Smart service design

With a continual push for efficiency and scale, service providers more and more rely on technology for service delivery. While that started with the automation of routine interactions - think automated payment in parking garages, or ATMs replacing bank tellers for cash withdrawals - more and more, very sophisticated technology is playing a role in serving customers. It’s intelligently learning from past interactions and modifying future ones, building up profiles of customers to learn how to more effectively serve (and sell) to them, and more.

This advent of ‘smart services’ calls for - naturally - ‘smart service design’. That is, adapting our practice to cope with new challenges, and harness new opportunities, to deliver the services of tomorrow. There is the risk that technology could subsume service delivery to such an extent that the concepts of empathy, aesthetics and design - never mind the human touch - fall by the wayside. At the same time, new technology opens up new possibilities that could not have been imagined before.

‘Smart service design’ is the topic we’ve chosen for this upcoming issue of Touchpoint. We invite service designers, and those in adjacent fields (especially those at the intersection between technology and customer experience), to contribute abstracts to this Call for Papers.

Read more and submit your abstracts via the online form until the16th of October 2022 (23:59 CET).

We are looking forward to many inspiring contributions!