Designing your customer journey is the ultimate in service based marketing.
Strategic Service Design
So much of a service is intangible. Compared with a tangible product, a service can be much harder to differentiate from its competitorsand more difficult to ensure consistent and high-quality customer experiences. Strategic Service Design is a holistic way for you to show how empathic you are to your customer needs. It is a practical but creative way to improve your services and innovate new ones. Strategic Service Design is all about making that customer journey tangible.
Humanising services is about creating those purposeful touch points that become those memorable moments for your ideal customer and position your brand head and shoulders over any alternative. It is based on the principal of don't tell me, show me and emphasises the important of designing a customer journey that is alive, interactive and delivers every time.
Strategic Service Design was created out of my interest in Service Design. Service Design is an interdisciplinary approach that combines many different tools and disciplines. It is evolving as an approach and a new emerging field.
The five principals of *Service Design thinking are:
- User Centred the services should be experienced through the customer eyes
- Co-creative all stakeholders should be involved in the service design process
- Sequencing the service should be visualised as a sequence of interrelated actions
- Evidencing Intangible services should be visualised in terms of physical artefacts
- The holistic the entire environment of services should be considered.
*Note: from This is Service Design Thinking book. Thus, Service Design is a philosophy or a way of thinking. I have taken this practice and created Strategic Service Design. It is based in innovating services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for us. It is a multidisciplinary integrated and holistic way to show empathy to the user. The reason I really resonate with this approach is, ultimately value is not just tied to the deliverable of a service but the ultimate value is tied to the how of the delivery as well. We are emotional beings and we make decisions based not just on a service ticking rational needs, but out emotional needs as well.
This approach can provide great services and customer experiences. I love 31 Volts service design definition.
"When you have two coffee shops right next to each other, and each sells the exact same office at the exact same price, service design is what makes you walk into one and not the other." It is this strategic service design approach that integrates so much with my customer centric marketing approach. Customer Centric Marketing includes the process of strategic Service Design.
