Topic 3: Service Design

Designing and Strategy in Services

Service Design

With the evolution of the service economy, organizations identified the need to bring the same business rigor applied to products to the services they increasingly delivered. Service design was introduced by Lynn Shostack in her 1984 article “Designing Services That Deliver” as a means to understand and manage services. The “service blueprint” was offered as a method to describe a service and to identify critical parts of the customer experience. In this class, we will discuss the elements of service design, and how designers can control the positioning of a service, whether that be in a healthcare environment or retail.

Header image: In-flight service (Southwest Airlines)

Image above: Nordstrom (Forbes)

 

Assignments for the Class

 

Readings & Assignments

The readings for the week include: 

  1. ASSIGNED READING: Designing Services That Deliver, G. Lynn Shostack, 1984 (Harvard Business Review)

    • Add a key point or two to the Mural board

    • Add a relevant question raised by the topic

    • Review the current class website page

  2. ADDITIONAL READING (SCAN): Service Positioning through Structural Change, G. Lynn Shostack, 1987 (Journal of Marketing)

The assignment for the week is as follows:

Method Toolkit

POSITION A BRAND: Shift a brand of your choosing using the map from the reading:

  • IdenIdentify a service that interests you (i.e. Disneyland)

  • Describe where you believe it fits on the map

  • Consider competitors

  • Identify how you would change the services level of complexity

  • Identify how the service could become more or less divergent

  • Be prepared to talk about the exercise

“They will forget what you did and what you said. But they will never forget the way you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou

 

Activity: The Service Blueprint

We will begin class experiencing the essential artifact of Service Design — the Service Blueprint. During the first portion of class we will create a Service Blueprint for a service you identify. Students will create pods of two to three individuals, and collaborate on creating the artifact.

We will focus on three essential aspects of the service experience: the journey, tangible evidence, and back stage actions. This focus is intended to support the consideration of topics including the “Line of Visibility.” It is not intended to be a complete blueprint of the service.

 
 

  • Create the essential flow of the customer journey as these individuals experience the service. An example might be the ordering of service.

  • Make visible the results of the service at specific points in the journey. This evidence could be a car arriving or the receipt of an order number.

  • Describe what goes on behind the scenes, including technology services. A back stage action could be the assignment of a ride share driver to your request.

  • Describe how you would modify the service to create a unique experience.

 
 
 

The Beginnings

Lynn Shostack established the essentials of Service Design with her seminal article “Designing Services That Deliver.” Shostack articulated the need to treat services as rigorously as products. She described how understanding and controlling a service provided companies the opportunity to differentiate these experiences.

The operations side of service management often uses work flow design and control methods such as time-motion engineering, PERT/GANTT charting, and quality-control methods derived from the work of W. Edwards Deming. These procedures provide managers with a way to visualize a process and to define and manipulate it at arm’s length. What they miss is the consumer’s relationship to, and interaction with, services.

“Back stage” actions are particularly important to most services. The service blueprint makes visible the many roles and technologies that support a typical customer interaction. Accounting for the time and resources that are dedicated to a customer are important to understanding the profitability of an organization.

Photo above: CEO of McDonald’s testing a self-service kiosk (Fortune)

Image left: Service Blueprint (Harvard Business Review)

Service Positioning

Shostack described how services can be positioned in the market in her 1987 article “Service Positioning Through Structural Change.” She describes how the essential aspects of a service can be engineered for strategic positioning using the tools of decision theory and operations management. Controlling for complexity and divergence in a service creates many new opportunities for positioning.

  • Reduced Divergence: A more uniform and consistent service

  • Increased Divergence: A tailored and personalized service

  • Reduced Complexity: Specialization in a single service

  • Increased Complexity: Adding and enhancing services

As many great service providers — Disney, HR Block, Southwest Airlines — have demonstrated, people are key to providing great service. Shostack elaborates on how employee self-management can lead to better outcomes. Training, communication, and marketing are important to improving behavior and motivation in an organization. Consumer participation can also change the positioning of a service in meaningful ways. Combining design methods with these tools can provide new insights into consumer preferences and behaviors that lead to new products and services.

Image right: Service Positioning, Shostack, 1987 (Journal of Marketing)

In the movie “The Founder,” this scene describes how the McDonald’s brothers choreographed the behind the scenes service design. (New York Times)

 

Thoughts to Consider

Consider how the services you use are positioned.

Uber Taxi service revisited (New York Times)

“The activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers. The purpose of service design methodologies is to design according to the needs of customers or participants, so that the service is user-friendly, competitive and relevant to the customers.”

Service Design Network

Service Design Thinking

 

Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider offer five key principles of Service Design in This is Service Design Thinking:

1. User-Centric

The service must always be designed around the users of the service users. Ask customers questions about how they feel, and what they want to achieve when using your product or service to gain insight into how you can improve the existing service (or whether you should introduce new services).

2. Co-Creative

All relevant stakeholders, from product design to fulfillment and customer service, should play a role in the service design process. This will help the service designer to find truly relevant solutions that provide a seamless experience for all involved.

3. Sequencing

Services should be visualized by sequences, or key moments in a customer’s journey. Each key moment can then be broken down further into three distinct steps: pre-service, during service, and post-service.

4. Evidencing

One of the more challenging aspects of this step-by-step process is helping team members understand what role they play in the overall experience flow. Service design relies heavily on evidencing, or visual communication, to help each individual team member visualize what stage the customer is in, and how they might best be served in that moment.

5. Holistic

Service design thinking is a continual assessment of what's working and what needs to be improved. It considers everything from business models to material components in an effort to create truly delightful experiences for the end user.

We discussed how Design Thinking can lead to new insight into customer needs and desires. Our challenge is to apply this knowledge in delivering products and services. There are many diagrams describing the interaction of Design Thinking with Lean/Agile processes. (Gartner)

 

Thoughts to Consider

Consider how design methods apply to service design.

Designing the hospital bed (1957)