Customer Experience (and) Service Design, one cannot be separated from the other

Only a few years ago, designing experiences was a luxury for the few and Design was more about the product. The increasing digitization process - that now pervades everything and all companies - is spotlighting on the importance of Experience Design. Even if, very often, companies still approach Design only from the perspective of the product, focusing digital interfaces development and with a deeply-rooted culture of the product or media (software, website, mobile app…).????

However, product design is not sufficient to guarantee a good user experience, even if the product is a digital service. Moreover, customer experience design alone is no longer enough. Without proper Service Design there is no Customer Experience either.??

What is Service Design?

Customer Experience Design and Service Design are both Human-Centered Design approaches, but how are they different?

Albeit with some approximation, we can say that:

• Customer Experience Design is the creation of an end-to-end process that succeeds in meeting customer expectations throughout all stages of the Customer Journey.
• Service Design is the methodological approach by which a company or brand manages to guarantee, orchestrate, and govern all the pieces of the puzzle that serve to ensure an adequate user or customer experience, including aspects such as policies, organization design, procedures, standards and technical infrastructure.

The two approaches have much in common. First, they put the human being at the center of any design and exploit common frameworks and tools. The main difference lies in the fact that in Customer Experience Design the human being at the center is the customer, while in Service Design the human being at the center is the user outside or inside the organization (in the Design teams but also in all the others directly or indirectly connected to them).

According to the literature of the Interaction Design Foundation,?

“Service design is a process where designers create sustainable solutions and optimal experiences for both customers in unique contexts and any service providers involved. Designers break services into sections and adapt fine-tuned solutions to suit all users’ needs in context-based on actors, location, and other factors”.

In simpler words, when you see two shops offering the exact same product, of the same quality, and at the same price, Service Design is that thing that makes you choose one shop and not the other.

Customer Experience Service Design, removing the “and”

Doing Service Design means working on a wide range, within a broad scope including User Experience Design and Customer Experience Design.

A service design experience often involves multiple channels, contexts and products. Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider, authors of “This is Service Design Thinking” book, identify five key principles of Service Design:

• User-centered – Use qualitative research to design focusing on all users.
• Co-creative – Include all relevant stakeholders in the design process.
• Sequencing – Break a complex service into separate processes and user journey sections.
• Evidencing – Envision service experiences to make them tangible for users to understand and trust brands.
• Holistic – Design for all touchpoints throughout experiences, across networks of users and interactions.

Ultimately, Service Design adds another level of consideration to Design, which sheds light on internal processes and resources, i.e., the things that happen in the background, invisible to customers, which must be designed and orchestrated so that the Customer Experience that people expect is then guaranteed.?