A Journey from Customer Experience to Service Design
What is Customer Experience?
The goal of customer experience is to ensure that customers have a good or even great impression/perception of your brand throughout every interaction.
Customer Experience approaches guide us to hold focus groups to understand the needs and pain points of current and/or potential clients and then map out the full customer journey looking at each stage and touchpoint – what the customer needs to do and how they are feeling at that point. Included in the above is often a KPI or metric that will be used to measure whether the customer is getting the experience that was designed.
What is Service Design?
According to the Service Design Network, the goal of Service Design is to create services that are “user-friendly, competitive and relevant to the customers”.
While both Customer Experience and Service Design focus on the experience of the consumer, ensuring their needs are met and that the interactions they have with an organisation are positive, Service Design take it one level deeper. Service Design focuses on the “Why, the “What”, the “How”, the “Who” and the “Measures”.
Using similar frameworks and models such as focus groups, customer journey maps and service blueprints as Customer Experience, Service Design looks at the next layer:
- The Why: What goals do we have in place, do they align with the purpose? Does your company culture enable the best in your people? Does your culture allow for your people’s purpose to align to the company’s purpose?
- The What: Does the organisation have the correct capabilities to deliver on these goals? Are these structured correctly?
- The How: What are the processes that are needed and what needs to be updated to achieve the goals?
- The Who: Who are the teams and people that are responsible for each process, does the organisational structure enable the processes? Are the right people in the right roles, are we using people’s strengths and adapting to their social styles to enhance employee engagement and collaboration? Do they have the knowledge, skills and tools to enable them to succeed?
- The Measures: How are we going to measure that are team members are providing a great customer experience? What quality frameworks need to be in place?
Our belief is that Service Design takes the importance of Customer Experience and focuses on building the necessary structures and resources to enable customers to have great interactions and ensure quality service and metrics.
Resources and References:
https://blog.hubspot.com/service/what-is-customer-experience
