Service Design for Business - Ben Reason, Lavrans Løvlie, Melvin Brand Flu

In this summary of the book "Service Design for Business", Livework experts show how to put service design in your company to solve the ongoing challenge of winning with customers.

The Internet and other digital technologies have brought the world to your customers' fingertips. With an unprecedented choice, consumers are demanding more than just a great product.

The organizations that are standing out are designing and delivering experiences adapted to the needs of their customers.

So, don't waste any more time and update this reading so that your company or business is updated!

About the book "Service Design for Business"

Published in 2015, "Service Design Business", written by Ben Reason, Lavrans Løvlie and Melvin Brand Flu, brings a practical approach to improving the customer experience through service design.

The book has 188 pages and 6 chapters.

About the authors Ben Reason, Lavrans Løvlie and Melvin Brand Flu

Ben Reason is one of the founders of Livework - winners of the prestigious "Design Team of the Year" award in 2014. As director of the London studio, he remains a pioneer in the discipline and is a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art, London.

Lavrans Løvlie is a founding partner and director of Livework. His work includes projects with the BBC, Sony, Orange, VW, several of the largest hospitals in Norway and the United Nations. He has taught at universities across Europe and is a board member of the Norwegian Design Council.

Melvin Brand Flu is a partner and director of strategy and business design for Livework. He has over 25 years of experience working as a business and strategy consultant.

To whom is this book indicated?

This guide is indispensable for all organizations that want to move their customers to a more positive experience.

The authors show you how to transform your customer's experience and keep you involved in the art of intentional service design.

In addition, the work offers a proven and effective approach to better respond to customers' needs and demands, and provides a strategy that can be implemented quickly.

Main ideas of the book "Service Design for Business"

• Approach the customer experience from a design perspective;
• See your organization through the customer's lens;
• Make the customer experience a responsibility across the organization;
• Analyze the market factors that fit the customer experience design.

Download the "Service Design for Business" Book Summary in PDF for free

Do you have no time to read now? Then download the free PDF and read wherever and whenever you want:

Overview: What is Service Design?

Service Design, is what helps us make an impact. It improves and innovates the services we use on a daily basis. Banking and insurance, healthcare, transportation, business services and various government activities are all services.

Organizations spend significant time designing tangible products. Services receive less attention from design; however, to succeed in the current market, this needs to change.

Generally, services are less productive and cause more frustration to customers than products. For example, we are fonder of our cars than we are of banks. The service design addresses this gap in quality and productivity.

Service design has been around for 20 years and has evolved from a niche design discipline to a more comprehensive and affordable way to address customer, business and organizational challenges.

However, it is still under-recognized and undervalued by businesses. This book aims to change that.

Overview: Trends that make service design relevant today

It is no coincidence that service design emerged in the 21st century. Just as industrial and product design emerged with the development of mass manufacturing, service design is responding to some significant economic, social and technical trends.

These trends, in each of these categories, define the context of why service design is a growing discipline and of progressive interest to more and more companies and organizations.

Economic: the trend towards value in services

As product differentiation decreases with the maturity of industries, services prove to be the area where there is the greatest potential. Services have the added benefit of supporting customers to get the best out of products and build loyalty.

Service design was invented to respond to this trend, to bring the best design methodologies to face a new challenge.

Social: Rising customer expectations

Consumers expect more because they value their rights more than previous generations, where people accepted what they got, market economies trained individuals to expect more.

This is accentuated when leading brands create great experiences that make consumers think, "Why can't all my experiences be like this?" Services that offer one size fits all need to rethink their approach as customer expectations rise.

As expectations rise, the need to understand them develops in parallel. Service design is a strong way to bring new customer power to the design and improvement of services in a structured and productive way.

Technical: Growth of digital media change in services

We are all aware of the impact of the digital revolution. It may be a cliché, but digital technologies have generated radical changes and disruptions in the service sector.

Services that were previously delivered by humans with a level of expertise can now be partially provided by technology. Think of financial or banking advice that used to be face to face, but is more and more online and self-service.

According to the book "Service Design for Business", the potential for change in service, and the fact that what were primarily man-made services are now mediated by technology, drove the need for service design.

Technology can dehumanize and make things more difficult for customers to navigate and less flexible. But service design offers tools to domesticate and humanize technology.

Overview: How to develop and deliver customer excellence in practice

Insurance is not a desired product and, therefore, a challenging space for the design of excellent customer experiences. Insurance companies have few ways to engage their customers in positive experiences and build loyalty; then, they should do as much as possible with the interactions they have.

As an insurer who understood the importance of the customer experience for his business, he found that by focusing on the customer basics - how to simplify the purchase, making it easier to change the terms of the contract and resolve any problems - he was able to remove any irritation.

They went from the top 50 to the top 10, along with more desirable proposals, such as luxury cars and vacation trips. The insurer aimed at excellence in the customer experience, because highly satisfied customers spend significantly more.

In addition to focusing on getting the basics right, the insurance company focused on providing a magical moment around the only real moment of truth in the insurance business: the claim.

Talking to customers who recently made a complaint and listening to the complaint's calls, they were able to understand the journey from the outside in.

What they learned was that customers have significant emotional needs from the claiming experience and the transactional need. If they have suffered theft or loss, perhaps abroad, their stress levels are high.

Think of a family on vacation who has had an accident and needs help with foreign medical services and then comes home. This is a crisis for the family; however, it is a daily occurrence for those who designed the processes and administered the phones.

Rethinking and redesigning this experience, the new claims process went so far as to say, "Whatever we're paying for, it's worth it!"

The insurer managed to make this an excellent experience, identifying an opportunity to delight customers and really taking care of them in a time of emotional need.

This was invaluable in an industry with very little opportunity to connect with customers. So, remember:

1. An excellent experience is 90% of the basic extraordinary and 10% magical moments;
2. Get the basics about the proper impacts on business performance, from acquisition to retention;
3. Realizing magical moments affects reputation and word of mouth promotion;
4. Revealing truths and using customer stories helps the organization understand customer experiences - and helps teams move logically through a process of creating ideas, testing options and detailed solutions.

Overview: Building a more agile organization

Rapid changes require agility. Being able to create, try, learn and adapt quickly requires agility.

Service design implies improvement or innovation, which requires change and creativity. By creativity, we mean the ability to do something new.

This is an approach that adapts to large organizations, as it brings a mixture of structure and fluidity to face their challenges. It allows creativity and divergent thinking, but also synthesis, prioritization and consideration of the implications of change.

• The assumption is that difficult changes are also high-impact. Focusing on the easiest solutions first can have the surprising effect of making some of the most difficult problems disappear;
• Agility can generally be seen as related to the culture and ownership of younger companies. More important is senior sponsorship and clarity of purpose to prevent blockers from slowing down the process. Put the CEO on board.

What do other authors say about it?

In "The Little Red Book of Selling", Jeffrey Gitomer says that the word "value" is difficult to define and understand. What's more, giving and adding value are words that many salespeople have a hard time understanding, let alone providing.

The Disney Institute revealed its service secrets in the book "Be Our Guest". The work portrays that understanding the client consists of applying "guestology" (guest study), and that involves understanding the client's needs and desires, what they think their company is and their emotions.

In the book "Marketing 4.0" by authors Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya and Iwan Setiawan, you learn all the most current concepts of Digital Marketing in order to apply them in your company at the end of the reading!

Okay, but how can I apply this to my life?

Here are some more tips for you to start applying now:

• Connecting the desired customer experience projects to organizational structures and capabilities allows you to make smart choices or quantify the impact;
• A service design approach for organizational impact analysis is to establish a direct connection between the customer experience and the delivery mechanisms;
• Just as, by creating multiple divisions to define how channels deliver a customer experience at each stage of the customer journey, we can categorize business structures or resources. This allows us to identify where a change for customers has an organizational impact.

Did you like this summary of the book "Service Design for Business"?

If you liked the work of Ben Reason, Lavrans Løvlie and Melvin Brand Flu, "Service Design Business", leave your feedback to let us know your opinion and always offer the best for you!

If you want to go deeper into the subject, you can enjoy and purchase the book by clicking on the image below: