Service Essentials
Reflections on exchanges with UX and Product Teams.
I have recently had the opportunity to work increasingly with UX teams who are keen to learn and explore how to venture into the design of services and to use this to better understand the organisations they work within.
In the spirit of openness and sharing, I have crowdsourced topics that the UX community is interested in exploring in this respect. By doing so, I have compiled a robust list of topics that I believe any design team, not just those in UX, should find relevant.
The Basics:
Definition of products and services, their value and proposition.
Why should we care? The benefits of thinking service.
The Design Practice:
How does service design differ from product design?
What are the areas for handoff?
What is a service-led organisation, and why is it important?
The organisational shift from a focus on products to one on services: mindset, decision-making, infrastructure.
The Business Story:
The business case for services.
As I gathered ideas on what teams are curious about and used this input to shape my narratives for keynote speaking engagements, I recognised several aspects that resonated with people, regardless of their experience level. This blog is, therefore, the first in a series in which I’ll unpack the areas identified above. This initial entry explores the basics of service essentials.
What’s What?
Despite varying levels of maturity, this return to the basics has been beneficial for almost everyone in my audience. The collective effort of revisiting the fundamentals helped to create clarity and establish a common reference point.
Services:
The way an organisation allows someone to do something they need to do.
Example: I need to travel from Amsterdam to Rome for work. The airline KLM facilitates this. My need (reaching Rome) aligns with their goal (making money by moving people around).
Products:
These are enablers of service provision and can be physical or digital. Generally speaking, without a product, a customer wouldn’t be able to access a service.
Examples:
The website I used to book my ticket to Rome.
The app I used to check in.
The aeroplane I flew in.
Journeys:
The way someone goes about experiencing the services and products. The journey unfolds regardless of whether an organisation has intentionally designed it.
Example: On this occasion, I am a business traveller, opting for light luggage, and a short stay. I expect everything to run smoothly and punctually, with no unexpected delays. I'll mostly engage with the service digitally until I board the plane. My journey this time contrasts sharply with when I used KLM to fly to Rome on holiday with my family, including my mother and a toddler. We had numerous pieces of luggage, used a kiosk to check in, and required staff assistance to rearrange seating.
Zooming in on Services
I like the definition of services provided by Kate Tarling in her (highly recommended) book "The Service Organization." Kate defines services as:
"A service helps someone to do something or to bring about something, where an organization has a desired outcome that it wishes to achieve."
I appreciate this definition because it begins with the recognition of an individual's need and connects that to an organisation’s desired outcome. Three common takeaways from a deep dive into the essentials are:
Services start with a verb: You might call them something else commercially, using complex terms or acronyms that regular people don't necessarily understand. However, in our journey back to the basics, at its heart, a service is a verb.
Services fulfil a want or need: They originate from an individual's or an organisation's desire to accomplish something.
Services correspond with an organisational outcome: With a service, there's always an entity that benefits by fulfilling the need.
Thus, services enable us to start, do, stop, reserve, request, become something, make an agreement, and so on. These are action-oriented, fulfil needs or wants, use plain language, and represent an organisational outcome.
Can you think of examples of services in your line of business? Pause here, grab a piece of paper and a pen, and jot down as many as come to mind.
Done? Could you conduct the same exercise with your team? Or with a cross-departmental team? Would you end up with a different list? A larger one? More detailed?
Returning to these basics can be a cathartic experience. It takes us to the very heart of the value an organisation offers its customers. It allows us to reconnect with the very purpose of the organisation, its raison d'être. It’s disheartening to see how many individuals in organisations have lost sight of this purpose. The understanding of what you are there to do as an organisation, why you actually exist, is a vital question to ask and to be able to answer.
I’d love to hear about the outcomes of your experiments with compiling service lists. If you need help, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Today, I have covered the service essentials. Over the next few weeks, I’ll write about the organisational and business stories. By then, we will hopefully (certainly) be able to answer the question of why we should care, from each of our unique perspectives.