Answer to Question #313902 in Management for Modi

Question

 Define and briefly explain the term ‘Service Design’. What are the various approaches that organizations adopt to implement ‘Service Design’?

Explain with examples for approach from setups like Banking or a Healthcare setup (choose any one reference of your own choice) 

Answer 1

Service design can be defined as the process in which designers come up with sustainable solutions and optimal experiences that both serve the customers and service providers involved in unique contexts. The designers do this by breaking the service into sections and adapt solutions that are fine-tuned and suitable to all the users.

It is a new term that describes as a set of methods and processes which are user-centered, product, marketing and strategic management. At its core, it focuses on the service user by designing new services or improving the existing ones. For example the designer could be working on a project to re-design a menu for a restaurant or innovate completely a new experience to be used by global chain of restaurants. Typically, it is used for improving services to its customers.

Banks use various approaches to service design as follows;

1. Creation of a customer-centric business model – Service design is aimed at ensuring that the customer is always put in mind to ensure satisfaction right from the point of entry and exit from the bank.
2. Optimizing resource allocation – Banks are designing their services in such a way that they optimally utilize their resources as they deliver services to the customers.
3. Simplification of business and operating models – Simplification of the processes is one the many approaches banks are adopting for example introduction of electronic tickets to ensure everyone is served well on first come first serve basis.
4. Acquiring customer information advantage – Banks have put in place a design of acquiring customer information about their satisfaction of the services offered for example by creating social media platforms where customers give their reviews about the organization and they use them to design future services.
5. Stimulating internal innovation – Banks are encouraging innovation from their staff who are interacting with the customers because they are in positions of seeing what is working and what is not working and through that they are able to design better service delivery.
6. Risk management – Banks are able to assess risk of their customers easily and thus are able to reduce any chances of their customers not getting services that are not risky.