Service design is an approach to creating intentional, holistic, end-to-end interactions between customers, users, and the employees that deliver the service. A positive service experience happens when your organization, or back of house, is orchestrated to create meaningful front-of-house customer experiences. Successful service design brings together thoughtful and consistent interactions across numerous touchpoints.
Service design is important for any kind of organization, but it’s especially crucial for those who provide ongoing and complex services, such as healthcare, financial services, business services, and the public sector.
Service design outcomes and impact
Uncover your service ecosystem
As a service provider, it’s so valuable to understand the distinct mindsets, archetypes, or personas of your target customers and user needs in order to serve a frictionless customer journey. Using service design thinking, our award-winning team can help you:
- Conduct design research that captures a picture of your current service ecosystem
- Understand unique front-of-house customer needs as well as back-of-house employee needs
- Create customer journey maps that capture the entire lifecycle of your customer experience (CX)
- Generate principles and directives that ground the service and support the creation of shared behaviors for improved customer satisfaction.
Implement impactful experiences
Thoughtful service design ultimately leads to innovation within an organization. In turn, this creates a positive impact on the customer as well as alignment for the employees who deliver them. Through service design implementation, you have the ability to:
- Create coherent touchpoints, interactions, and UX design that result in more personalization, loyalty and long-term value for customers
- Use findings from research and service design to improve or transform in-house employee experience and brand identity
- Establish key metrics to ensure that front-of-house, or front stage experience and back-of-house operations align with customer and stakeholder expectations.
Placing the human experience at the center of our efforts, we develop solutions for exceptional service delivery experiences and outcomes for your customers as well as staff.
Case study: Children’s Wisconsin
We worked with Children’s Wisconsin, a nationally recognised paediatric hospital looking to improve customer care for children and adolescents. We worked in partnership with the hospital team to understand the needs and experiences of parents seeking mental health care for their children.
Through people-focused research, we were able to uncover the context and motivations around a parent’s decision to reach out for help. The results of this finding were surprising, and led to us developing innovative and improved customer care pathways that truly met user needs.
Working with a service design agency
Through our multi-channel experience research methodologies and service design processes, Highland can help your organization bring clarity, shape, and structure to new or existing service models in order to deliver more innovative, engaging, and useful services to your customers.
Our world-class team of designers, engineers, researchers, and digital strategists have a long history of helping service providers to identify, design, and launch new services and digital products. We can help you and your customers too.
Design meaningful services
Throughout our design projects, we put people first—our clients and their customers/ users. A human-centered approach is at the core of our work.
By leveraging key service principles in service design and user experience design, organizations can improve their customer experience, redesign, or even create new services. We adopt a partnership approach with our clients. We assemble a cross-functional design team—including key members of your service staff—and use an iterative approach to incorporate as many perspectives as possible.
- We design key service touchpoints and interactions across the customer journey that improve your customer/ user experiences. They also help to align employees with shared service goals
- We iteratively prototype and test improved workflows across front-of-house and back-of-house, including processes, technology and digital product design
- We create a service blueprint to align and inform your operations, service delivery, and even your business model.
We pride ourselves on our design project methods being emphatically human-centered. We identify and map the people, processes, and digital products that have to be orchestrated to deliver the experience, quality of service, and value that your customers expect. Along the way, we identify pain points to be avoided, key moments where the service can be differentiated, integration points that enable scale, and metrics for measuring how the service is ultimately delivered.
Our award-winning team is here to help you with service design excellence.
