Service Design

Effective service design always puts people first—on both sides of the exchange.  It’s built on knowledge that can be tested through experience.  Knowing your customers intimately, where they come from and why they buy from you is the first step in the service design process. 

Our CAST service design practice provides our clients with a powerful way to assure that their business identity and their brand promises align with the expectations and concerns of customers.The first principle of Service Design is very simple but often overlooked: services can only succeed if they satisfy customer’s needs. 

Service design recognizes the service as a “journey” in time that customers and the service providers experience together. It also addresses what it takes to assure the quality and continuity of the service, addressing all the external factors that enable the provider to scale their service processes for growth and profitability.  Good service design is uniquely customer-driven with the focus on bringing repeatability of a quality service experience for both users and providers.

The CAST service design document provides a map for the effective staging and representation of your service. It provides a customer-centric nomenclature for the marketing of your new or redesigned service. CAST Service Design address all five performance points that combine to assure repeatable, high quality service:

1. People. Services involve reciprocity: people performing tasks, giving and receiving, selling and buying, interacting together for mutual benefit. Some services involve delivering a product, but a service is never a product.  A service is always about people and how they experience the mutuality of its performance.

2. Journeys. All services involve a journey in time to pass into, through and beyond the service. The journey can be smooth and delightful or awkward and uncertain.  Good service design works from an understanding of the customer’s journey in depth, and examines what happens before, during and after the central service experience, both from the perspective of users and providers. 

3. Propositions. Services are “packaged” and presented as propositions that define the what and especially the why of the service so that users will readily identify with it, value it and buy it.  An effective service value proposition describes and differentiates the service (and its experience) from that of competitors and does this in terms of service’s value to its users.  Framing the selling proposition for a service involves modeling the customer’s service experience in a way that the prospective buyer can immediately and intuitively identify with the service as something to be desired and experienced.

4. Infrastructure. No service happens in a vacuum.  Services are produced and consumed in a support system of relationships with suppliers and other services.  Every service involves creating a kind of “bridge” that customers cross from need to satisfaction.  This bridge is what supports the customer’s “journey” and it’s built on all the factors that contribute to service delivery.  Good service design looks holistically at this service “infrastructure” in an effort to understand how the different parts and “players” interconnect with and support effective, profitable delivery.

5. Value. Different services create value differently, but most services try to deliver the best value possible for both users and producers.  Indeed, the perception of value is the driver of demand and utilization of services.  Service design may be about making something easier to experience by optimizing processes, but it should always be focused on growing and sustaining value.