Service Design

But what is Service Design? It’s important to realise services are not tangible goods. An interface is not a service. A product is not a service. Service Design it is about the areas, relationships, connections between and across products.

Service Design is the activity of planning and organising business’s resources in order to improve its quality and interaction between service provider and customers. Ideal services are considered to be user-friendly and competitive within their market.

The Principles of Successful Service Design:

Keep it simple stupid

If you build a simple service, it’s logical that people spend less time figuring out how it works. If things are built with simplicity in mind, they are easy to understand and this clarity will ultimately make people stick to your product. Simple services will also be easier to build, which means you can adapt faster than your competitors.

Consider what happens before and after your service

Your service is not the only one that your customers will experience. Your service is only a small part that helps your customers either do their job or achieve a personal goal. If you discover what happens before and after your service, this will help you to seamlessly transition the customer from the previous service to your service.

Tell me as soon as possible that you can’t do anything for me

The service must clearly explain what the user needs to complete the service and what they can expect from the service provider in return. This includes things like how long something will take to complete, how much it will cost, or if there are restrictions on the types of people that can use the service.

Selling is not the end, it’s the starting point of the relationship

Many businesses focus all their efforts on selling their services and products. But hat is only the starting point of the relationship. There are different stages of how people experience a service. Phases such as “aware” “join”, “leave” and “rejoin” the service. Take all these steps into consideration and do not focus your energy solely on selling.

Allow what your competitors are not doing

Services and businesses find it difficult to stand out in today’s market. Often when you allow people to do things others forbid, you simplify customers lives.

Great ideas from yesterday could suck today

What worked well years ago may no longer be true. Technology and culture may have changed how users live their lives. In such a context, it is important to always go back to the field and question your assumptions.

Big problems do not need big solutions

More is not always better. Next time you try to solve a problem by adding more features, ask yourself, could this addition make things worse?

Beauty reduces pain

Beauty has an enormous influence on the customer experience. Bringing beauty to your products or services will make these services less painful to your customers.

When you add this, remove that

Innovative businesses love to bring new ideas and features to their services. But there’s a well-known problem. They have a limited amount of time to run the service. Make a list of all the tasks you already have to do before you put something new in place. Make the same for all the features of the service. List the one you can remove, simplify or delegate to create time for new ideas or features.

Offer fewer choices to improve customer experience

Test if it really makes your customer more satisfied before you add more choices, options and features to your service.

Focus on smaller short-term goals to change behaviours

To keep customers involved in the use of the service, it is better to have smaller immediate goals.

Always end a service with a high peak

The memory of an experience is made up of two things. First, the experience peak, the best or worst moment. The second aspect is how people felt at the end of the experience. And this is going to be a huge part of how people will remember your business, product or service.

Make it easy to get human assistance

A service should always provide users with an easy route to talk to a human about a problem if they need to.

Be equally usable by everyone

The service must be usable by anyone, regardless of their circumstances or abilities. No customer should be able to use the service more adversely than any other.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

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Good service. Happy customer.