When creating and designing a new service, it’s important to involve not only customers in the process but other stakeholders as well.
This brings us to the second principle of service design: it should be a co-creative process.
A stakeholder is anyone who’s involved with the service – including managers, marketers and engineers, as well as possible private organizations and governmental agencies. Of course, customers can also be counted as stakeholders.
All these people should have a direct or indirect say in the creative process of service design since they all play an important role in the successful development, operation and usage of the service.
If providing a public-transportation service, you’d need to cooperate with an array of individuals: government officials to make sure you adhere to regulations, engineers who could confirm that your buses are safe and perhaps a marketing firm to promote the new service.
These are just a few of the people you might need to consider for your co-creative environment. The purpose of such an environment is to ensure that all your stakeholders’ needs are accounted for, which shouldn’t be seen as a burden since each stakeholder has the potential to contribute valuable expertise and ideas.
The third principle of service design is sequencing, that is, the sequence – or timeline – of providing a service.
You can think of sequencing like a movie. Every movie is made up of a series of still frames that, when put together and played in sequence, tell the story of the movie.
As all movies are composed of a sequence of still frames, all services are composed of a sequence of touchpoints or interactions; when put together, they form the complete service.
Sequencing is helpful because it allows you to break down each step of the user experience – all the interactions, all the touchpoints – to get a detailed overview.
Details that might otherwise be overlooked often get caught in the sequencing process. For instance, if you were opening a new barbershop, a service-design sequence will make it clear that the floor needs sweeping between each customer, and that you should provide things, such as magazines or TVs to keep customers comfortable if they arrive early.