IV.

LESSON PROPER:

LET’S BEGIN!

Based on the preliminary activities, what did you notice?

THAT’S GREAT!

You may now proceed to the lesson.

The Service Process Defined

We can define the service process as the way in which a company works so that a customer receives service.
To standardize this in line with the company’s identity and aims, managers will work on:
 Determining procedures which contribute to the process
 Allocating tasks and responsibilities
 Formulating effective schedules and routines
 Defining service mechanisms and process flows

The shape that the service process will assume will depend on two primary factors:
 The type of service process
 The degree of customer contact

Next, we’ll look at each of the three broad types of service process namely:
 Line operations
 Job shop operations
 Intermittent operations

Types of Service Process

1. Line operations
Line operations progress in a linear fashion. Thus, the client passes through a sequential experience
beginning at point A, when they first enter the store or contact the business. Now, service delivery passes
through a number of processes before finalizing the transaction.

2. Job Shop Operations

This type of service model provides customer satisfaction by tailoring the service to the client’s needs. For
example, a professional organization such as a law firm or a bespoke service such as that which a carpenter
may provide is only open to a limited level of standardization. Each client’s needs will vary to some degree,
and the service process must, therefore, vary accordingly. Being able to offer flexibility makes this model
attractive, but it can complicate scheduling and workflows.

3. Intermittent Operations
Some service projects are unique and seldom repeated. For example, construction projects or branding
initiatives would fall under this category. In most instances, the projects themselves are of a relatively large
scale. They will involve bringing together several elements so that they can work harmoniously.
Planning will be key, and managers would evaluate each project independently in order to determine what
process flows would contribute to the final result: providing the desired service to its clients. Critical path
analysis is often used in this context.

In high contact service processes, clients will:

 Expect some input into the business processes that affect the service
 Expect similar service levels regardless of current demand
 Judge the quality of the business based on their experience of the people with whom they interacted

High contact systems are the most demanding for businesses to manage effectively because:
 Scheduling becomes more complicated
 The processes can be difficult to standardize or automate
 They may need to coordinate low and high contact service systems simultaneously

Developing and Maintaining the Service Process

Developing a service process may sound easy. After all, you merely need to map the process that employees
will follow when serving their clients. A low contact, linear service would be the easiest to map. For example,
when entering a self-service restaurant, clients would collect a tray at the door, collect a plate and eating
utensils, select the foods they want, and proceed to the checkout.
Or, it can also be extremely complex, with multiple, completely different, interactions with the client throughout
the lifetime of the relationship.
Mapping every step of interaction with the customer using a workflow diagram can be extremely helpful in
designing the right service process.

Digital Tools: Develop, Evaluate, Allocate, Monitor

For companies with a few, high-profile clients, you’d want to take special care of each one. A single mistake
could result in losing an important client. Workflow management tools such as Tallyfy allow you to design
the general service process, which you can then re-use for each new client. This streamlines the entire
experience, leaves no room for error, and ensures customer satisfaction.

Nature and Types of Services

We generally associate buying with goods. But in a market a customer also buys services. Everyone from your
doctor to your plumber is selling you a service. Let us learn in detail about business services and their nature as
well as types of services.

Nature of Services
The definition of service is “any intangible product, which is essentially a transaction and is transferred from the
buyer to the seller in exchange for some consideration (or no consideration). Let us take a look at some of the
characteristics of a service.
 Intangibility: A service is not a physical product that you can touch or see. A service can be experienced
by the buyer or the receiver. Also, you cannot judge the quality of the service before consumption.
 Inconsistency: There can be no perfect standardization of services. Even if the service provider remains
the same, the quality of the service may differ from time to time.
 Inseparability: One unique characteristic of services is that the service and the service provider cannot
be separated. Unlike with goods/products the manufacturing and the consumption of services cannot be
separated by storage.
 Storage: The production and consumption of services are not inseparable because storage of services
is not possible. Being an intangible transaction there can never be an inventory of services.

Types of Services

1. Business Services
The first type of service is business services. The most basic definition would be services that support the daily
functioning and activity of any business but is not a commodity. Take for example IT services. In this day and
age, every business will require technological setup. The people who provide IT support to a business are
providing a service in exchange for consideration.

2. Personal Services
Personal services are commercial activities that are provided to individuals according to their individualistic
needs. The service here is extremely personalized to the customer. So there can be no uniformity in the services.
The service provider will alter his service according to the personal needs of each customer.

3. Social Services
And when talking about types of services, we come to social services. These are essential public services. They
are provided by the government or other such non-profit organizations. These services aim to achieve social
equality in the society by providing the backward sections with the help they need. The service is not provided
for a profit motive but as a social cause. Social services include services in the sector of education, sanitation,
medical facilities, housing etc.

SERVICE DESIGN
Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material
components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and
its users. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new
service entirely.

The purpose of service design methodologies is to establish best practices for designing services according
to both the needs of users and the competencies and capabilities of service providers. If a successful method
of service design is adapted then the service will be user-friendly and relevant to the users, while being
sustainable and competitive for the service provider. For this purpose, service design uses methods and tools
derived from different disciplines, ranging from ethnography to information and management
science to interaction design. Service design concepts and ideas are typically portrayed visually, using
different representation techniques according to the culture, skill and level of understanding of the
stakeholders involved in the service processes.

HISTORY

Early service design and theory

Early contributions to service design were made by G. Lynn Shostack, a bank and marketing manager and
consultant, in the form of written articles and books. The activity of designing service was considered to be
part of the domain of marketing and management disciplines in the early years. For instance, in 1982
Shostack proposed the integration of the design of material components (products) and immaterial
components (services). This design process, according to Shostack, can be documented and codified using
a "service blueprint" to map the sequence of events in a service and its essential functions in an objective
and explicit manner. A service blueprint is an extension of a user journey map, and this document specifies
all the interactions a user has with an organization throughout their user lifecycle.

Servicescape is a model developed by B.H. Booms and Mary Jo Bitner to emphasize the impact of the
physical environment in which a service process takes place and to explain the behavior of people within the
service environment, with a view to designing environments that accomplish organizational goals in terms of
achieving desired behavioral responses.

Service design education and practice

In 1991, service design was first introduced as a design discipline by professors Michael Erlhoff and Brigit
Mager at Köln International School of Design (KISD). In 2004, the Service Design Network was launched
by Köln International School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Linköpings Universitet, Politecnico di
Milano and Domus Academy in order to create an international network for service design academics and
professionals.
In 2001, Livework, the first service design and innovation consultancy, opened for business in London. In
2003, Engine, initially founded in 2000 in London as an ideation company, positioned themselves as a service
design consultancy.

Service design principles

The 2018 book, This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World, by Adam
Lawrence, Jakob Schneider, Marc Stickdorn, and Markus Edgar Hormess, proposes six service design
principles:
1. Human-centered: Consider the experience of all the people affected by the service.
2. Collaborative: Stakeholders of various backgrounds and functions should be actively engaged in the
service design process.
3. Iterative: Service design is an exploratory, adaptive, and experimental approach, iterating toward
implementation.
4. Sequential: The service should be visualized and orchestrated as a sequence of interrelated actions.
5. Real: Needs should be researched in reality, ideas prototyped in reality, and intangible values
evidenced as physical or digital reality.
6. Holistic: Services should sustainably address the needs of all stakeholders through the entire service
and across the business.

In the 2011 book, This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases, the first principle is “user-centered”.
"User" refers to any user of the service system, including the organization's customers and employees. Thus,
the authors renewing “user-centered” to “human-centered” in their new book, This is service design doing, to
make the meaning clearly that human includes service providers, customers, and all others relevant
stakeholders. For instance, service design must consider not only the customer experience, but also the
interests of all relevant people in retailing.

“Collaborative” and “iterative” come from the principle “co-creative” in this is service design thinking. The
service exists with the participation of users, and is created by a group of people from different backgrounds.
In most cases, people tend to focus only on the meaning of “collaborative” emphasizing the collaborative and
interdisciplinary nature of service design, but ignored a service only exists with the participation of a user.
Therefore, in the definition of new service design principles, the "co-creative" is divided into two principles of
"collaborative" and "iterative". "Collaboration" is used to indicate the process of creation by the entire
stakeholders from different backgrounds. "Iteration" is used to describe service design is an iterating process
keeping evolve to adapt the change of business posture.

“Sequential” means that service need to be logically, rhythmically and visually displayed. Service design is a
dynamic process of a period of time. The timeline is important for users in the service system. For example,
when a customer shops at an online website, the first information showed up should be the regions where
the products can be delivered. In this way, if the customer finds that the products cannot be delivered to their
region, they will not continually browse the products on the website.

Service is often invisible and occurs in a state that the user cannot perceive. “Real” means that the intangible
service needs to be displayed in a tangible way. For example, when people order food in a restaurant, they
can't perceive the various attributes of the food. If we play the cultivation and picking process of vegetables
in the restaurant, people can perceive the intangible services in the backstage, such as the cultivation of
organic vegetables, and get a quality service experience. This service also helps the restaurant establish a
natural and organic brand image to customers.

Thinking in a holistic way is the cornerstone of service design. Holistic thinking needs to consider both
intangible and tangible service, and ensure that every moment the user interacts with the service, such
moment called touchpoint, is considered and optimized. Holistic thinking also needs to understand that users
have multiple logics to complete an experience process. Thus, service designer should think about each
aspect from different perspectives to ensure that no needs are missing.

Methodology
Together with the most traditional methods used for product design, service design requires methods and
tools to control new elements of the design process, such as the time and the interaction between actors. An
overview of the methodologies for designing services is proposed by Nicola Morelli in 2006, who proposes
three main directions:
 Identification of the actors involved in the definition of the service by means of appropriate analytical
tools
 Definition of possible service scenarios, verifying use cases, and sequences of actions and actors’
roles in order to define the requirements for the service and its logical and organizational structure
 Representation of the service by means of techniques that illustrate all the components of the service,
including physical elements, interactions, logical links and temporal sequences

Analytical tools refer to anthropology, social studies, ethnography and social construction of technology.
Appropriate elaborations of those tools have been proposed with video-ethnography and different
observation techniques to gather data about users’ behavior. Other methods, such as cultural probes, have
been developed in the design discipline, which aim to capture information on users in their context of use
(Gaver, Dunne et al. 1999; Lindsay and Rocchi 2003).

Design tools aim at producing a blueprint of the service, which describes the nature and characteristics of
the interaction in the service. Design tools include service scenarios (which describe the interaction) and use
cases (which illustrate the detail of time sequences in a service encounter). Both techniques are already used
in software and systems engineering to capture the functional requirements of a system.

Public sector service design

Public sector service design is associated with civic technology, open government, e-government, and can
be either government-led or citizen-led initiatives. The public sector is the part of the economy composed
of public services and public enterprises. Public services include public goods and governmental services
such as the military, police, infrastructure such as (public roads, bridges, tunnels, water
supply, sewers, electrical grids, telecommunications, etc), public transit, public education, along with health
care and those working for the government itself, such as elected officials. Due to new investments in
hospitals, schools, cultural institutions and security infrastructures in the last few years, the public sector has
expanded. The number of jobs in public services has also grown; such growth can be associated with the
large and rapid social change that is calling for a reorganization. In this context, governments are considering
service design for a reorganization of public services.

Health care
Clinical service redesign is an approach to improving quality and productivity in health. A redesign is clinically
led and involves all stakeholders (e.g. primary and secondary care clinicians, senior management, patients,
commissioners etc.) to ensure national and local clinical standards are set and communicated across the
care settings. By following the patient's journey or pathway, the team can focus on improving both the patient
experience and the outcomes of care.

Private sector service design

A practical example of service design thinking can be found at the Myyrmanni shopping mall in Vantaa,
Finland. The management attempted to improve the customer flow to the second floor as there were queues
at the landscape lifts and the KONE steel car lifts were ignored. To improve customer flow to the second floor
of the mall (2010) Kone Lifts implemented their 'People Flow' Service Design Thinking by turning the
Elevators into a Hall of Fame for the 'Incredibles' comic strip characters. Making their Elevators more
attractive to the public solved the people flow problem. This case of service design thinking by Kone Elevator
Company is used in literature as an example of extending products into services.

Designing the Organization from Service Design Perspective

Aesthetics and the Ideology of Service and Service Design

The term “Service Design” is said to have been coined in early 1990s where educational program dedicated
to Service Design firstly appeared in Köln International School of Design. Later on in 2004 the Service Design
Network was founded, and since then various discussions on Service Design have been conducted. There
are in fact several definitions of the term, but first I would like to familiarize reader of this article with Service
Design and Service before proceeding.

Service Design is an approach that takes interaction in its entirety between customers and a service provider,
existing behind the scenes of a Service, as its design subject with the aim of optimization and utilization.
In other words, it can also be referred to as Communication Design between customers and a service
provider as they interact through points of contact.

Communication occurring in Service arises from the

continuity of interactions between the service provider and
recipient of that service. For that reason, if communication
problems occur at even a single stage, the service
recipients’ overall estimation of the brand in question is
negatively affected.

This is because regardless of the point of view of the service provider that communication takes the form of
1:N (N being an unspecified large number of people), for the recipient, interaction is seen as being 1:1. You
often see a similar question to “How was the service you received?” in customer satisfaction surveys, but the
answer is given as a kind of overall evaluation depending on the individual personality of a customer.

Above-mentioned communication problems are a serious issue. There was an incident last year in Japan
where a certain hotel restaurant served dishes with different ingredients to the ones indicated on the menu.
The cause of this was revealed to be flaws in the operational process and interdepartmental communication
system. These kind of problems eventually come to a head and run the risk of entering the customer’s field of
vision and being exposed. I believe it is this difference in point of view between 1:N and 1:1 that is a primary
factor in the occurrence of communication problems.

If Service Design is defined as above, Service can be thought of as a Social System created and configured
through the occurrence of interaction between a service provider and customers.

This is based on the mindset of Service-Dominant Logic in which all goods and operations are seen as
“Service”. Service exists in different fields such as Education, R&D, Healthcare, Insurance, Logistics, and B2B
/ B2C Business, but the Service characteristics common in all of these can be categorized into the 3
characteristics below:
1. Intangible: Something that cannot be touched as an object
2. Simultaneous: Production and consumption occurring at the same time
3. Heterogeneous: Value differs from person to person

In other words, Service exists between a service provider and each and every customer meaning it is a
company’s intangible asset. From the view that Service is an intangible asset, the approach of efficiently
utilizing this asset is Service Design.

Front and Back Stage Experience and Design

From here I would like to take a look at the approach focusing on the design of the front and back stage
experiences, often referred to when explaining Service Design, from the 2 points of view of service provider
and service recipient i.e. customers.
 At the Facebook developers conference f8 held last year,
CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote speech provided
particular food for thought.

To summarize, he has stated that calling the people that use

a service “users” as if they exist only to use said service is
equivalent to insolence. In order to create a Human-Centric
Service, it is first necessary to recognize that these people
are people with their own lives and tastes.

“People First” was a key phrase at Facebook’s f8, and from it, I believe that we can learn the importance for
an organization to consider how best to communicate with the “People” that use its Service. Turning our focus
to the “People” offering a Service, it is necessary for them to view and consider the Service they offer with a
truly Human-Centered outlook from both points of view in a comprehensive and detailed manner.
Back tracking a little, the experiences that occur at the front and back stages can in the example of a drinks
and food establishment be sorted as below:
CX (Customer Experience)—The experience at the front stage.
This refers to the customer’s sequence of experiences from entering the establishment to leaving it.

EX (Employee Experience)—UX which occurs at back stage.

This refers to the sequence of experiences from taking the customer’s order to completing the dish in the
kitchen.

There are several representative factors which are the focus of Service Design in both front and back stage,
and those are such things as customer journey, touchpoints, product, and operation.

“User” in UX (User Experience) often signifies the end user or customer, and it has come to be debated how
many points of contact should be created with the user in mind, but in reality there exists another “user”, the
service provider or organization, which also needs to be considered.
 Not being able to grasp what is going on at a user or business location,
 Not being able to determine the cause of this,
 And not being able to predict the effectiveness of policies…
…are some of the issues that exist and inhibit communication with the user, and these are affected by such
things as silos within the organization, a deficient means of information transfer and acquisition, and ambiguity
of responsibilities. To find a solution, it is necessary to turn an eye to and consider the experiences at the back
stage in addition to those at the front.
This is true Human-Centered Design. As a matter of fact, many
of the projects I was involved and would introduce later, are
classified as Communication Design among back stage
considering approaches to do such things as improve policy and
governance, User Experience Design, and develop systems in
an effort to solve the 3 issues above.

Why Service Design?

In a large number of cases when User Experience Design is employed, it
regrettably goes no further than measures aimed at the end user.
However, from the point of view of Service-Dominant Logic, once
Service takes its desirable form, my view is that attention should
then be given to improving the experience on the service provider-
side (back stage) and that further in-depth discussion is
necessary. Subsequently, contributions can be made to improving
User Experience value from the position of the end user. I believe
that exceptional Service can only come from an organization that is
itself exceptional.

Organizational design is of course no easy feat and unless in an official position

to do that, it is difficult to realize. Having said that, there are people like the CEO of Yahoo! Marissa Mayer
who is driving management reform with an ideology based on Service Design. Even without being a CEO, by
recruiting similar-minded people, planning approaches from different angles, and if you can amass fait
accompli, you will surely become more persuasive.