Service design practitioners are rarely seasoned salespeople. While they may be comfortable with all the challenges that a service design project can throw at them, they are often less sure of themselves when it comes to securing the project in the first place.

I’ve been a fan of service design since my introduction to it in grad school — and an active champion of the discipline since my initial involvement with the Service Design Network back in 2010.

Cambridge Consultants is a product development house based in the UK and US. The range of projects we undertake is broad: from revolutionary ‘round’ teabags that transformed a business, through inhalers with enhanced human factors and on to air traffic control radio systems used in airports around the world.

In order to design services in a consumer-centred way, service designers often rely on reasoning through how a consumer would behave in certain situations. To do this, designers have developed tools and techniques such as personas and empathy.

One company advancing the design of services is 7-Eleven, the convenience store chain, whose 56,000 stores across 16 countries explores designing diverse yet localised services.

During the past years, Hellon’s sales team has become very successful in selling service design. The yearly turnover has increased at an accelerating pace, reaching a total growth rate of 30% in 2015.

Executives are busy people. Daily, they struggle to rise above the mountains of emails, back-to-back meetings and the demands of managing staff to focus on and achieve the strategic and tactical responsibilities they hold.

Service designers truly help organisations innovate, if they manage to blend the two fundamentally different approaches of problem-solving and decision-making. We propose a three-step approach.

In life, we are constantly faced with the limited view: the office window that shows you a sliver of the outdoors; the car mirror that shows you most of the lane beside you; the porch light that helps you navigate half the staircase in the dark; and perhaps many of us experience a limited view when we are trying to figure out something about our own health or to help others with theirs.

As service design practitioners, we continually help our clients to better understand their customers: we help them find out how they can be more valuable to their clients, how they can make a difference or how they can persuade prospects with extraordinary services.

From the front covers of the Harvard Business Review and Businessweek, it would appear that design has become a part of every facet of business. But, while Toronto is home to North America’s third-largest design workforce (1), service design remains a new phenomenon here, and across Canada.

As much as service design has evolved as a discipline to deliver better results and become more attractive to organisations, many business executives are not even aware of the importance of delivering great service experiences. So, in my upcoming book, I’m trying a new strategy: lower the volume on service design to first spread the word about the impact that great services can have on businesses.

We believe selling service design isn't about making service design sellable. Instead, successful sales are determined by adopting a mindset of ‘becoming buyable’. We believe that applying the methods and approach of service design to your sales process will help you become buyable.

In this article, we look at selling service design in the context of a developing country (Chile) where the concept is still at a relatively early stage in both the private sector and in academia and research.

In our daily lives, the electric plug has long become indispensable, making it all the harder to imagine that there are still more than 2 billion people worldwide without access to electric energy. In 2011, a handful of engineers wanted to tackle this problem by combining renewable energy with internet-of-things technology and founded the Mobisol company in a Berlin garage.

Happy employees make for happy customers. Intuitively, this relationship makes sense, but how can it be proven? How can it be understood in a nuanced-enough way to organise the design, delivery, and assessment of services? How can it be used to make the case for keeping both the employee and the customer sides of the equation happy?

While working as a team in real-world settings is crucial to the design process, and certainly should not be replaced entirely, the deliberate use of software tools can enhance the productivity of service design teams throughout all stages of the service design process.

Service concepts and added value are best communicated through action and a moving image. A moving image concretises service moments and interactions. It can be easily distributed through new media channels. A service design movie, then, is a great way to develop and share your service concept and value offering within the business.

In this issue’s profile, Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes speaks with Ulla Jones, Business Designer at OP Financial Group, the biggest banking and insurance group in Finland. Her company is currently working on building an in-house design team, the first of its kind in Finland.