Management buy-in for a Service Design Function

I have worked with a number of companies in different sectors who try to rationalise needing a Service Design function within their IT organisation. It would seem an obvious requirement, but so little is really known about the true benefits of having this function in place and the value it beholds to the end user experience through trust and respect, and growth of the company.

Trust in Technology

Trust is a big issue in the world of technology. With so many stories told about your personal information and bank details being leaked by companies who have poor security, it does bring a level of anxiety. But everything in life is pretty much dictated by the use of technology. From how house bills are paid, how we contact friends and family, when we order our weekly food shop, booking tickets for events, checking bank statements, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, ordering a new passport, booking a holiday, the list is endless. Yes of course you can live without technology, but I imagine you’re living in a glamorous teepee in the beautiful countryside, maybe your job is maintenance of some description; but to be totally “off grid” must be a challenging task.

We all need to have an element of trust with the companies we consume services from, and this trust is formed through a variety of experiences from a service provider.

Gratitude & Respect

With trust comes gratitude. We are grateful when a service provider treats us with respect, makes us feel seen and heard and makes us feel special every now and then, and this keeps us going back to them. All we ask is that our hard-earned cash is given to someone who will treat us right. All service providers have a duty of care by ensuring our personal details are kept private and secure and the service they provide us with is what they promised to give us. If these fail, we will just go somewhere else, and we are more likely to be vocal about our negative experience.

Success through planning

Successful companies have intelligent minds that have sat down and worked out a plan. Usually starting in the form of a business case. But they thought about the service, how they would deliver that service, how much it would cost and what they would need to consider if they want it to grow, stay in the market or not receive any bad press. The companies who deliver seamlessly are probably some of the best designed companies out there, when you consume a service but have no idea on how it got there, and nor should you! You have given them your money for a product or service, their job is to deliver this to you. Here are some examples:

1. You can turn on the tap and get clean water straight away
2. You can flick a switch and light fills the room
3. You can fill up your car, with fuel to drive to your destination
4. You can buy a fresh loaf of bread from your local shop
5. You can send an email from your laptop

These are all products and services. How they got there and how it works should not really be a concern to you. It is an item of consumption that you need and are willing to pay for. End of story.

Taking design for granted

But none of this was easy, and we should not take this for granted. Your local water board did not just press a few buttons from a laptop and out popped some water from your tap. There was detailed architectural mapping of the land on where to dig and place the pipes. The pipe material would have been considered to prevent it from rusting, disintegrating or chewed through by animals. The same for when you went out and bought a fresh loaf of bread. Someone worked out the supply chain from the supplier where the grain was purchased, to the factories where the bread would be made, the material and design of the packaging and how quickly it needed to get on the shelves at the shop to maintain it being as fresh as possible.

Importance of Service Design

Service Design is, and should be used if you want your product or service to be delivered successfully. Anyone who has an idea and just throws it out into the universe is doomed to failure. Consideration of the people, the processes to support how the product or service will be delivered, what suppliers are involved, and what technology is needed, are just the basics, but it is a start!

Service Design is critical and service ‘re-design’ just as important, as often the world moves on but services don’t and business declines to irrelevance because of this. The courage to redesign a successful service is also key for success.

Value delivery

Service Design is there to future proof what you are planning to give to your consumer. It is about meeting the needs of your consumer, and when you meet their needs, you are delivering value. Value is the key driver. If you are not delivering value, then you may as well give up now.

Who wants to receive a broken laptop on their first day of work? Who wants their most critical systems to fall over every week and risk losing the business millions of pounds? Who wants to set up a business, only to have frustrated customers or even worse, have them leave?

Delivering value is the ultimate goal and question we should all be asking.

Reporting & Measurements

To ensure you are delivering a seamless product or service, you will need clear measurements in place to report on it’s success. This can be Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Employee Experience (EX) and Customer Experience (CX) measurements. These measurements will help support other capabilities in the department such as Risk Management, Continuous Improvement, Quality Assurance, Financial Management, Strategic planning and decision making.

Roles & Responsibilities

We want consumers to be happy. That is a given. But what about the people who are creating the product or delivering a service? Yes, your colleagues! Surely, we want them to be happy too? You are all in this together, trying to make money or a company who is helping people. Either way, you do not want your colleagues to suffer, otherwise they will perform poorly or leave. Service Design plays an extremely important role in this, because it looks at the roles and responsibilities of the people and teams involved. This ensures your job descriptions are accurate and the teams who need to engage and collaborate with each other, are doing this seamlessly, they have the tools they need to do their job effectively and efficiently, and leaving every day knowing they’d done something that delivered value and they have purpose.

Employee Experience

To ensure you are delivering value to your customers, you need to capture their experience when using your product or service. This is incredibly important to ensure strategic decisions are being made based on real data. All decisions should be based on user requirements, which should be captured through detailed User Research. If it is not, then you are at risk of not continuously delivering value. This could result in loss of customers, loss of revenue, brand damaging and being pushed out of the market.

Try to consider a variety of ways to capture Employee Experience (EX) data, some suggestions are online surveys sent via an email, QR codes put around the office, tablet PCs by the coffee machine in the office, automated surveys after a ticket has been closed, through conversational AI interactions via collaboration tools, like Microsoft Teams, and not forgetting some good old fashion face-to-face time!

And of course, you can learn about the Employee Experience using EX tools that monitor the interactions a user has with the services from the end-point perspective i.e. are they able to access services quickly and consistently from their laptop, and is every part of the chain working effectively (their hardware, the end user software, their connection, the company’s infrastructure, the services / platforms being accessed etc.

Business Forecast

Service Design will ensure that the product or service you are delivering to customers, delivers value, and in return, you can be confident that your business will remain stable and thrive towards new opportunities, whether that be customer growth, revenue growth, or new products and services being offered.

If there is no Service Design function within your organisation, other than getting lucky, how confident are you that the product or service you are delivering will still be fit for purpose and deliver value not just today or tomorrow, but also in 1, 3 or 5-years’ time?

Business case benefits

Here are just a few listed key benefits on having a Service Design function within an organisation:

1. Ensures the customer voice is being heard through User Research and data capturing and is used in to decide what and how you evolve your services.
2. Details the roles and responsibilities of the people who need to deliver the product or service.
3. Makes employees feel they have a purpose and are valued within the company, keeping good talent.
4. Teams know how and when to collaborate to ensure seamless delivery.
5. Offers a holistic view on gap analysis and risk management of a product or service.
6. Easily identifies costs to deliver, supporting organisations with managing their budget.
7. Helps with understanding the maturity and capability of the technology used, and if there are duplicate tools that can be retired.
8. Identifies suppliers needed to support the delivery of a service or product, their costs and service level agreements.
9. Builds an end-to-end picture of the service and where value is delivered.
10. Provides end-to-end timelines for delivery in Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that meet customer demand.
11. Highlights areas of improvements across the entire value chain to drive down cost, increase productivity and meet customer demand and satisfaction.
12. Opportunities to improve services and make strategic decisions for new products and services based on customer experience and their feedback that drives growth.

Still don’t agree?

The picture below is a classic, with a slight adaption to EX and CX… it gives a great example where having no service design, or having poor service design, will result in products and services not meeting your customers’ expectations and the longevity of your company could be compromised. It is really that simple.