Solita service design services

Service design

Service design

Service design is a customer-oriented approach with a holistic view of development that includes the customer, business, service production and technology.

Service design is a versatile tool

Service design is a versatile tool for developing services, business, customer experience, user experience and strategies. Digital service design plays an important role in modern service development, but we always take a multi-channel view of the service to be developed, going beyond just the user experience.

How to use service design in solving business challenges

  • Service concept design

    We use service design methods to create new service concepts, both digital and physical. We always include the multi-channel aspect in service design.
  • Service productisation

    Effective productisation is essential for products and services to succeed. Service design is a customer-oriented way of building products that meet the customer’s actual needs and business objectives.
  • New business development

    The conventional business development method is to use the company as the starting point. We help conceptualise and create new business with the main focus on customers. Using service design, we ensure that there is customer demand for the new business, and we use business design to ensure that the business will be profitable.
  • CX development

    Service design is an excellent tool for improving the customer experience. We use customer insight to first understand where the bottlenecks and value for customers lie in the current service. We then proceed to design improvements to the customer experience. We know from our time in the industry that creating a foundation for customer experience development in the form of a vision and strategy will be a great help. 
  • Sales and conversion optimisation

    We use service design to help commercial services succeed. Once we have a better understanding of the motives and needs driving customer behaviour, we can adjust the service to increase its conversion rate and attract more suitable customers.
  • Customer relationship development

    Service design based on comprehensive customer insight helps the organisation focus on the important things in customer relationships. For example, service design can be used to shape customer relationship strategies, account management models, and customer programmes.
  • Customer insight

    Service design can help organisations understand their customers better. Unlike pure research, service design goes beyond recommendations, using customer insight to produce actual development ideas for the design process. 

Service design management

Our customer service development process starts with the definition of objectives. Clear objectives are set for the project being designed, which help steer design work from beginning to end. Objectives are also set for business and the customer experience. Further objectives may be set as required: sustainability, employee experience, organisational learning, etc. The objectives are always linked to indicators that make the objectives measurable. The objectives steer our joint efforts throughout the project and naturally lend themselves to the monitoring of the customer experience and business objectives after the project has concluded.

Service design includes customer insight and co-creation

Customer insight and collaborative design are integral to service design. In our experience, new services, better customer experiences and business should be co-designed with customers and stakeholders. Service design emphasises qualitative customer insight supplemented with quantitative methods. Hypotheses are an important part of collaborative design – we build them with your organisation’s employees and refine them with your customers. A hypothesis is an initial proposition about the direction service development should take.

Service design is more than the customer experience

We take a comprehensive approach to the customer experience, which almost invariably means that more complex matters must be addressed: such as business models, service production, organisation and technology. We go beyond telling you what needs improving about your customer experience: we help you change your organisation’s operating models, reorganise your services and choose the right technologies to make the desired change possible.

Service design ends in a measured result, not PowerPoint

Too often, service design stops after defining the service path or acquiring customer insight. This is when the actual design work starts. What measures are needed to produce tangible results for your services, customer experience, and business development? This often means experimenting, learning, refining, and finally scaling the services. The end result is a profitable service loved by customers.

Service design management and ability development

Companies are increasingly looking to improve their service design capacity, recruiting their own service designers. Large-scale use of design thinking on all organisational levels takes persistent and systematic effort. Typical questions involve skill requirements, service design organisation, partner involvement, measuring the success of service design, and how service design can be integrated broadly into service development, business planning and strategy work.

We act as your partner for improving your service design ability. We help with team building, organisation, performance indicators and wider skill building. We work seamlessly with your service design team when you need experienced designers, ideas or trainers for building your in-house service design capacity. We can also provide training for specialists and service designers.

Our experience

  1. Services designed by us are used by millions of people every day

  2. Combined experience from more than 2,000 service design projects

  3. One of the most experienced players with more than 13 years in the industry

Cases

Value to variety of industries

HSL More convenient routes
HSL case - More convenient routes
The Journey Planner is our most important service for our customers’ everyday needs, and it has a direct impact on the attractiveness of public transport.

Niko Tynkkynen Team Lead, Digital Service Design, HSL

Want to know more? Contact us!

  • Iivari Airaksinen Director, Design & Strategy, Solita

    [email protected] +358 503 883 911