The following is an exclusive excerpt from Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, a new book by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason. Rosenfeld Media has kindly granted us permission to share Chapter 2 – The Nature of Service Design, in two parts. See the first half, as well as an introductory note, here.
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The Service Economy
In developed nations, around 75% of the economy is in the service sector, and this is where most new jobs are created. In Germany, known for its export prowess, the industrial industries dropped 140,000 jobs in 2010, while the service sector added 330,000 jobs, and private nursing services generate more revenue than the entire German automobile industry.1 To an increasing degree, we also see that the design of services is becoming a key competitive advantage. Physical elements and technology can easily be copied, but service experiences are rooted in company culture and are much harder to replicate. People choose to use the services that they feel give them the best experience for their money, whether they fly low-cost airlines or spend their money on a first-class experience
Just as industrial design fueled the introduction of new products to the masses in the industrial economy, good service design is key to the successful introduction of new technologies. Design of new models each year became the recipe for maintaining the success of established products. In the service economy, services can be redesigned on a continuing basis to keep a competitive edge in the market.
Some of the greatest opportunities are found where a business model can be changed from a product model to a service model. A case in point is car sharing, where the business model has changed from selling the car as a product to offering access to the service of mobility.
Core Service Values
One way to understand services better—and what makes them different from products—is to examine what it is that people get from services. There are many breakdowns of the characteristics of services, some of which we will look at later in the measurement chapter. We have been developing a simple way to understand the generic types of value that services deliver to customers by cataloguing every service we have become aware of and then grouping them in relation to three core values: care, access, and response (Figure 7). Most services provide customers with at least one of these or, often, a mix of all three.
Figure 7 – Core service offerings can be grouped into three primary spheres: care, response and access.
1.) Services That Care for People or Things
Healthcare is the most obvious case of a service focused on care, but many maintenance services also have care as the core value. A famous example of a care service is the Rolls Royce aviation engine service that monitors aircraft engines in flight and has spare parts ready to be fitted as needed when a plane lands, anywhere in the world.2
Care for an object—a car, an air-conditioning system, a wool coat—is provided by auto mechanics, HVAC technicians, or dry cleaners. Care for a person is provided by a wide range of services, from nurseries to nursing homes. Accountants, lawyers, and therapists provide care for money, freedom and happiness.
2.) Services That Provide Access to People or Things
Many services enable people to use something, or a part of something, temporarily. A railway service provides a seat on a train for a specific journey. A school might offer a child a place in a classroom from the age of 5 to 11. A cinema provides access to a giant screen, a comfy seat, and 90-plus minutes of entertainment. Generally, the services for which access is the primary value are services that give people access to large, complex, or expensive things that they could not obtain on their own.
Other kinds of access services are those that give access to infrastructure over many years. Utilities, such as water, gas, and electricity, are ubiquitous examples in the developed world. The Internet is, of course, a relatively new infrastructure that enables a whole new generation of services that provides access to information, digital media, and technology on a shared basis. Spotify provides access to a huge music library. Google provides access to an enormous database of searches. Facebook provides access to billions of personal pages. In this sense, we can view the Internet as a kind of metaservice, because it enables the provision of many other subservices, which is why so many people insist that no single entity “owns” it. These services provide individuals with access to large infrastructures that are used in conjunction with many other people. They don’t end up owning anything that they can take away and store or give to someone else, apart from the experience they had.
These services are often a fundamental part of people’s lives that are typically noticed only when they are disrupted, such as when the daily commuter train is canceled, or when schools are closed due to heavy snow. People expect the infrastructure to always be there for them. As individuals, we understand that we all have our own experiences of the specific access we have to this infrastructure—this is the service layer that enables us to access our bit of the larger whole.
3.) Services That Provide a Response from People or Things
The third category is services that respond to people’s (often unforeseen) needs. These services are usually a mix of people and things that are able to assist us: an ambulance rushing to an accident, a teacher helping a child with a math problem, or a store assistant finding a customer a pair of jeans with the right fit. Sometimes these “response” services are anticipated and people buy the right to them in advance through insurance policies, social welfare, or simply by their choice of brand experience. In many respects, response is the default understanding of what service is— think of a waiter responding to a request for a glass of water, for example.
Service is someone doing what he or she has been asked to do. In this sense, response services are fundamentally different from products in that they are not predesigned but created in the moment in reaction to a request. The three core service values overlap in many instances. An insurance service offers both access to a financial-risk-offsetting infrastructure and a response to a specific issue when a client calls with a claim. A healthcare service provides care on a personal level, but also access to a hospital facility if necessary. It will also transport a patient there in an ambulance if necessary. It is not so much that any one service fits only in one category, but more that the service has different core values at different times.
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Image courtesy of IAMECO
Figure 1 – Capture everything that everyone thinks they know so that it’s not stuck in their heads. Portigal, Steve. 2013. Interviewing Users. New York: Rosenfeld Media. 
Figure 2 – Transitional rituals are actions we take to remind ourselves that we are shifting from one mode of being to another. Portigal, Steve. 2013. Interviewing Users. New York: Rosenfeld Media. 
Figure 1 – Where is the customer in this picture? Staff working in silos tend to focus on the efficiency of their step in the value chain rather than the quality of the complete customer experience.
