Paper [abstract]
Service Design: A Systematic Approach
The US Department of Commerce estimates that the service sector’s share of the US economy is roughly 80%. There is a growing need, focus, and opportunity on the importance of delivering quality service encounters as companies seek ways to create customer loyalty and brand differentiation. Service design allows companies to leverage customer and employee facing interactions and relational opportunities to shift current or create new business opportunities.
New or existing services have been predominantly designed through a user centered design process casting the customer as the sole end user. Employing this process limits the service’s potential in scope and quality because it fails to acknowledge the contact employee delivering the service. Consequently, many of the current services are designed lacking relational insights yielding missed opportunities.
This paper proposes a radical shift in thought and approach by looking at services as a holistic system constructed of relational factors, stakeholders' experiences, and interactions. Firstly, mapping and modeling can reveal valuable insights in identifying participants' experiences on various service encounters. Secondly, technology can be used to skill employees in facilitating situations that deliver a quality personal service encounter while impacting the felt experience of doing their jobs. Finally, designers can use services as a vehicle to craft new business models in the context of behavior.
Project Details
Advisor:Jodi Forlizzi
Project
Wink: A system facilitating employee value and performance
The use of technology in the delivery of services has been a growing area of focus for designers. Monetary metrics and time-based efficiency have fueled the adoption of self-service technology (SST). The primary intention of SSTs has been to automate services for the customer as the end user. The impact however, has shifted the current service paradigm from “high touch, low tech” to “low touch, high tech.” What that means is that contact employees’ roles have been devalued and even marginalized while, the demands for accessing and storing more complex data points has increased.
I am proposing a radical shift in thought and approach to deploying technology as a means of restoring balance in the service paradigm. I am currently exploring various uses of technology to support the argument that a service is a holistic system constructed of relational factors. My objective is to facilitate felt experiences for all of the stakeholders in a service, not just for the customer. More specifically, I am focusing on embedding technology as a means of facilitating experiences systematically and spontaneously by skilling contact employees to draw insights based on customers’ patterns.
Project Details
Advisor:John Zimmerman