Gabriëls or Desimpel?
Take a look at the two pictures below. What do you notice?
Gabriëls gas station in Merelbeke
Desimpel Gas station in Merelbeke
The Gabriëls and Desimpel gas stations are right next to each other. They both offer the same products and they charge exactly the same price for those products. Yet, people stand in line to refuel their car at Gabriëls, while the gas station of Desimpel tends to be empty. This is what service design is all about. Service design is what makes people choose for Gabriëls instead of Desimpel (in this case), although they offer the same products at the same price.
There are many different definitions of service design, but here’s our favorite:
Service design helps to innovate (create new) or improve (existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for clients and efficient as well as effective for organizations.
Stefan Moritz
The principles of service design
Service design is deeply rooted in design thinking and helps organizations see their services from a customer perspective. It’s all about balancing the needs of your customer with the needs of your organization. These are the key principles of service design:
Understanding the customer journey is an essential part of service design
The components of service design
To create a perfect service or user experience, it’s important to get all crucial components of a service aligned. We focus on the following four components: people, products, touchpoints and processes.
People
Anyone who uses the service or contributes to the creation and delivery of the service at your organization, as well as people who are indirectly affected by the service:
Products
Your digital, physical or phygital products will clearly always have a big impact on the customer’s perception of your service and organization.
In the case of the gas station, gasoline is obviously the main product, but the gas stations can also make a difference by offering or improving other related products like fuel cards, products to quickly clean your car while refueling, etc.
Touchpoints
Which touchpoints are crucial for your customer and how can you improve his/her experience at that touchpoint? Some examples of touchpoints:
This is where we can find a big difference between the two gas stations in Merelbeke. While the Gabriëls station feels very open, spacious and easy to reach, the Desimpel station is rather small and more difficult to enter. I'm quite sure that most people don't even know there's a spot to fuel your car at the back of the Desimpel station as well.
Processes
Which processes does your customer go through using your service? And which internal processes, procedures and workflows are necessary to deliver that perfect experience to your customer?
Some examples:
Frontstage, backstage and behind the scenes
A service consists of a plethora of components, many of which remain unknown for the customer. Think of it as a theater play: when you attend such a play, you only see what’s happening in front of the curtains, while behind those curtains a lot of support processes are happening as well. And without those things happening in the backstage, the play would look completely different.
That’s why when talking about service design, we always break down components into frontstage, backstage and behind the scenes.
A good service design aligns frontstage, backstage and behind the scenes. Because when backstage or behind the scenes problems arise, they tend to have frontstage consequences.