Core Capabilities for Service Design
Building service design capability within yourself and your organization takes seeing the bridge between current capacity and future possibilities. As so many organizations are now trying to broaden their design horizons and adopt service design as a practice, I want to talk about what I believe are core capabilities that can make for great service design. I firmly believe that the future of service design lies in activating these core capabilities in staff across a variety of disciplines, both in an effort to train the next generation of service designers, and to also bring service design thinking to our organizations. This list is a mix of skills and strengths that I believe are key ingredients to building service design capability. Let’s dive in.
1. Empathy
Service design is in service to people. At the heart of service design as a practice, theory, and discipline is empathy and a desire to improve people’s lives. This is grounded in a drive to understand, connect, and help others, and the ability to deeply listen, engage, and explore diverse perspectives and experiences.
In a service design context, you have to both empathize with the customer, who has to navigate the experience your organization has created, as well as empathize with your internal stakeholders that are doing their best to deliver the service despite the organizational boundaries and silo’d resources. You act as the empathetic mediator between customer expectation and organizational constraint.
2. Communication
As service design requires cross-functional collaboration, engagement of staff at all levels, and often the introduction of new concepts, having communication and presentation skills is absolutely essential to building relationships, influencing others, and educating around service design efforts and vision.
As a service designer, you’ll be communicating with teams that might not be like you, or even like one another. Translating the same plan or strategy to a finance department one day, and to a user experience department the next requires agility in your approach to meet a diverse set of audiences. In addition to this agility, you will often find yourself acting as a translation hub, communicating the customer’s experience to your varied set of stakeholders, and explaining how that experience is affected by the component parts of your organization.
3. Facilitation
Related to the cross-functional nature of service design in practice, facilitation skills are key to guiding diverse teams through a service design process, and leading initiatives that require engagement of a diverse group of stakeholders. Designing and facilitating the right approach to engage teams (e.g. workshops, sprints, or other activities) is a significant part of day-to-day service design work.
For example, it’s not uncommon to be facilitating collaborations between teams that have never worked together before, but are right next to each other from the customer’s point of view. Being able to take these parties and lead them through the service design methodology requires you to not only be a subject matter expert, but also a capable teacher through facilitation.
4. Systems Thinking
The ability and inclination to think on a systems level is critical in service design. A service is made up of many components (e.g. billing, support, provisioning, delivery) and many dimensions of experience (e.g. time, channel, emotion, context). By nature, service design requires systems thinking to understand and analyze how all aspects of the service integrate and impact each other in the context of the larger service ecosystem.
When thinking on a systems level, you’re not only taking and end-to-end view, but also the surface-to-core view of what it is that makes the customer’s journey happen. It’s the deep underpinnings of an experience that aren’t seen by the customer, but felt throughout the journey. Beneath it all is the web of systems that keep things operating, for better or for worse. Being a systems thinker in a service design context means being able to simultaneously see a high level view as well as a detailed view, and to be able to make sense of both.
5. Synthesis
Going hand-in-hand with systems thinking is the ability to synthesize — forming theories, frameworks, and insights to guide service efforts. To take inputs of all kinds — research findings, analytics, customer feedback, ideation, strategic directives — and turn this into a clear direction for the service.
This is a crucial capability. The design of the customer’s experience is limited by the level of synthesis that happens within service design work. If you’re job as a service designer is to serve both the customer and the organization, creating a central taxonomy and strategy that is broadly applicable is what will allow you to create those “more seamless” internal structures that are expressed by a “more seamless” customer experience.
6. Future Visioning
The work of designing for service is often the work of designing the future — imagining the future state, weighing options and strategy, helping teams set sights on a “North Star” to guide service development. Envisioning future scenarios, and balancing those with business requirements, customer experiences, and other contextual factors, is a service design superpower.
In real life, this means putting yourself out there, helping teams make predictions, place bets, test viability of service concepts and ideas, and prototype future service experiences. The ability to synthesize the needs of the customer with the needs and current state of the business into potential futures, and articulate those futures is what will bring true change.
7. Storytelling
No great vision for change will inspire others without strong storytelling skills. Storytelling is the best way to making ideas understandable, making the future more concrete, and the present more impactful. Storytelling takes the power of emotion and personal connection to make ideas stick. Storytelling is what will turn your success into “leverable wins” that can inspire organizations to embrace service design.
The difference between being product focused and service focused is that a service is truly a story — the story of a customer’s relationship with the business, and how it unfolds over time. Often teams are very good at knowing their part of the story, and inferring the other parts of the story on either side of them, but no one is acting as the holistic “script supervisor.” That is where service design plays an important role in “gluing” all the chapters of the same story together, and making sure that story is heard throughout the organization and understood by all of its “authors.” Storytelling is a critical tool for creating this end-to-end understanding.
8. Visualization
By nature when dealing with complex service ecosystems, multiple channels, and the dimension of time, one of the major challenges of conducting service design work is helping others see the end-to-end and surface-to-core nature of the service. Visualization (either through diagramming, storyboarding, or information design) is a power tool for service designers to communicate.
As one of our main goals is to communicate clearly the complex dimensions of service experience and delivery, we must be able to visualize this information in a variety of ways in order to reach each of our different stakeholders. We are the translators between vast and unwieldy sets of data and our organizational change makers, the creators of motivational data stories that will inspire action.
9. Making
Lastly, would it really be “design” without making? Making artifacts to evidence service systems and experiences, making simulations or prototypes to test service concepts, or making toolkits and materials to facilitate service design efforts — this is a fundamental capability that service designers should have.
Service design projects will likely cross through channels and contexts, spanning multiple mediums. We can’t be expected to make high-quality artifacts in each medium, but as a service designer, we must be able to produce “scrappy but not crappy” prototypes to test and validate our designs. This service prototyping might be anything from a retail store layout, to the script the retail staff uses to in-store displays, all the way through the receipt design and maybe a follow up call. There is a lot more to making than just doing hands on arts and crafts. You’ve got to be able to fabricate experiences and prototypes in just about any medium or context necessary.
Conclusion
Whether you are looking inward trying to make that leap to pursue a career in service design, or looking outward to building this capacity in your organization, it is important to have awareness and understanding of core capabilities for service design.
I see these traits as key ingredients to successful service design efforts, whether or not they are all found within a single person. Consider the composition of your growing service design team, or your own personal desire for development, and whether that means narrowing into a particular role — researchers, strategist, or designer — or aiming to become a service design generalist.
If you are as passionate as I am about growing service design as a necessary practice for organizational success, be on the lookout for these traits in others you know, and consider the possibilities of activating new talent to grow our service design community. You might find it in surprising places. In fact, I believe that the future of service design as a discipline depends on activating these traits in staff with backgrounds in business development, service management, finance, and organizational change (to name a few).
We are at a pivotal moment in the history of design as an industry — we have an opportunity to extend the reach of design, expand our community to embrace a larger context, and integrate design more deeply than ever before into the way we work at an organizational level. Service design can be the bridge to connect disciplines, the catalyst for bringing design thinking to the heart of business, and the open door for those with these core capabilities to walk through and realize their destiny.
This is your opportunity to be a leader — to develop these capabilities in yourself and others, to educate your organization and peers, and ultimately inspire others to change the way we work to be in better service of our customers and our communities.
