Why Customer Experience Isn’t Enough Silicon Valley Needs Service Design Silicon Valley is the home of most of the world’s most influential tech companies. A focus on design and customer experience is everywhere, from the CEO down to the newly hired designer. Many tech companies that once dominated through features and functionality now compete almost solely on the customer Erik Flowers is a Principal Service Designer at Intuit, a financial services company, where he is re-envisioning customer experiences, and building organisational capacity to design end-toend and surface-to-core.
Megan Miller is Senior Service Designer for Stanford University IT, where she works to design seamless and quality customer experiences for the university and build momentum around service design. Erik and Megan are Co-Founders of www. PracticalServiceDesign. com, an online resource and community of practice for service designers.
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experience. But today, competing on the customer experience of touchpoints isn’t enough. Just ten years ago, having a dedicated experience design team would have been an exception, not a rule. As technology has boomed, especially with the intro duction of the smartphone in the past decade, experience design has grown from a luxury to a necessity. Today, we see design at the forefront of company identity, and not a single company would admit that customer experience isn’t a top priority. It has been the best way (so far) for companies to differentiate in a sea of rapidly innovating competition. Yet experience design in the technology industry has largely remained confined to the digital medium, and companies still approach design from the perspective of the product and its digital interfaces. This deeply-rooted culture of the 'product' – the software, website, or mobile app – still reigns supreme across Silicon Valley and drives much of the strategic integration of design into company culture.
A changing landscape Design in tech is rapidly evolving. There are new players on the scene, such as Airbnb, Uber and Instacart, service-based companies that are using technology to deliver fantastic service experiences, where the technology is purely an interface layer to facilitate the delivery of value to the customer. These companies are taking The Valley by storm and are playing a major role in shifting customer expectations. Companies such as these are standing out because of their focus on using digital as a means to meet real-world, non-digital customer needs. For example, shopping for groceries, getting a ride across town quickly or saving money on an overnight trip. The digital experience is a means to providing service, not the other way around. Their delightful, orchestrated, multi-channel experiences are being
