Everything within service design is putting the customer at the center. It is putting products and services around your consumers’ needs and desires. To understand how consumers experience the service, activities including research, workshops, prototyping, and evaluation are used. We ask questions to participants such as how they feel about using the service and their expectations. What could we be doing better or is something missing from expectations?

Organizational teams should have a contributing voice to create impactful insights and ownership. Stakeholders should be involved in the service design process from workshops to prototype testing. With this co-creation, include users at every step of the process from early design to development as it will bring significant discovery that reduces risk to your business.

Sequencing helps determine the timeline of a project. Service design thinking deconstructs customer journeys into single touchpoints and service interactions. When these are combined it creates service moments. Every customer journey follows a common three-step transition of pre-service, the actual service period (when the service consumers experience a service), and the post-service experience. The customer service journey should be visualized as a sequence of interrelated actions.

You cannot get proper feedback from consumers if prototypes, visuals and service mock-ups are available to represent the experience. Encourage the team to use low or high fidelity representations to either be scrappy early on or true to the final product or service at the end . Visual tools like these are less complicated and easier to digest; they allow the team to remember important points, and they help bring ideas to life.

Where service design is most impactful is considering all impacts - good and bad. It is crucially important to evaluate each aspect of the service or product as to how it improves and may also disrupt various experiences and business support. Holistic services consider the end-to-end user journey with each consumer touchpoint and pivotal moment. Personas should be used to highlight variances within the experiences as well.

Service design should also consider how the change may disrupt your business as well as how it supports it proportionately. As you ideate, include various business teams including front-line employees to find solutions to support. Brands can become significantly challenged with adverse impacts releasing updates or net new products or services when employee teams do not have the tools or responses to support them. Consider outliers such as third-party teams who have not received updates, working in legacy support protocols.