Designing-in Productivity

The principal aim of service design is to design in productivity to the nation’s major service industries, public and private, by increasing the attractiveness and usage of services. In the language of design, “form follows function”.

Service design differs from many longer-established disciplines or professions in significant ways, service design is the formative new link between the suppliers, service deliverers and end users. In the case of, say business process reengineering, there are two fundamental differences between it and BPR – customer focus and innovation.

While it can be an extraordinarily creative process, in general BPR concerns itself with effectiveness and efficiency on the cost side of the equation. However, it only addresses parts of the resulting costs – cost of customer dissatisfaction / cost of rework - and seeks little impact on the top line of customer relationships and the generation of income or loyalty.

Service design, by contrast is characterised by depth of insight into customer / user needs. It is the absolute focus on the customer / end user’s need and based on those insights, the generation of ideas and solutions well outside the normal scope that distinguishes service design from BPR. Ideas generated are then synthesised into an optimum solution around which a coherent business proposition can be built.

First Direct, Orange, Go and Easy Jet were propositions which only took hold because of the clarity of the insight into customer need and the dramatic shift in starting point which characterised all three of these and many other launches based on a combination of informed intuition and market analysis.