Service Design in the Real World

In a perfect world, service design starts from the very beginning

Before developing a solution, we seek to understand what people need, the problems they are trying to solve, and the context in which a future service will operate. We look at the entire customer journey, bring together different perspectives from across the organization, develop ideas, test them, and improve them step by step.

This is how service design is often taught, and under ideal conditions, it is highly effective.  The reality in organizations, however, rarely looks like this. Products, processes, and systems already exist, responsibilities are divided, and projects may have been underway for months or even years before service design enters the picture.

This doesn’t mean service design has come too late. But it does change the question. Instead of striving for the perfect process, we need to ask: What is the right question to ask now and where can service design make the biggest difference under the actual current conditions?

 

When the most important question comes just before launch

We encounter this situation regularly: a new digital product is almost ready to launch and there is time for one final round of qualitative testing. Can users navigate it, find the relevant features, and understand the interactions? These are all useful questions, but a bigger question sometimes emerges:

Does the product even address a relevant customer need?

This is an important distinction. “Can people use it?” is not the same question as “Do people need it?”

A few weeks before launch, the answer can be uncomfortable. Once the product has been built and key decisions have been made, fundamental changes may be difficult or no longer possible. Ideally, customer needs would inform development from the start. But later is still better than not considering these needs at all. Even late testing can reveal risks, enable improvements, and provide insights for future development. It also illustrates why service design is more than a collection of methods. What matters is when we ask questions and which decisions the answers can still influence.

 

You may already be a service organization

Many organizations already provide services but continue to design their offerings as individual products, channels, or touchpoints. Apps, digital interfaces, consulting, installation, and support may gradually emerge around a physical product until it becomes part of a wider service ecosystem.

Consider a hotel stay. From the organization’s perspective, booking, check-in, room access, the stay itself, and customer support may be managed by different teams and systems. Each team may optimize its own part of the experience, such as the booking platform, reception process, mobile key, room services, or support channel.

Guests do not experience these separate components. They may book on a website, check in through an app, ask for help at the reception, and use a digital key to enter their room. For them, these interactions form a single service with one objective: a comfortable and straightforward stay.

This changes the challenge facing the designers. It is no longer enough to optimize individual touchpoints. We also need to consider how they work together. Do they follow a clear logic? Are interactions and visualizations consistent? Does moving between touchpoints feel like moving within the same experience?

Organizations structure their work around products, projects, and responsibilities. Customers do not experience that organizational structure. They experience the service as a whole.

Service design helps us see these individual elements as one connected system.

 

When valuable insights stay within projects

This broader perspective applies to knowledge as well as touchpoints. In one long-term client relationship, we supported both an overarching employee journey and several individual projects. Insights from one project were often relevant to others, but they are rarely shared with all participants and departments accross a large organization.

Different project teams generate knowledge about the same people from different perspectives. Their needs, findings, and decisions may overlap, and insights that could help a team may already exist elsewhere in the organization.

So the question is not only how we generate new insights about customers or employees.

 

What subsequently happens to those insights afterwards?

Do they remain within the project that generated them, or can they contribute to a shared understanding across projects and responsibilities?

A long-term external partner can add value here by working across teams and projects. This more holistic perspective can help connect related insights and keep the overall experience in view.

Sometimes the greatest value of service design is not generating another new idea. It is making sure existing good ideas and insights become part of a cohesive service.

 

The perfect process is not the goal

None of these situations reflect the ideal textbook conditions. We would prefer to understand customer needs before building a product, design touchpoints as one experience, and allow insights to flow across organizational boundaries. But established organizations do not start with a blank page. This is precisely why service design matters.

In reality, service design is less about following a perfect process from beginning to end and more about recognizing which question needs to be asked next.

• Are we testing usability when we actually need to be validating the proposition?
• Are we designing separate products although customers experience a single service?
• Are we generating new insights when relevant knowledge may already exist elsewhere in the organization?

The answers may require very different service design activities. Sometimes it is research. Sometimes it is an overarching journey, shared design principles, or simply a different perspective on what already exists.

 

Where is your service potential?

Perhaps the first question should not be: How do we introduce service design into our organization?

A better question might be:

Where could service design make the biggest difference for us today?

This is the starting point for our Service Potential Analysis. Rather than assessing whether an organization is doing service design “right” or “wrong”, we look at what is already there: when and how customer needs influence decisions, how touchpoints work together, how insights travel through the organization, and where valuable connections may be missing.

The goal is not to impose a perfect process, but to identify where service design can add the most value and start there.

The path ahead may not be straight, and the starting conditions may be far from perfect. But service design does not require a blank page or a flawless route. It requires relevant questions, realistic next steps, and the willingness to begin.