It is common to consider design in terms of physical things like phones and chairs, or virtual ones like games and apps. But have you considered about the intangible things like experiences that we cannot touch, and see?


For this reason, service design exists. Understanding this emerging business strategy is crucial for all business owners and employees involved in the development and implementation of service procedures, as customer service affects every part of a business. Let’s dive deep and look into this business strategy!

What is Service Design?

Service design refers to the process through which a business creates its services with the end goal of enhancing the experiences of its employees and customers. It simplifies service procedures to enable staff members to be efficient and to better assist customers.

In the same way that a product designer creates a toy or a piece of furniture, service designers map out the experiences that customers will have while interacting with a company, whether it’s over the phone, in person, or through an online booking system.

You should know the distinction between user experience design and service design in order to grasp the concept of service design. Improving a product or service’s usability, accessibility, and user satisfaction is what’s known as “User Experience Design”, and it’s the process by which users are left feeling more satisfied with the product or service overall. While the latter guarantees the satisfaction of a customer’s interaction with a business, its products, or its services.

What can Service Design do?

As much as it is about the result, design is a methodical procedure for figuring out what needs fixing, then researching, prototyping, and executing a workable solution. It’s important to think about the customer’s journey in its entirety. Take for example a person using a bank app, the time they realize they need a bank through the point at which they receive post-transaction follow-up from the company. How does the customer experience it? And how does that measure up to what they’re hoping for?

When put into effect, service design results in the creation of infrastructure and procedures that are tailored to the needs of the customer as a whole. It’s an intentional design activity that aims to improve people’s lives and the economy by prioritizing both the needs of businesses and customer satisfaction. Service design can help a business boost the quality of its offering and attract a wider customer base. It has the potential to boost revenue, expand margins, reduce operational costs, develop novel approaches to improving the customer experience, and reshape the public’s perception of the brand.

Key principles to consider when re-thinking a service

• User-Centered: People are the focus of the service design.
• Co-Creative: Participation from others is essential in service design, particularly from those who are actually part of the system or service.
• Sequencing: Significant points in the customer’s experience, should be the basis for how services are represented visually.
• Evidencing: The details of the service must be made clear to customers. Customers are more likely to be satisfied with and loyal to a company if they are able to see the parts of the service that contribute to a positive experience.
• Holistic: Designing service with a holistic approach means thinking about the user from start to finish. This depends on the situation.

Fundamental components of Service Design

To truly grasp service design, you need to understand the core ideas in order to apply them to your own organization. They consist of:

1. Service design for processes
The creation and development of processes are an essential part of service design. When designing a process, keep in mind these guidelines:

• Always think about how your actions can add value to the customer.
• Pay more attention to the process than to things like products and how they work.
• Focus on meeting customer needs. If a customer has more than one request, you may need to make more than one process to meet them all.
• Make sure that processes and development are not separated from the rest of the company’s larger operations.
• Reduce the number of steps, points of contact, restrictions, breaks or delays, and processes that depend on each other.
• Use performance indicators to measure results that show how employees and customers are feeling, like the number of customer questions that were answered satisfactorily.

2. Service design for employees
One of the most important factors in creating a successful service is the quality of the people that work for a company. These concepts of service design can help you get the most out of your staff:

• Collaborate with others who have expertise in the services you’re providing and the processes that go along with it.
• In order to make and influence decisions, it is important to get your voice heard. Encourage your peers to do the same.

3. Service design for information
A company’s ability to provide services to its customers is enhanced by the exchange of information. When workers have up-to-date knowledge of the company’s goods, services, and customers, they can work more productively. A company’s credibility and openness to its customers improve when information is freely shared. When striving for such an open exchange of data, keep in mind the following service design guidelines:

• Feel free in disseminating information both inside and beyond the company.
• It’s important to make sure data transfers smoothly so that information may be shared and reused with minimal effort from all parties involved.
• Investigate possible error-prone locations, such as data entry. It may be preferable to switch to a different method of obtaining and verifying information, such as a more trustworthy database.

4. Service design for technology
Service design, like most other business sectors, relies heavily on technological advancements. If you want to get the most out of your technological investments, consider adopting these service design guidelines:

• Use technology to accompany services instead of driving them
• Make sure the technology is suitable for the service, and only use it if it improves performance.
• Ensure the technology is adaptable enough to be updated in the future if the need arises.

If you do not have the time to conduct service design thinking or are still uncertain, contact us now at marketing@convergenceconcepts.com.sg for a highly reliable team that can assist you with service design.