What makes selling Service Design so hard? (part 2)

Have you ever struggled to explain service design in a simple way without feeling like you’re dumbing it down? Or have you had to “sell” service design to people who don’t (fully) understand it or haven’t even heard of it in the first place? Well this article might help you a bit in those situations.

I’m on a journey helping teams that work on making services more people oriented to be more effective and have more impact. In this series of articles I’m exploring the most common challenges people experience in regards to selling service design.

In the first article I looked at whether we can, and need to, show hard evidence (upfront) that investments in service design pay off.

In this article I’m focussing on the challenge related to explaining service design. Explaining it in a way that everyone understands. I’ll also give two practical tips that work for me and might also help you the next time someone asks “So what is it that you do?”.

And remember that whenever you’re ready to dig deeper into the topic of selling service design you should join the webinar I’m hosting. It’s free but you need to sign up!

Service design in plain English please

Come on how hard can it be to explain? It’s just the design of services! Right? Well sort of. When explaining it this way you quickly get into messy things like explaining what a service is and what design is.

You realise that it [service design] is two very unfortunate names put together in an unfortunate name. -- Stefan Moritz, Service Design Show episode 18

I see a lot of people looking for inspiring and easy to understand examples or case studies when trying to explain service design. This is especially true when someone hasn’t had the chance yet to build his own portfolio of projects. In this scenario you’re really dependant on how well others have documented their projects in terms of process and results. And even when a project is documented it’s really hard to share the story without knowing the full context. I’m not saying case studies can’t be useful but I think their value is often overrated.

The other thing that I found not to be very effective to explaining service design, and again I see a lot of people doing this, is putting the process at the core of the story. The story is focussed on explaining how service design works. So for example you start by telling that service design is about understanding the user needs, creating new ideas and coming up with prototypes. Usually at this point when you’re done people just repeat their question “So what is it that you do?”. Not only does this way of explaining assume that people have a basic idea of the steps you’re describing (what does it mean to do research) but more importantly it doesn’t say anything about the benefits this approach brings.

Finally you’ll sometimes run into encounters where you need to explain service design to people who have sort of vaguely heard about it. In these situations where people compare service design to things they already know like UX or LEAN and you’ll often get questions: “How is it different from what we’re already doing?”. Or you’ll hear something like ”But aren’t we doing user research already?”. These situations require us to carefully articulate what makes service design, service design. And what makes this hard is that first you need to understand which part of service design you really want to explain. Is is the values, the process, the outcome… everything?

Two things that might help to tell your story

The list of challenges associated with explaining service design goes beyond the 3 things I’ve described here. But let’s step aside for a moment and look at how we can actually make service design easier to understand. There isn’t one golden approach, that’s for sure. Each situation requires it’s own tactics and you just need to practice often. But here are two things that work quite well for me and maybe will do for you too.

The first thing actually leverages the fact that people like to compare things. So when I’m in a conversation with someone who understands UX I say something like “Service Design is like UX but it’s not tied to screens.” and take it from there. What works really well in this approach is that you connect to something people already value! The challenging part here is that you need to know the background of the person you’re talking to and you need to understand their field well enough that you can make the distinction. I’m collecting a list of comparisons for future reference. Check it out and be sure to add your own.

The second approach you can take, and this might be my favorite one, is to connect service design to the experiences people have as ordinary customers. And we’re all customers somewhere right? In a conversation I’ll ask someone to recall a bad service experience he’s had recently. Unfortunately we all have to deal with our fair share of service nightmares whether it’s related to banking, travel or telecos. You could also ask for a positive service experience but I’ve found that these are usually less powerful. So when someone tells me about the last time they tried to change the contract or how their complaint wasn’t handled correctly I ask them to tell me what that did to their attitude towards the company. This differs from a “mweh” to “I left the company the same day”. This is where I try explain that aim of what I do (service design) is to fix these frustrations and make sure customers are satisfied.

The goal of these approaches is not to give an extensive and elaborate explanation of service design but to put it in context and make it relevant. The best way to do that is to focus on the output, outcomes and results that service design delivers. And like Marc Stickdorn now famously said (source): “A customer journey map is not a f*cking deliverable!”.

Let’s continue the conversation

There is so much more to share and explore regarding this topic. If you want to follow up on this topic I’d suggest you read this article by Mauricio Manhaes where he elaborates on the 7 different approaches you can take to explain service design.

Which approach has worked well for you to explain service design? Leave a comment and let’s continue this conversation over there.

Take it to the next level

Finally if this is a topic you would like to learn more about and really take it to the next level join the free webinar I’m hosting. I’ll be sharing more useful strategies, answering questions and giving a preview of the selling service design course that is coming up. Would be great to see you there!