there are these "good services" that make our day the best one and others that are well-known as build-to-ruin-your-day services.

At least once, your day had been ruined by a phone company that didn't want to cancel your line or you had the improvement of a smile from an attendant of a little street market helping you to find your favorite chocolate. No matter what you are consuming, you have been impacted by customer experience, rather than built by huge squads planning it or just with the services small businesses create themselves. 

We have learned in tech that, with the right approach, we can create design squads to study, anticipate, and plan how the customer could feel better interacting with a service, and how it impacts on satisfaction, sales, and retention. We can map, strategize, and take action about the gaps and opportunities we find in our digital and offline experiences. However, what most companies forget about is that the experience needs to be built from a systemic view, connecting different action plans to improve the main experience and this includes the redesign of customer experience and mostly of internal processes too. 

Service design states that from a customer-centric view, everything is connected. At the end of the day, it is all about the person who will be experiencing the service and how the company will work to deliver this experience without friction. If User Experience Research works to bring the customer voice to the clients, and the Product Managers and Product Owners speak from the business, Service Design works in the gaps. We use the user experience design approach to build new services or redesign existing ones, firstly based on the data collected with User Experience research, secondly connecting with the operational part of the company through collaborative methods to better understand the connections and improvements that can be built beyond the squads.  

Recently, we applied the service design methods to build a Service Blueprint for one of our customers who was experiencing difficulties with client retention and the prioritization of digital initiatives. The client had lots of past studies indicating consumer behavior, consuming profiles, and a robust design team that works to improve the digital experience at the company. Moreover, the products and services that they offer are not just digital, the client experience there involves connecting with consultants, going to in-person events, and of course interacting with some digital touchpoints. But, with so many different touchpoints, how can we plan a full user experience only based on digital in this scenario? 

As a service design team, we offer to build a Service Blueprint to map the customer actions, understand how they interact with the different touchpoints, and further, how can we connect this journey with the operational part being more efficient in improving sales and retention.

Why build a Service Blueprint end-to-end? 

Service design involves research across all the stakeholders, giving a bird-eye perspective from staff to customer experience to inform the best business decisions. A Service Blueprint is only one of the many service design tools. 

To sum up: a map that connects: the user journey, the touchpoints, and the front and backstage processes. From a customer-centric view, we only improve customer experience by building an operational team that works from the front and backstage fully aware of the experience of their customers, and helps to co-create this experience. Good experience for staff equals satisfied customers. 

We choose the Service Blueprint because: 

1. Uses the customer journey map as a reference being customer experience centered turning the traditional silo method into a more participative one. 
2. Engaging with real people provides powerful insights on all levels of a service value proposition. (Polaine & Lovelie, 2013) 
3. Provides insight into how the customer's experience unfolds, not just how we think the service should run. 
4. The one-page role of responsibilities of a position is far away from how the service is performed daily: what people do and what they tell they do is different.
5. Provides the operations team with insight into the impact of their activities on the final experience. 
6. It can be used as a visual record of changes and improvements made to the service over time. 
7. Helps to identify initiatives that can overcome the squad limits breaking work silos.  

Over months of hard work, research, interviews, and workshops, we had the Service Blueprint mapped. Showing our client that they could improve work to specific areas that were being undertaken, proposing new actors that needed to be included in business decisions, and redesigning roles and responsibilities. More importantly, identifying the new opportunities of digital innovation that could help customers and staff, improve both experiences. 

Impacts achieved with the end-to-end Service Blueprint 

1. Dissemination of the customer's vision in the company and the teams' perception of its impact on the final experience. 
2. Recognition of previously unknown operational and customer pain points and gaps.
3. More efficient prioritization of team roadmaps: we know where we need to improve the experience and why. 
4. New initiatives to fill experience gaps.
5. New users are considered a priority for the internal team.
6. Possibility of working better on retention strategies by knowing exactly where the low points in the customer experience are.

"This Service Blueprint was of critical importance, as it provided valuable insights that opened people's eyes and minds. It was an outstanding and necessary piece of work." 

__ Digital LATAM Manager