Service Design for Growth (Growth Design Monthly)

January 2020

Dear Readers, 

Happy New Year! January is the month when we hit the reset button and renew our commitment to things that matter most– like our health, our relationships, and in my case, my Disneyland annual pass. Having just renewed, the topic of Disney’s guest experience was top of mind. 

It’s no secret that Disneyland is very successful at delivering exceptional customer experiences. Their ability to create magical moments for their guests attracted a record number of visitors in 2018-- nearly 18 million! Given their scale of operation, it’s interesting to think about how much time and effort they must have put into their service design. 

Disney’s success is proof that investing in service design is good business. If you’re not familiar with service design, not to worry! I’ll explain what service design strives to do and show how a service blueprint can give your organization a treasure trove of ideas for growth.  

Good customer experience is a magical moment!- Thao

What is service design?

“Service design is the activity of planning and organizing a business’s resources (people, props, and processes) in order to (1) directly improve the employee’s experience, and (2) indirectly, the customer’s experience.” 

- Nielsen Norman Group

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, by improving the employee’s experience, the customer’s experience would indirectly benefit from it as well. It seems counter-intuitive to take focus away from the customer, but when you think about how Disneyland’s hundreds of cast members interact with guests every day, you start to understand the merits of this argument.

Understanding what makes a service

When you start identifying the services that your organization provides, there’s at least a person, a prop, or a process involved. The list below should help you identify each specific component that needs to be designed correctly and integrated into the service to create the total customer experience.

People: Anyone who creates, uses, or is indirectly affected by the service.For Disneyland, that would be cast members, guests, other guest encounters, and partners. 

Props: Anything physical or digital that is needed to successfully perform the service.For Disneyland, that would be the website, app, trams, ticket booths, restaurants, retail stores, signs, maps, buttons, and merchandise. 

Processes: Any workflows, procedures, or rituals exercised during the service.For Disneyland, would be ringing up the register, serving food, street sweeping, safety protocols, crowd control.

The frontstage vs backstage

When talking about service design, you often hear the analogy of a theater performance where the audience only sees what’s happening on the frontstage. Although a lot of what’s happening behind the scenes is critical to the audience’s experience, it is never seen by the audience. This accurately describes Disneyland’s tactic for maintaining the magic.

The Nielsen Norman Group splits components by frontstage and backstage: 

Frontstage 

• Channels (A medium for interaction between a customer an organization)

• Products

• Touchpoints (A specific interaction between a customer and an organization)

• Interfaces

Backstage

• Policies 

• Technology 

• Infrastructures 

• Systems

Principles of Service Design

Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider’s book This is Service Design Thinking outlines these five key principles of service design. You’ll notice that some of these overlap with a few UX design principles:

1. User-Centered: People are at the center of the service design. The same as in UX design.

2. Co-Creative: Service design should involve other people, especially those who are part of a system or a service. The same as involving stakeholders in UX design.

3. Sequencing: Services should be visualized by sequences or key moments in a customer’s journey.

4. Evidencing: Customers need to be aware of the elements of a service.  Evidencing creates loyalty and helps customers understand the entire service experience.

5. Holistic: A holistic design takes into account the entire experience of a service.  Context matters. The big difference here is that UX design typically focuses on the end-to-end experience of a single touchpoint (like adding a fast pass in the mobile app) while service design focuses on the collective experience of all the touchpoints. 

1. Zoom out

As I mentioned above, UX design typically focuses on one touchpoint at a time. For service design, we want to zoom all the way so we can have a holistic view of the entire service experience. Doing so will give us richer context and understanding to the connections between each touchpoint. 

2. Research

Talk to people in your organization to understand what they do and how their work ladders into the customer’s experience. Learn who/what are all the people, props and processes that make up your service experience. You can apply some of the user-centered research methods you may already know, such as:

• Interview people

• Observe users

• Identify needs 

3. Service Blueprinting

From your research, you should have a good sense of the services that your organization offers as well as the tasks and goals of your customer.

Start to map out the customer’s journey in a service blueprint similar to the one below. Each column represents a step in the customer journey, while each row represents a different aspect of the service’s operation. When the service blueprint is fully filled out, both the customer-facing touchpoints and all the service’s “backstage” elements should be present.There is much more info to share about service blueprinting than we have time for in this issue. You can visit Service Blueprinting - Nielsen Norman Group for a deeper dive. 

4. Identify and act

Once your service blueprint is complete, it’ll be a great tool to:

• Discover weaknesses and drill down to the root of the weakness in the ecosystem

• Identify opportunities for optimization

• See interdepartmental efforts and dependencies

From there, your team can prioritize and act on the things that will deliver the most value to your organization.

Creating a service blueprint is not a trivial task taken on by one person. But the many benefits it yields is worth the endeavor.

Concluding thoughts

Good design is good business. When customers have a great experience with your service end to end, they tell their friends. Your business grows authentically by delivering well at every turn. Thinking through these important aspects of your business can help you find the opportunities for growth.

Resources

A few resources to dive deeper into the principles of service design:

• The Principles of Service Design Thinking

• Service Blueprinting - Nielsen Norman Group

• Service Blueprints - Communicating the Design of Services

This is Service Design Thinking

This is Service Design Doing

Thao Vu

is a Senior Product Designer at The Black Tux, where she focuses on improving the interactions between the business and its customers. She enjoys digging into complex systems and making them easier to navigate.

EventsBusiness Essentials for Designers WorkshopMarch 24-31 (San Francisco)CXL LiveApril 5-7 (Austin)Growth Hackers ConferenceJune 4 (San Francisco) 

JobsProduct Designer, GrowthFigma (San Francisco)Senior UX Designer - Growth & Commercial TeamKahoot! (Oslo, Norway)Senior Product DesignerReforge (San Francisco) 

This is the Growth Design Newsletter. We produce monthly issues on topics relevant to growth design. Want to write or edit an issue? Hit reply!In the February issue

Finding Growth Levers