SDN Team
Author - SDN Team

We asked leading practitioners giving talks and workshops at the Service Design Global Conference to answer the 3 key questions. Today we asked Daniel Ewerman, a writer, service developer, entrepreneur at Transformator Design, to give us his take.

1) Can you explain what service design is? And how your company implements it / uses that field?

Service design is a design method (an approach) in order to become customer centric. It’s used to improve the relationship between the organisation and their customers but also to improve the relation within the organisation.

Transformator Design is helping organisations to become customer centric. We help organisations to understand customers’ needs and transform the organisation accordingly in order to become relevant, profitable and reduce costs. 

Custellence is a software system to create ownership of the customer centric change plan. It’s used to keep focus on the customers in the continuous improvements.

2) What do you believe is the greatest opportunity for your company using service design? 

We interact with service providers’ daily and by helping organisations to adapt to human needs will in the long run create a better society. It’s proven that happy customers are profitable and empathy is probably the biggest competitive edge you can bring to a business in the coming years.

3) Can you share three tips for implementing service design in their own practice? 

1.     The connection between the organisation and the service design deliverables, such as customer journeys, customer insights or service concepts, is essential for a successful implementation. Service design must be a crucial part of everyday life in the organisation and can’t live a parallel life of wonderful "what if". It must be prioritised! And you must understand how everything is connected. For example how is the customer journey connected with the internal processes and channels?  It’s complex but you need to have the big picture in order to get result.

2.     The organisation must have ownership of the change and fully commit to the change. And there is only one way of doing it; they must understand the needs that everything is based on. Commitment of internal stakeholders is crucial and along comes distribution of mandate and budget.

3.     You must have the whole picture. Many organisations are facing the challenge to explain why they need to change, many departments (and people) do not understand their role in a bigger change plan towards a better service offer and customer experience. That’s why it’s so important to have a service map and to visualise how it’s all connected.

 

Daniel Ewerman is an industrial designer who started designing customer experiences and now calls himself a writer, service developer, entrepreneur and passionate advocate for customer centricity. A year ago Daniel wrote a book, Customer Experience – why some organizations succeed and others do not.

 

Read Daniel 's full biography here.

And find out more about his SDGC16 talk Finding the New Business As Usual here.

 

 

 

Related Community Knowledge

Meet the service designer Meet the service designer: Natalie Kuhn (she/her)

Meet the service designer: Natalie Kuhn (she/her)

Along with fellow service design pioneers in the New York City area, Natalie Kuhn helped establish the SDN New York Chapter. In the years since, her team and chapter have been recognised with awards for their chapter activities, and she has been involved with the global SDN's efforts around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, as part of a taskforce established in 2020. She also manages to find time for her day job: Managing service design at US banking giant Capital One. Here, she chats with Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes about her roles and ambitions.

Continue reading
Meet the service designer Patti Hunt:  Meet the service designer

Patti Hunt: Meet the service designer

Patti Hunt is the founder and director of MAKE Studios, a service innovation company based in Hong Kong. For this edition of the Touchpoint Profile, she had a chat with Jesse Grimes, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, about her work with multi-national corporations, NGOs and start-ups in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the unique challenges posed by practicing service design in Hong Kong.

Continue reading
Meet the service designer Eleonora Carnasa: Meet the service designer

Eleonora Carnasa: Meet the service designer

Eleonora Carnasa is a Bulgaria-based service designer and founder of Fabrica 360, a design and innovation agency. In this profile, she had a chat with Jesse Grimes, Touchpoint’s Editor-in-Chief, about her efforts to grow service design in Eastern Europe.

Continue reading
Meet the service designer Luis Alt: Meet the service designer

Luis Alt: Meet the service designer

Established in 2010, Livework’s São Paulo outpost is a service design pioneer in one of the world’s top-ten largest economies - Brazil. Since then, the team has worked with an enviable roster of clients, but also experienced the challenges of carrying out service design before it became widely recognised. In this edition of the Touchpoint Profile, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes speaks to Luis Alt, one of the studio’s founders.

Continue reading