The Value of Service Design to Providers
Leading service providers say their chief concerns are revenue, growth, and people, according to a number of recent studies. When you otherwise take out normal fluctuations in the economy, i.e. recessions, these issues remain perennial. So, how can they be addressed? The field of Service Design may have some answers.
If we are to continue to improve the economic well-being of our countries, dealing with these issues is imperative. At the risk of minimizing their concerns, making them sound trite or unimportant, there are techniques using service design that might be helpful. And if it were me, as a former business consultant, I would be looking to service design techniques, and service designers in particular, to explore new solutions.
Forbes Council’s Top Five Executive Challenges
Some organizations have changed their business models to convert their offerings into services to address growth. And some organizations, including ones that have built Service Design departments in house, are visibly using a Service Design approach to solve some of these challenges, including several that are within 20 miles of where I live in Washington, D.C.: Marriot (hospitality), Capital One (banking), and Fannie Mae (quasi-government home loans). On top of that, this city is host to many global consulting firms that offer Service Design, including Booz Allen Hamilton, who offers their clients Service Design.
At a glance, the field of Service Design can address revenue by crafting services in high demand by addressing user needs, ideally in intuitive ways (innovation); maximize time involvement with faster, well-informed decision-making; tackle leadership issues beginning with improved alignment to the organization’s service offerings and its mission, and boosting growth through building long-term customer loyalty.
My armchair advice: Be open-minded to the emerging, yet proven ideas found in the field of Service Design, a user-centric discipline. Its techniques, models, and tools help organizations be more relevant to their customers and stakeholders. Its processes help erode some of these perennial concerns. The key to improvement and progress is gaining insights from the user’s perspective, central to the approach of Service Design.
The International Service Design Institute provides employers, trainers, and learners proprietary sequential learning for Service Design.