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Service & Product Designer


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What does a Service Designer actually do?



21 July 2020



Any existing organisations are set up to do something...

  • The state of a country collects money from its citizens in order to run public services
  • Supermarket chain sells you food and other essential goods because everybody needs essential goods to survive.
  • And you need to go to a beauty salon or shopping for clothes to keep your hair neat and make you more desirable...

A service is something that helps someone to do something.



However, over time, many organisations tend to sprawl and slowly start losing the plot...


And this is bad because they tend to forget the customer! (they also then to forget the employee too).



In these times losing customers is dangerous because the customer is empowered. They have the power to choose and choose to go to your competitor for the first time they feel unsatisfied with your service.


Also, we simply cannot afford to run public services ineffectively, because the people that contribute to our society normally don't know how to fill the public forms or have to pay taxes because they have a pet or they keep calling the council, but no one helps. And the public services should be the perfect service to everybody have a great quality of life.



Service Designers to the rescue!



1. The Service Designer start to study the customers/users.

Through observation of the real situation, and interviews with customers/users.


2. Then, they try to figure out how the process works inside the organisation...

By researching all the internal process of the organization and interview the directors and employees


3. Then, they streamline it by co-designing with users!

Through workshops, all the solutions are designed in collaboration with the users to meet their expectations and needs.


The result is a clearer "customer journey" and a Service Blueprint, and a company that aligns its activities around the customer.



Unfortunately the Service Design approach can hit a few stumbling blocks



1. Management think it's only for the digital parts in Service delivery


2. The transition from digital to "real world" is hard... sometimes almost impossible.

For example:

  • Incentives don't support new ways of working.
  • Iterative process does not become part of the workflow.
  • No senior management buy-in.


So the issue is (as with almost everything):

EXECUTION,

EXECUTION,

EXECUTION!


Is very hard to make Service Design projects to happen. Normally, after present the perfect solution to an organization, the organization doesn't want to advance with the solution (even with the organization say "this is exactly what my clients want!").


So the question is Service Designers have the solution to move the mountain, does the mountain want to be moved...?



Thanks for reading!





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