Eight steps to innovating through service design

Service design is a meaningful way to unlock innovation, but it requires organizations to embrace a certain mindset.

In brief

• In a fast-moving market, organizations must innovate continuously to retain employees, engage customers and support citizens.
• Organizations that embed service design into their ways of working can make every new and improved policy, program, product or service directly support user needs.
• This helps set organizations apart with stakeholders and carves out a competitive market advantage.

Service design can be your key to unlock innovation. It offers a framework for embedding innovation in organizational culture and creating an environment where ideation can thrive. But tapping into service design’s amazing potential requires organizations to embrace a certain mindset. This is the first step to making the most of a service design methodology overall. 

First things first: what is service design?

Service design is a way of thinking and working that allows us to connect dots across every stage of an experience. This empowers teams to innovate better and more effectively. How so?  Innovating purposefully requires us to start by understanding the landscape in which people are operating. Service design principles offer measurable ways of gaining that understanding and putting humans at the centre of innovation.

Whether focused on employees, citizens, service users or commercial customers, service design allows organizations to understand themselves from an end user’s point of view. This approach brings visibility to connections across all actors, systems and capabilities so organizations can better design their products and services.

In practice, service design drives more effective and measurable innovation by staying true to four key principles:

• Consider user journeys holistically as a connected, end-to-end experience.
• Design across every physical, digital, virtual and human touchpoint or channel.
• Think front to back and include everything the user interacts with, as well as the supporting operations, processes, technologies, data and policies that enable these experiences.
• Balance macro and micro considerations so teams can visualize the big picture and zoom in to specific product suites or service touchpoints. 

What kinds of benefits can service design generate? 

At EY, we use service design to support organizations we serve with insight into how real users experience their solutions, products, or services.

There are endless ways service design can unlock innovation: from helping businesses speed up product development, to identifying critical service gaps for citizens in a vulnerable position, by the way of cost optimization along a broad customer journey. While it can help to streamline delivery, bringing end users at the centre of the design and development process can generate tremendous value for organizations.

We’ve deployed service design principles to help organizations:

• Increase customer satisfaction through differentiation and personalization.
• Reduce customer churn through stronger loyalty and omnichannel engagement.
• Grow revenue through higher conversion rates or boosting value capture from willingness to pay.
• Decrease risk and costs through an evidenced, human-centric, value-driven approach to investment initiatives and prioritization.
• Foster employee satisfaction through increased productivity and better organizational alignment.
• Increase process efficiency and staff adoption through design tailored to contextual needs and environment.

How does service design work in practice?

Service design draws on a host of methodologies and tools, bringing a mix of elements together to assess a unique experience or situation. Although toolkits vary based on the organization and project goals, service design blueprints tend to be a mainstay across service design work. These blueprints exist to spark meaningful conversations and inform investment decisions. They connect a front-stage user experience with the way the organization delivers that experience — the enabling backstage people, operations, technology, data, processes and policies.

Service design blueprints help all stakeholders understand how end users move through a holistic journey and touchpoints, identifying capabilities and operational synergies that take shape behind the scenes. They can simplify thousands of decisions in a digestible format, acting as the central source of truth. Those that work best place a strong emphasis on user needs, employee experience and encourage collaboration across disciplines and are inherently iterative.

At EY, we create tailored digital and physical blueprints that incorporate relevant variables to design the target state. We build these blueprints in a co-creative way, leveraging the knowledge held all across an organization, and validate our insights with end users. The impact can be huge. Service design blueprints allow us to establish a framework for user feedback, assess user engagement data, develop key performance indicators (KPIs) for the business, understand standard operating procedures, and create conditions to quantify decisions and more. 

How can you embrace service design to innovate now?

Successfully incorporating service design principles requires organizations — and the people who bring them to life — to embrace a certain mindset. They must be open to centre users and working iteratively to understand stakeholders. Anyone who’s looking to innovate through service design must also create a working culture where everyone is on board with the process.

At EY, we recommend keeping a set of leading practices in mind when seizing on service design as a path to innovation:

1. Focus on a north star. Service design aligns multiple design, business and technology teams around a common north star that outlines commercial and customer outcomes.

2. Take everyone on the journey. Using a service design approach brings all areas of an organization and ecosystem together to unpack the current state and inform the future state. But resistance to change is common. To avoid this, we continuously break down silos, share our ambitions and create opportunities for people to contribute.

3. Anchor business decisions in user needs. Service design decisions are always based on end-user research. By continually uncovering and quantifying pain points, dependencies and scenarios, we can understand the implications of doing things — or not doing things — for users and test the feasibility and viability of desirable solutions.

4. Think broadly and surface to core. Without factoring in what happens on the back end, we can’t provide implementable solutions and improvements on the front end. Service design allows us to understand and share an organization’s inner workings, mapping out connections and illustrating the combined employee and customer experience. Teams must consider this broad view to innovate effectively.

5. Resist the urge to compromise with the old ways. There are always existing capabilities, approaches, systems, and processes that “sort of” do what’s required in transformation. Challenging archaic ways of working and upskill employees with the tools and insights needed to take a human-centred design approach to problem-solving is necessary.

6. Aim to make things simpler. Organizations can be complicated. This often makes services overly complicated, too. Service designers simplify complexity by visualizing multiple experiences to see how components like products, technologies, operations, and policies interconnect. This is how we can identify potential gaps and points of service breakdowns.

7. Commit to continuous learning and improvement. Curiosity and experimentation are key traits of organizations that continuously learn and improve. Experimentation allows teams to continuously test and validate assumptions, ideas, and concepts before implementing them on a larger scale.

8. Support employees to drive and implement change. For employees to successfully adopt new methodologies, approaches, and mindsets, they must feel ownership over what’s changing. Bringing folks into service design activities and highlighting their role as enablers of an end-user experience is a highly effective way to achieve this.

What’s the bottom line?

True innovation isn't about chasing trends. Service design methods help organizations design and deliver personalized, omnichannel experiences that create exceptional, differentiated value for customers, while streamlining operations and costs to serve. By embracing service design, organizations can foster collaboration, fuel growth and shift from talking about the future to actively building it. After all, innovation isn't a destination; it's a journey — and service design becomes your map. Embracing a user-first, service design mindset can help seize that potential now.