I’ve started leading a book club at work for Service Design and it’s creating some great discussions around how to improve our service setup. This week we covered Chapters 1 and 2, which gave an overview of how a Swedish insurance company used service design and the basics of service design. As we progress through the book I’ll post about interesting ideas and discussions.
One of our first talking points was around the notion of classifying services in one or more of the following values:
- Care – Services that maintain people or things, such as healthcare or airplane maintenance.
- Access – Services that enable people to use something temporarily, like a car rental.
- Response – Services that respond to people’s unforseen needs, like an insurance policy.
For a new Product Manager, this classification of a company’s service values can help them think about a product holistically. A great point in the book is that many businesses silo parts of a customer experience into business unit to optimize organizational structure, but the end customer receives the service as one package. It can be all too easy for a new Product Manager to think only about product development without considering how product decisions impact the overall service that a customer receives. And that a customer’s experience with your company is shaped only partially by the product experience. It’s important to work across the business with all stakeholders, incorporating internal needs into product design and communicating profusely about any service impacts.
At work we’re in the midst of transitioning from Access and Response values to Response and Care values, which is an exciting time to explore new ways to structure our services. It also means that the tone and value proposition of our products has to change to support this new service model. Viewing the service change as a fundamental shift in service values helps give a measure for examining product changes. Any product change I make should be about getting us away from an Access value to a Care value. For instance, instead of giving customers access to raw exports of data, we should be caring for them by bundling that data into actionable recommendations that can easily implement.
If you are interested in using Service Design for you own book club, here are some discussion questions you can use for Chapters 1 & 2:
- Gjensidige had their CEO and Executive Team talk to customers. What effect do you think direct Executive Team involvement would have/has on our services, both internally and externally? From the book – “When a CEO sits down to talk to customers to find out what they think, it sends an important signal to the rest of the organization and the industry.”
- Where are we siloed as a service organization, and where are we not? What impact do these silos or lack thereof have on our customers? What could we do to help bust any existing silos? From the book – “The division of the silos makes sense to the business units, but makes no sense to the customer, who sees the entire offering as one experience.”
- How do we think and talk about our customers: as productive assets or as consumers? From the book – “The biggest missed opportunity in development is that organizations don’t think about their customers as valuable, productive assets in the delivery of a service, but as anonymous consumers of products.”
- Services deliver one or more core values: Care, Response, and Access. What are our service values? Is it different depending on the product/value proposition?
- How could we make our service more visible to customers? How do we make the invisible visible? From the book – “As a result, service designers frequently need to make the invisible visible by showing customers what has gone on behind the scenes, showing staff what is happening in the lives of customers, and showing everyone the resource usage that is hidden away.”