What the service design process looks like?

Service design is an ever-growing field, which can completely change the organization of services in any company. It’s about creating and optimizing the customer experience at various points of contact with the brand. The service design process can be based on different models. Let’s take a look at its most important stages one by one.

1. Preparation – at this stage service designers get to know their client’s business, observe what the company earns on and learn more about the market itself. If the organization has its own service design team, specialists can skip this step because they know their jobs very well.
2. Challenge – every process requires a problem to be solved. Sometimes the challenge is obvious, and sometimes it can change during the work.
3. Discovery – this is one of the key stages, consisting of immersion in the analyzed problem. Service designers have to put themselves in the place of the customer (empathize) and conduct in-depth research. They are interested in all insights, consumer behavior and constant broadening of perspective.
4. Defining – once the necessary information has been collected, it is necessary to organise it and draw specific conclusions from it. Here we can define or redefine the challenge and the goal, as well as establish the KPIs necessary to monitor progress.
5. Co-creation – the phase when words turn into actions. It is at this point that specific solutions are created in cooperation with various parties. At the stage of co-creation it is worth to verify the hypotheses made, to test the experience of users and to catch possible complications.
6. Implementation – this is the most important and most difficult stage of service design work. At this point, different areas of the organization come together in order to implement the developed solution.
7. Monitoring – in fact the work on service design never ends. Solutions introduced to the market require observation and constant improvement. At this stage assumptions are verified and the effects of changes are monitored.
8. Awareness – lasting and real change is only possible if you build broad support and awareness of the new approach in your organization. It is a necessary step to introduce a culture of innovation in the company.

Dissecting the service design process into individual stages will help you better understand the nature of service design. Remember that on this path there must also be checkpoints, that is moments in which the team can analyze the situation and make business decisions about further work.