Journal Review

Thoughts on the journal article Service Positioning through Structural Change.  

The first thing that caught my attention was the age of the article; it was published in 1987 before service design existed as a quasi discipline. The author talks about marketing, service positioning and process design rather than service design per se. The article is about market positioning and differentiating a service from its competitors by strategic selection of the service complexity and divergence. Complexity being a measure of the service process steps and sequence. Divergence is the amount of variation in the service steps and sequence. A high divergence service would be discreet while a service with low divergence would be standardised. So clearly adjusting the complexity and divergence of a service can have an enormous effect on market position and success.

The author also talks about the use of a service blueprint to visualise processes and develop positioning strategies to differentiate the service from competing services. Blueprints look at a service as a system and can help to make intangible processes or aspects of the system more tangible.  

The importance of involving the service user in the process design is discussed and several methods to facilitate designing a services complexity/divergence strategy.

The article was written before the emergence of service design as it is today. After reading the article that is evident due to the lack of actual design input in the process such as co-creation workshops, service mock-ups and prototypes, and it feels more like marketing and change management. However, the aim of the techniques discussed is the same reason that modern day companies use service design; to gain a competitive advantage through differentiation from the competition.

Customer Satisfaction: Misconception or Ignorance?

Each week I will be talking about interesting points I discover from the material that I am reading as part of my service design research. From the paper Service Design as an Emerging Field I found the following statement quite remarkable:

"...it seems that many companies have an amazing misconception regarding customer satisfaction: while 80% of all companies believe that their service is good, only 8% of the customers think so".

So how exactly are companies assessing customer satisfaction? Are they guessing or simply assuming customer satisfaction? If not, who are they talking to and what research are they doing? 

I'm somewhat circumspect of the figures in the paper. However, if they are accurate, it seems unlikely that companies with misconceived customer satisfaction levels are placing the customer at the centre of their services. Without doing so it will be difficult to improve their services and significantly increase customer satisfaction, as most customers would go else where for a better experience. I think service companies that do not embrace service design will lose any competitive advantage they have over companies that are integrating service design into their business. 

Having said the above, if the success of service design continues to grow and the field itself becomes more widespread then its hard to imagine businesses not adopting service design thinking. Then the disparity between perceived customer satisfaction and actual customer satisfaction will have reduced significantly.

What is Service Design?

So what exactly is service design? Change management, design consultancy, interactions design, operations management?? 

Here are a few quotes I came across whilst trying to find an answer to the same question...

"Service design is all about making the service you deliver useful, usable, efficient, effective and desirable"   -  UK Design Council

"When you have two coffee shops right next to each other, and each sells the exact same coffee at the exact same price, service design is what makes you walk into one and not the other"   -  31 Volts Service Design

Great. But if a service is not a product or even something you can keep, and therefore not really tangible, how do you go about designing one and how do you know if it is any good?  How do you make sure that your coffee shop is the one that people "walk into"?

Over the next 3 months I will be studying service design and working on a project simultaneously. Hopefully when my project is complete I will be more than able to answer these questions - no pressure then.