What is service design?
The service sector is growing, both in terms of numbers employed and in its importance to the British economy as the manufacturing sector declines. However, as with manufactured products, services must be designed and this design must be managed.
Service design can be both tangible and intangible. It can involve artefacts and other things including communication, environment and behaviours. Whichever form it takes it must be consistent, easy to use and be strategically applied.
Only recently have managers in organisations involved in the service sector realised that a conscious effort in applying design techniques to services can result in greater customer satisfaction, greater control over their offerings and greater profits.
Recently, several consultancies including Live|Work and Engine have turned their attention to designing services and are offering their assistance to the wider community.
In more depth
You can find a listing of companies that specialise in service design in the
Where next? section of this article
Many senior managers involved in the service sector are still unaware of the benefits that design can bring to their offerings and, as a result, many organisations are operating at a sub-optimum level.
Unfortunately, there are few resources available that can assist these managers in the application of design to their service products. In this section, you can find an overview of the discipline and some tips on implementing service design in your organisation.
In Principles of Marketing, Philip Kotler defines a service as ‘any activity or benefit that one party can give to another, that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything. Its production may or may not be tied to a physical product.’
There are five ways in which most services differ from manufactured products:
- Customer contact - Generally, in manufacturing the customer is probably unaware of how the product came about. In services, production and consumption tend to occur at the same time.
- Quality - In manufacturing measures tend to be quantitative, and quality tends to be measured against things like drawings. The measures of quality in a service tend to be qualitative and there are few quantitative measures. As a result, there is a wider variability in services and it is more difficult to control the quality of a service – as it is often down to the individual person supplying it.
- Storability - Because services tend to be intangible, it is usually impossible to store them. For example, a car in a showroom if not sold today can be sold tomorrow but an empty seat on an aeroplane loses its value once the plane has left.
- Tangibility - One can physically touch a manufactured product but most services are intangible. One cannot touch legal advice or a journey, though one can often see the results.
- Transportability - Most services cannot be transported and therefore, exported (though the means of producing these services often can). It is estimated that only 11% of services are exportable although this is fast changing
Business and management courses are fast-growing areas in education and increasingly, courses or modules in these courses are being included that show how to manage products and services. The design of services is a natural component of such courses.
- There are plans to open a college in Northumbria that has services and service design as its main focus. This is planned to have 6,000 new service design graduates per year and between 270 to 350 faculty by 2012.
- The University of California, Berkeley is offering a Services Science graduate course for the first time in 2006.
- Paul Horn, Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research, has suggested a new academic discipline of Services Science that would ‘bring together work in the more established fields of computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, management sciences, and social and legal sciences, in order to develop the skills required for a services-led economy.
There is a need to educate service providers on the importance of total design, to show that it needs process and leadership – and also to show that innovation can occur throughout every stage of a product’s usage.