Service Design Explained

Service Design is a discipline that helps you to innovate in services. It’s a specialism within innovation management that helps design and deliver great services. Service design is the practice of defining and building customer experiences that are compelling and transformational. Service design projects improve factors like ease, satisfaction, loyalty and efficiency right across areas such as environments, communications and products – and not forgetting the people who deliver the service.

How does it work?

Service design begins with understanding what you’re trying to make better, why you want to make it better and how it could best serve people’s needs.

Service design helps you imagine a variety of solutions and decide which would be most appropriate. It shows how to make the new service idea come to life through the things that users of the service would experience, and help to understand what needs to happen behind the scenes to ensure the service performs well.

Why design a service?

If you’re a commercial business it’s well worth looking at whether your offer is as worthwhile and enjoyable for customers as it can be. The better the experience the more they’ll return.

Public sector organizations don’t need to make a profit in the same way but as it’s tax payers’ money they’re spending, they too need to be as effective as possible. Providers like schools and hospitals have a duty to work even harder than commercial brands to create services that make people feel positive about the experiences they are having.

Who needs their services designed?

Anybody who provides a service, whether within a physical environment – such as a hotel, school, airport, hospital, or public transport system – or through other means, for example a mobile phone, cable television, or online.