What is service design?

- [Instructor] Service design is what you do to make sure that your client or your customer gets the experience you want them to have at every point across a customer journey. Now there are different pieces of that sentence, right? One of the things is these are the customers you want and the experience you want so service design is something you do plan fully to make sure that you get every time the experience that you want to create for that customer. - A lot of times companies say, "But we have "a customer service department. "We're taking care of customer experience." They're not recognizing that customer service is just one aspect of the overall customer experience. Customer experience is about the entire journey between a company and a customer. All the things that happen between first point of interaction to the last. And actually customer service sometimes is the last point of interaction. Customer service is often about what happens when something doesn't quite work out at best or when something really goes radically wrong. - Services get designed too and the idea that services can and should be designed is really only about two generations old. Starting to emerge in Europe, it also emerged here with a woman named Lynn Schoffstack who was the Chief Marketing Officer of Citibank as it then was who started thinking about how do you create a service blueprint. That's what she called it, a blueprint. So that when different customers and clients would come into a bank at whatever level, you know, getting cash from a teller or talking to a loan officer or whatever it is, so you could actually plan and layout what was going to happen in some sort of a predictable way. Before that, services were kind of by guess and by gosh. You could go into a law firm and every partner would have a different way of approaching a problem. You could go into a bank and just not be sure. You could go into a retail store and one sales person at Brooks Brothers would greet you in a certain way and another would not greet you at all, and there was no predictability and in a sense no strategic idea, strategic intent and strategic intelligence that was shaping the surface. Service design is about applying that strategic intelligence so that you get what you're after. So when we think about service design, we think about four fundamental beliefs, four tenets if you will of service design. The first is that the design of a service, what it does and doesn't do, the experience it creates, the value it delivers, fundamental to any service business whether it's a hair salon or an investment bank. The second is that excellence in service delivery needs to be built in from the start. It needs to be designed into the company the same way like performance is designed into a BMW. I mean think about it the other way. The greatest driver in the world could not get great performance out of a Yugo. The third thing is that this should be free. Excellence in customer experience and excellence in service design should not cost you anything. Why? Because it's saving you so much. McKinsey did a study that showed that companies that design a customer journey and do it really well can save up to 20%. 20% because they don't have to do it again. 20% because you're getting fewer calls to the customer service line. 20% because you're not, your employees aren't running around like you know chickens with their head cut off trying to find what it is that they need to deliver. So great service should be free and that's the third tenet of great service design. And the fourth tenet is that service design is a sustainable, repeatable way of delivering value to customers. In other words, it's a strategic discipline not just a fancy schmancy form of customer service. - You should have a clearly defined identity whether you're doing service design or not because that is part of your strategy. But service design forces you to clarify your identity and actually service design will force you to do a couple of other things as well. If forces you in addition to defining your identity to sharpen your value proposition. Why do people come to you? What is it that they're looking for from you that they cannot get or they're not looking for from somebody else? It helps you identify what customers you're really going after. Who are the customers who are valuable to you and that matter to you? And it's not about what you can do, it's about what you will do. Can is about ability. Will is about strategy. And strategy is really the key element of service design that a lot of people are overlooking.