What is Service Design?
Service Design is a new discipline that earned stellar prominence as an essential technology by making businesses highly acceptable in their market niches, internally and emotionally delighting their customers. It also results in efficiency in all aspects of the business’s operation redounding to cost-savings that spell out profits.
Let’s be honest. We know that Service Design is primarily taken on for the business. While it also genuinely takes customer satisfaction into consideration, the business is the primary beneficiary of its advantages in the form of assured and increased income. Even if customer satisfaction is removed from the picture, the business can still survive albeit with lower sales. But if profits do not happen in a business, it will surely collapse. That is why businesses innovate. And the best innovation to date is, you guessed it: Service Design.
How does Service Design, as an innovative business improvement tool, benefit a business? So many words cannot explain this in prose and poetry but will not really make it that clear in the end. So we will do that by dissecting the business structure itself.
Business has 4 functional areas – market, technical, organisation-and-management and financial aspects. Let us discuss the benefits of Service Design on a per-functional area basis.
1) Marketing Aspect
– The product itself, the price, place (or accessibility) and promotion are minutely examined based on customer acceptability and preferences. Product quality is improved. Factor-based product costing is done to find out cost-intensive areas, remedy them, and effectively lower the price. Attention is given to product/service accessibility by customers thereby improving the place aspect. Lastly, focus is given to how the product/service is made known to its customers. Promotional strategies are developed or improved according to what customers will delight in. On the whole, the product/service becomes easily marketable to enthusiastic customers.
2) Technical Aspect
– This area is about how the product/service is “manufactured”. Personnel, raw materials and processes are reviewed so that “time and motion” are so set up and coordinated that the least is used in coming up with products/services that delight customers.
3) Organisation and Management Aspect (O&M)
– This area is about the organisational structure and how it functions. A detailed review is conducted on the people behind the marketing, technical, O&M and financial divisions who should be sufficiently qualified to perform their functions according to policies and rules with the customer as the supreme boss. The result of the analysis and improvements based on the review spells out cost and operational efficiency.
4) Financial Aspect
– The area most avoided by study teams but is impossible not to tackle because it is where the “lifeblood” lives. Cash is both the “life” and “killer” of a business. Financial management should be “sound” and designed in such a manner that all the four business functional areas interact harmoniously, at the least effective cost.
Service Design: The Way to the Customer’s Heart!
