Service Design is a discipline that involves planning and organizing resources to directly improve the staff experience and, by extension, the customer’s experience. Communication is the key to success: if staff are unprepared to deliver the experience by design, then it will be delivered by default. We’ve honed our practice of this discipline to cover human interactions in every phase of an experience: before, during and after.
Process
Based on the previous project phases, we convene stakeholders that participate in an interactive workshop(s) to help us understand the entirety of the user’s experience, both informational and physical, and explore potential avenues to implement proposed design solutions.
We create a visualization of the system that exists so that we can overlay individual user pathways and understand which Message is being shared, by which Member of the team, in what Medium and at what Moment. By doing so, we can start to see gaps and opportunities to better communicate and support each team member at each point in the process.
This helps us engage in cross-sector conversations about overlaps in the service process that can be eliminated, allowing for a more equitable (and common-sense) distribution of responsibility and resources in the system map. It also helps staffers see themselves in the context of the larger system, so that they better understand handoffs to work across organizational silos.
Some of our clients have called this process “LEAN lite,” which is a fair approximation. The difference is that we’re doing this as part of a robust human-centered process, and thinking in terms of designed tools to support experiences.
While we’re engaged in these discussions, we may brainstorm potential tools that we can study in-depth in the next phases of work.