Let’s face it, it’s hard to deliver meaningful customer experience (CX) changes. As the Service Design Lead at Capital One Canada, I’m constantly asking myself, “How is service design supported within the business, and how does service design support the business?”

Establishing partnerships and networks with a wide range of actors (going beyond users) from diverse disciplines is key to designing and launching good services. This article explores how service designers manage partnerships during a long-term project involving many different stakeholders to achieve the timely and effective implementation of the service developed.

India is often described as ‘complex’ due to its diverse cultural, economic and social structures that make it challenging for companies to penetrate or innovate. We sought to better understand this complexity and define how service designers can turn these complexities into opportunities.

When Mexico’s BBVA design team began to grow rapidly, from six to 120 designers in the space of two years, our biggest challenge was to establish and permeate the same design mindset, which had to have an optimal balance between putting processes in place and encouraging creative freedom.

How might we design for better client-agency relationships in strategic design, at the beginning of new projects? After interviewing a wide range of clients, agencies and experts, I proposed and tested a workshop called ‘Solution Mapping’, that helps co-create strategies for dealing with potential problems during a project in advance.

There is a natural synergy between service design and design management, sharing as they do three principles fundamental to their success: user centredness, co-creation and a holistic perspective. How can this synergy be exploited to establish service design leadership in organisations, markets and service design teams, and advance the service design agenda?

For designers — especially those in large organisations — conventions, culture and language can create barriers to building trust and collaborating with business partners. In observing these dynamics at a large technology company, we found that business designer archetypes can help service designers better engage with their business peers and create greater impact.

Service design applied to libraries makes perfect sense. Unlike industry institutions, libraries are so-called ‘third places’1 that act as binding agents for communities. Library stakeholders include community members who call a library their own. As such, managing library service design efforts is important and we have seen methods to infuse our institution with service design thinking.

A joint team of public sector officials from the City of Long Beach, California, and graduate students from the Harvard Kennedy School worked on a semester-long project to understand the drivers of illegal dumping in the city. Harvesting the synergies from quantitative and qualitative analyses was a key to success.

As service design matures and shoulders new responsibilities within larger organisations, it also finds itself facing new challenges. Demonstrating its value and applying it to organisational transformation has been addressed in these pages before. In this issue, we look at a new question: how to manage service design.

Out of more than 80 agency, corporate and student submissions from all around the globe, 16 finalists were selected by an international jury of service design experts.

This paper presents the results of intelligent technology research and case studies in a modern garment store in China.

Today, organisations are going through sporadic transformations of varying magnitudes, contexts and complexities.

For this issue of Touchpoint, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes met with service design pioneer and educator Lara Penin, who has recently made a great contribution to the service design literature, with her publication of 'An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible'.

Traditionally, the concept of ‘Service Quality’ (SQ) is defined as the gap between expectation and perception (1). In this article, we present a customer experience-centric approach to service quality that focuses on the impact that service design processes have in delivering a strategically-defined experience proposition.

Co-creating future visions in large organisations can be a daunting task, involving multiple stakeholders with diverse viewpoints, cultural backgrounds, levels of influence and commitment.