What is Service Design?

Services have been around forever they used to be simple but then the world got more complicated we found more and more ways for customers to interact. These complications can be seen in how many businesses deal with their customers and these complications in design can be addressed and removed with the help of Service Design. Service Design is the process of analyzing the workflows and the tasks that are performed to complete a service, and bringing in changes to improve this experience which results in a better experience for both users and employees.

In this article, we will discuss what Service Design is. What is the Importance of Service Design? And how is different from Product Design?

Service Design

What is Service Design?

Service Design is the process of analyzing the workflows and the tasks that are performed to complete a service, and bringing in changes to improve the experience of the customer going through a Service which results in a better experience for both users and employees. Service Design simplifies the complexity of delivering a service by allowing the designer to see the world from the customers’ point of view from their first interaction to the building of a long-term relationship. Service Designers work directly with customers, frontline employees, and internal teams to prototype and iterate better interactions. Service Design helps us manage and diagnose existing services, or compose completely new services.

The three important questions that Service design addresses are:

1. What do customers want?
2. What are customers needs?
3. How would customers like to do business?

Benefits of Service Design

• Bridging Organizational Gaps: In most of the organizations various teams work in silos meaning that departments like sales, product, marketing, and support aren’t communicating about the holistic customer experience. In any business, each team understands the user not the experience of one user across many touchpoints. These knowledge gaps can result in inconsistencies in the end product. Service Design comes in play here and bridges the gap between various departments making sure that the customer experience is good as well as consistent.
• Reducing Redundancies: Redundancies in terms of design are the various component of design or processes that have very less to no impact on the improvement of the final design and can be considered as a waste of time and resources. The Service designers get a better picture of what user wants from the product or service and hence they play an important role in Reducing redundancies by defining where duplicate efforts occur and redesigning them.
• Improving the customer and employee experience: Service Design is the process of analyzing the workflows and the tasks that are performed to complete a service, and bringing in changes to improve this experience of the customer going through a Service which results in a better experience for both users and employees.
• Surfacing Conflicts: Surfacing conflicts refers to figuring out the issues with the experience of the service and the difference between what the company wants to deliver and what it delivers. It is the job of a Service designer to surface conflicts like misalignment between the business models and the service the organization delivers and figure out possible solutions to these conflicts. This increases the importance of Service Design since it helps in managing and diagnosing existing conflicts in the services being offered to customer.
• Fostering Conversations: In any Company or business even when each team understands their user in isolation, they are likely not paying attention to the experience of one user across many touchpoints. These conversations gaps can result in inconsistencies and user pain points. Service designers make sure that the teams communicate their goals with each other so that all the teams are on the same page.

Service Design vs Product Design

The difference between the process of Service Design and Product Design are highlighted under following points:

	Service Design	Product Design
Definition	Service Design is the process of analyzing the workflows and the tasks that are performed to complete a service, and bringing in changes to improve this experience of the customer going through a Service which results in a better experience for both users and employees.	Product design is a set of processes that collectively is about imagining a product and then bringing it into reality by designing it and iterating until the desired prototype is formed.
Skills Required	Service design expertise Communication Collaboration Empathizing User research Customer journey mapping Extract insights from research data points	Wireframing, Prototyping and creating Storyboards Design Systems User research & testing Presentation User Personas
Communication	Service designer have to work on forming relationships, by facilitating discussions across departments and creating a shared understanding.	Product Design does not include forming relationships and Product designers have a limited role in bridging the communication gap between various teams.
Salary	Average salary of a Service Designer in the US is about $80k	Average salary of a Product Designer in the US is about $100k
Lifestyle	According to a survey, Service Designers rate their work life balance as 4.5 out of 5.	According to a survey, Product Designers rate their work life balance as 4 out of 5.

Working Process

The working process of Service Design can be divided into 6 sub steps:

1. Defining clean Objectives for Service Design
2. Understanding the users using data or User Personas
3. Go through the current design ecosystem
4. Identifying issues and optimizations in current design ecosystem
5. Ideation or coming up with innovative solutions
6. Testing and Iterating the changes

Conclusion

The complications that the modern day companies face in providing the best services to its customers can be addressed and removed by the help of Service Design. Service Design simplifies the complexity of delivering a service by allowing the designer to see the world from the customers point of view from their first interaction to the building of a long-term relationship. Make sure to follow the points we mentioned in this article to understand what Service design is and why it is important. A good note to end this article would be a phrase that says – “The process we design is just as important as the product we make.”