One may be led to think that service design is about software architecture. That’s especially true and sad for most of us in the software business. When you look at it from a high-level point of view, service design is about planning and organization of resources to improve employee and customer experience.
Let’s put this into perspective with an example.
Consider an online store. Service design focuses on how the store operates to ensure its promise of delivering items to its customers fast is kept. Starting from inventory, requests dispatch, payment processing, delivery and item reviews. When a customer places an order, an enquiry is sent to the inventory for availability and pricing. Once availability is confirmed, collection of payment starts followed by the delivery procedure. Along the chain of the events, the customer is kept in the loop when changes occur, that may or may not require their direct or indirect intervention. In this imaginary scenario, each piece plays a role in ensuring the customer gets what was ordered in time.
While in the above scenario customer experience may seem like the direct beneficiary of service design, employee experience is the indirect beneficiary. For instance, how will the customer care representative be notified when a payment procedure fails and the customer is left stranded? How will the delivery personnel be green-lit to pick up items for delivery after packaging?
Front matter and Back matter in service design
Service design is broken down into to parts, front matter and back matter. Front matter is what the customer sees and interacts with. In our online store example, front matter would be a webpage or a mobile app with products listing. Or a customer service attendant call them back. Back matter is everything the occurs away from the customer’s perspective (internal processes)
Sadly, most business spend vast resources on the front matter, while over-looking the back matter. This disconnect triggers a common, widespread sentiment that one hand does not know what the other is doing.
Service design is meant to fill this gap by :
Surfacing conflicts between business needs and processes. It brings out what needs to be setup prior to addressing business needs.
Triggering hard conversations which exposes weakness or misalignment in processes and policies.
Eliminate redundancies which directly reduces the cost of resources the business has to incur.
Enables internal tools and teams to communicate as one.
Conclusion
Any business that transacts by giving value through its goods or services should put service design as the focal point of its operations. As you can deduce, service design is about the end-to-end fulfilment of connected processes. When the back matter is overlooked, poor customer experience will be the result.