Service mapping
Humans are at the heart of what we do as designers of products, services and experiences. Our clients understand the value of making their customer lives simpler, better and smarter. After all, making customers happy, makes the business happy... and stakeholders, and employees, and their families…
The world is becoming more complex, customer behaviour is changing, and businesses need to transform to keep up. By identifying new opportunities that de-risk change and support the design of smarter services and products, organisations can increase profit and innovate to open up new revenue streams.
It's hard for big companies to change rapidly. So for bigger (and also beneficial to smaller) organisations, to improve the current customer experience, it is vital to consider the interactions and systems within the business. New technologies, disrupters and legacy systems can affect both operations internally and interactions externally with new services or products.
Using a design toolkit, we look at the way businesses interact and connect their services with customers; allowing us to understand the broader relationships between customers and providers of services in detail.
The relationships between the people inside the organisation and outside of the organisation can be mapped in a Service Blueprint.
This tool helps to describe and visualise the critical touchpoints of a service. It shows a high-level interaction between customer experience and business operations existing in an end-to-end process. This visual reference tool helps to align teams and share a complete view of any business, service or experience.
How does it work?
Mapping starts with insight. Customer and stakeholder interviews and workshops lead to a low-fidelity sketch of the interactions. It can look something like this:
Or this:
Or this:
More knowledge, understanding and collaboration enables the blueprint to exist as an end-to-end visualisation that can be displayed in the open for teams to see and inform our and their work.
The blueprint helps visualise pain points for clients and customers and offers a contextualised consideration of the business implications of design. It can go deeper into operations or inform smarter customer metrics visually. It can show stakeholders how new KPIs such as increasing customer happiness can lead to higher revenue and profit margins.
Service design and innovation go hand in hand. In the last 10 years, I have seen a lot more in-house teams building design capability internally and starting to adopt service design methods. It's amazing to see teams delivering new products and services using these tools and a design approach. By understanding the things that are broken, we can fix the basics, and design the essential steps to change pain points and prioritise opportunities to innovate along the way.
It's important to note that maps are not going to change your business, they are there to guide and set direction into the next phase of transformation.
I believe it's valuable to have an outside perspective to support working across organisational silos and facilitate transformation programs that will inevitably serve companies better when it comes to facing future challenges.
‘Design’ is not simply about creating or fulfilling the needs of people - it is about enhancing their lives, and more broadly, creating a simpler, smarter, and kinder society.
Let’s make great services together
Are you interested in designing better services for yourself or your organisation?
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