Customer Experience

Companies are awakening to the new reality in which their brand isn’t what they say it is; it’s the cumulative experiences people have with a company.

If delivering an exceptional customer experience is your destination, service design is a vehicle that will get you there.

Companies have lost control of their brand—if they ever had it. Brand is now what customers feel, think, say, and do about the experiences they have with companies. As a result, customer experience improvement is more important now than ever. How can forward-thinking businesses improve their customer experience?

At our 6 April meetup, Sean Walsh proposed that “if delivering an exceptional customer experience is your destination, service design is a vehicle that will get you there.” This is because service design aims to improve “the interaction between service provider and customers” “so that the service is user-friendly, competitive and relevant to the customers.” In order to ensure their viability, service design also ensures that services are “sustainable for the service provider.”

Sean introduced the service blueprint, a key tool of our trade. The service blueprint follows the customer journey from left to right. From top to bottom, it shows the actions of not only the customer, but also the “front stage” personnel, supporting personnel, internal processes, and internal systems. A good blueprint clarifies complex systems through straightforward visual communication. As a result, stakeholders can identify issues in the customer experience, quickly trace their root causes within the organizational system, and make changes for improvement.

Sean recommended these resources:

Access Sean’s slides here.
Sample service blueprint --
Sample service blueprint
Sean introduces service design to 27 professionals. Webster University hosted our meetup. -- Nathan Lucy
Sean introduces service design to 27 professionals. Webster University hosted our meetup. — Nathan Lucy
medium_id
medium_id - Co-Founder and Managing Director, Xperience Lab

Sean is a founding director of the St. Louis Chapter of the Service Design Network.

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