Bridging the Gap Service Design is the Means to Customer Experience Success
The knowledge that collaboration and synergy fuel success is a cornerstone of service design. As practitioners, we have developed or applied many methods to break down silos and encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration. We do this in service to the organisation, to keep everyone’s eyes on understanding Lynn Stott, Ph.D., is a customer experience design consultant who champions service design as an essential methodology for improvement and change. Her insights are born of a background in anthropology and education coupled with 15 years conducting design projects and developing in-house programs for UX, CX, & service design. She has experience in education, energy, finance and the NGO sector. She lives in California and works wherever she can make a difference.
the customer and their needs. It is ironic that the field of Customer Experience (CX), whose success depends on deep understanding of customers, has not been one of our closest partners, at least not until now. CX is a strategic business value proposition. Improving the customer experience promises an increase in customer loyalty, brand reputation and revenues in the business of selling products and services. Improving experiences increases engagement, participation, behaviour change and compliance in education, healthcare or social services. However, in many organizations and sectors, CX as a discipline and strategy falls short on some of its promises. From a ‘big picture’ view, CX as a function spends too much time measuring and not enough time designing. In this article, I suggest that the data gathering
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and analysis that forms the bulk of CX practices cannot deliver on necessary changes in customer experience without significant help from service design. Service design’s human-centred approaches to problem definition, target state blueprinting, contextual data analysis, rapid prototyping and more will close the gap between CX’s data analytics and the quality experiences that will make a real difference, both to customers and to the bottom line. Service design is the means by which to deliver on the value of customer experience. A short review of history: Changes in retail and service operations of the last 30–40 years led to the need for customer experience strategy. Technology and the opening of world labour markets led to a shift to h ighvolume production of goods. Customer turnover in some industries increased
