Services are a growth area. But service design and management is often poorly planned, so it is quite easy for a company to gain a competitive advantage through the application of some quite simple design techniques
Innovations in both marketing and technology are currently changing the ways in which customers are contacted, served and retained. Service design can be applied at any stage where customers interface with your organisation, and can improve customer satisfaction and thus enhance company profitability.
The importance of services to the economy of the country will almost certainly continue to grow in the near future. Manufacturing in the UK has declined and it now ranks 4th in Europe in terms of GDP, while the balance of trade surplus in services is £6-7billion per annum. Indeed in industrialised countries across the world there has been an increase in the contribution to the GDP and to the level of employment derived from non-manufacturers – or, more specifically, from the service sector. Financial services continue to grow as do international tourism and related hospitality services worldwide. And the inclusion of customer service is becoming a key feature in the sale of tangible products. It is the complete pre-sale, final sale and post-sale experience that now determines a brand or organisation’s overall quality rating.
In services, production and consumption occur at the same time. So customers cannot fail to notice if the service has been poorly designed. Of course, this often relates to their physical surroundings but, increasingly, users are looking to the totality of the service. That which is offered must, at least, meet their expectations.
And those customer expectations are continuing to rise. Service that was acceptable in a shop, hospital outpatients department or railway station just a few years ago is now considered unacceptable. Many necessary and ongoing improvements can be brought into the service through the application of design.
Some services operate within tight financial constraints – particularly within the public sector. Although it may not be possible to increase the amount of finance available, through service design it is often possible to make the available finance stretch further.
If new and improved services are designed and planned with a front-end focus, poor ideas can be easily eliminated and better ideas should be more fully thought out while the design is still on paper. This avoids changes later in the process, at the high-cost end of design. And this should result in a more efficient use of the resources available.
While the main measure of the success of most services is profitability, there are exceptions. The emergency services, public transport and education services, for example, are in part created for the good of society – so service performance often outweighs (but does not exclude) financial considerations.
Generally, innovation, being an important subset of the design process, is poorly applied in the service sector. Innovation can occur in all stages of the whole life of a product, especially (and increasingly) at the service end when customers are more likely to be directly involved with the delivery of the service.
Innovation is generally easier with services as there is less of an existing infrastructure to be replaced than with manufacturing, so customers more readily accept changes brought about through innovation.
In more depth
Find out more about
innovation and why it’s important to your business in our article by Bettina von Stamm