customer experience. This requires. Design Thinking (Brown 2008), which powers innovation from a thorough understanding of users and their lives.
ByLia Patricio and Raymond P. Fisk
Synthesizing Service Design and Service Science for Service Innovation
ha Patricio is assistant professor at the School of Engineering at the University of Porto, Portugal. She teaches and carries out research on interdisciplinary methods for the design of service systems and was cofounder of the Master in Service Engineering and Management at the University of Porto.
Raymond P. Fisk is professor and chair, Department of Marketing, Texas State University, San Marcos, USA. He has been researching and teaching about serving customers for more than 30 years.
14 TO U C H PO IN T
The growing importance of services in the global economy and the need to foster firms' competitiveness has brought service innovation to the forefront of research and practice priorities. Understanding the crucial role of customer experiences and the growing complexity of service systems creates the need to develop interdisciplinary methods that unite contributions from Service Science, Management, Engineering and Design (SSMED). In this article, we will show how synthesising service design and service science can foster service innovation. Service innovation involves finding new ways of value co-creation for the customer and the firm. Value is co-created with customers through relational exchanges and interaction experiences. As such, service innovation builds upon a strong focus on the customer experience. This requires Design Thinking (Brown 2008), which powers innovation from a thorough understanding of users and their lives. Service design has emerged as a new field that involves understanding users and their contexts, understanding service providers and social practices and translating this understanding into developing evidence and service systems interactions (Evenson 2008). Service design makes a crucial contribution to service innovation through its holistic
I T H E J O U R N A L O F SER VIC E D ESIG N
perspective and co-creative processes, in order to transform user understanding into the development of services that are useful, usable and desirable (Mager 2009). Customers today co-create their experiences through 'systems of service systems' that are increasingly complex. For example, customers co-create their house purchase experience by combining a constellation of services such as estate agents, registration offices and banks. In this context, a bank needs to understand how its service fits into the customer value constellation to better design its service concept. This 'system of systems' view is important in broadening the firm's perspective beyond the boundaries of the existing service and in opening up new forms of service innovation.
CROSS-DISCIPLINE
At the company level, customers cocreate their service experiences through multiple interactions with the service system, which comprises multiple service channels, backstage support processes and technologies. Firms, such as banks, need to design their service system as integrated configurations of people, technologies and service channels, in order to enable customers to smoothly co-create their customer journeys according to their preferences. These complex services require 'systems thinking' to be able to bring together the different components of the service system into an integrated whole. Service Science (Chesbrough and Spohrer 2006) has emerged as an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand complex service systems and develop frameworks for service innovation. Service science helps understand and model service systems, their actors, roles, activities and relationships between them. Service science can therefore help design complex service systems, such as systems of service systems that form customer value constellations, or multichannel service systems, which are becoming increasingly more common. We believe that synthesising the contributions of service design and service science is crucial for designing complex service systems. Service design provides the design thinking, with holistic, co-creative and user-centred perspectives to open up the boundaries for service innovation. Service science provides the systems thinking, to help understand, model and design the complexity of service systems.
MULTI LEVEL SERVICE DESIGN
DESIGNING THE SERVICE CONCEPT
DESIGNING THE SERVICE SYSTEM
DESIGNING THE SERVICE ENCOUNTER
UNDERSTANDING THE
DESIGNING THE
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
SERVICE OFFERING
VALUE CONSTELLATION EXPERIENCE
CUSTOMER VALUE
SERVICE EXPERIENCE
ARCHITECTURE AND NAVIGATION
SERVICE ENCOUNTER EXPERIENCE
SERVICE EXPERIENCE
CONSTELLATION
SERVICE SYSTEM
BLUEPRINT
The Multilevel Service Design Method (MSD) for Designing Complex Service Systems
In the past several years, we have synthesised the contributions of different service fields to develop the Multilevel Service Design (MSD) method (Patricio, Fisk, Cunha and Constantine 2011). MSD enables integrated design of service offerings at three hierarchical levels with a strong focus on the customer experience. MSD contains a set of interrelated models: • Designing the firm's service concept with the customer value constellation of service offerings for the value constellation experience. In MSD, the service concept is defined as the set of benefits that the service is expected to offer to the customer and how it is positioned in the customer value constellation.
T O U C H PO IN T I T H E J O U R N A L O F SER VIC E D ESIG N
1
5
Istomer experience User experience
Service Blueprinting S e r v i c e Encounter
Human Activity Modeling
INTERACTION DESIGN Usage centered design Touchpoints Use cases
Value constellation
SERVICE MANAGEMENT
Service Experience Blueprint
SERVICE DESIGN
Service concept Customer value constellation Service system architecture
Service evidence S e r v i c e system navigation Customer Journey
SERVICE ENGINEERING
Service system
SERVICE SCIENCE
Systems thinking
Service modeling Activity Diagrams
Technology enabled services
Service design as an interdisciplinary field and that each touchpoint is designed to enhance the service encounter experience, but also supports the other service levels. By building upon in-depth studies of the customer experience, MSD adopts a usagecentred approach to enhancing customer experience at all levels. MSD is an interdisciplinary service design method that synthesises the concepts methods, models and tools from service science, service management, service engineering, and interaction design for the design of complex service systems. Service science provides the systems logic that helps to understand and model the different levels of customer experience and service design. Service design provides We have applied our MSD method to several service industries, such as banking a unique perspective for understanding the customer experience and a holistic and retailing. MSD enables integrated perspective for turning this understanding design of the different service levels, addressing the complexity of service systems. into new service offerings. We hope MSD The multilevel approach ensures that the is just one example of the fruitful synthesis of service design and service science. service concept is well integrated into the customer value constellation, that the ser- These two service communities have much to gain from further collaboration in the vice system supports the service concept and enables a desirable service experience, shared quest for service innovation. •
• Designing the firm's service system, comprising its architecture and navigation, for the service experience. The 'service system' is the firm's configuration of people, service channels, processes, technologies and other resources that support the service concept. • Designing each service encounter with the service experience blueprint for the service encounter experience. 'Service encounters' or 'touchpoints' are the moments of interaction between the customer and the firm and may take place at multiple interfaces.
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