What is Service Design?

Service Design means the human-centered improvement of a whole customer experience including every physical, digital or personal touchpoint the customers may encounter when interacting with a product or service.

What happens in a Service Design project

In a service design project, the majority of work happens in a cross-functional team of Ergomania experts and key stakeholders of your business. In order to explore all necessary information about your business processes, we usually hold several workshops in our comfortable designated workshop room at our premises. The team focuses on understanding business goals and customer behaviour, with a special attention to the physical space where the interactions take place. The exploratory workshops are supported by carefully executed user research about the user’s expectations of the product or service.

Key Tools

The research toolkit of a Service Design project typically include on-site ethnographic techniques: observation, interviews with staff and customers, shadowing, mystery shopping, service safari, user diaries. The design toolkit of a Service Design project consists of customer journey mapping, service blueprint creation, Lego Serious Play, actors mapping, storyboarding, role playing or service prototyping.

Key Benefits

The result of a Service Design project is highest quality customer experience for your users with the total fulfilment of your business goals. Users in a Service Design project can be anyone: your customers, your business partners, your staff. In other words, Service Design provides excellent tools to improve not just your product or service but, say, the internal processes of your call center.

Key Features

There are many ways to describe a Service Design project. Here’s a few key features what to expect as a business if you work with us. At Ergomania, Service Design projects are:

• People-centered. When designing experiences, we focus on people rather than formal business processes. “People” here can be anyone that your product involves – your customers, your business partners, your staff.
• Collaborative. As we hold workshops regularly, running a service design project requires the constant involvement of several colleagues – typically key stakeholders – on behalf of your business.
• Experiential. It is crucial for us to learn how your real customers interact with your product. In order to gain insight and experience, we often do ethnographic field research including interviews, shadowing, or mystery shopping.
• Methodical. We constantly follow and apply the latest design methods in our work. Methods of a service design project typically include: building personas, customer journey mapping, service blueprint.
• Visual. During a service design project, we make extensive use of the whiteboard as well as various lo-tech mindmapping techniques. As a result, we regularly assess our findings in the form of various illustrative artefacts at every key step of the project.

Your involvement as a client

A service design project requires a great deal of effort from you as a client. What we typically expect you as a client to do are:

• Attending workshops
• Providing interview respondents, research participants
• Explaining your processes
• Providing research findings

Key deliverables of a Service Design project

The results of a Service Design projects may be assessed in various forms. Typical deliverables include:

• Customer Personas
• Customer Journey Map
• Service Blueprint
• Service Improvement Roadmap