Researchers conduct a study in the person's natural environment. Are users of a walk-in clinic primarily concerned about wait time, part of the experience, or are the health outcomes paramount? One reason clinics (and healthcare generally) has such a problem with wait times is that most stakeholders agree that the outcomes are more important than the experience (although there is growing evidence that the experience conditions the outcomes, and that the two are not independent of each other).The contextual inquiry method consists of two key elements. Why does the service matter to them, how will they consume it, is the service the experience or do other outcomes matter? Look for contradictions and tensions that could disrupt design or delivery. The same questions need to be asked of the buyers and users of the service. In many service businesses including operating a clinic, staff utilization is an important input into profitability. Why would the clinics want this? Do they wait times really disrupt them? Perhaps, if the wait times reflect a poor match of services to demand and if better management of wait times leads to better utilization rates. The provider, the user, the people providing the service and other stakeholders may all have different ‘Whys.’ Uncovering the relations between these, and how they change across the touch points where the service is delivered can help uncover tensions.Īsk ‘Why is the provider offering this service?’ ‘How will it provide value to the provider?’ For example, imagine you are designing an application to manage waiting times at walk-in clinics. This process needs to be embedded in the context of purpose, the ‘Why’ of the service. Map all of the customer touch points from initial awareness to after the service is retired Many such processes exist, but the one we follow at Ibbaka is designed to inform pricing decisions. We can use these rules to inform a service design process. Go beyond experience to outcomes - experience matters, but the service has to deliver on its promised outcomesīuild the service around the price you will charge, how you will charge, and make sure that value to customer and value to provider are alignedĪn even simpler process (for service design) Go beyond outcomes to experience - outcomes matter, but the experience that delivers the outcomes is part of the value Look all ways - consider the people receiving the service, the people delivering the service and the wider social implications Start before the beginning end after the end - service design requires a wide temporal bandwidth To help us do this, we have developed a few simple service design rules and are developing a services design process that will take value and pricing into account. Our goal at Ibbaka is to change this and to place value, and with value, price at the centre of service design. Beyond this, price is part of how we experience a service, and pricing will shape how and when a service is used.ĭespite this, most of the recent work on service design thinking ignores pricing (a notable exception is Majid Iqbal’s excellent book Thinking in Services which provides a detailed framework for how to think about value to the customer and value to the provider). Of course one cannot analyze the profitability of a service without knowing how it is priced. ![]() Pricing is an integral part of service design. ![]() She even identified some of the critical failures in service design: ![]() ![]() Her key points in this article are that service design is poorly understood relative to product design, it is often partial and ad-hoc, reactive to failure rather than shaping success, and that we need to take service design seriously. One of the early articles on service design was ‘ Designing services that deliver’ by G.Lyn Shostack in the Harvard Business Review, back in January 1984. Like anything new, it has old roots and has been on a slow build for years before blossoming forth over the past five years. Service design is emerging as a core discipline for redesigning products, converting them into services and then reconfiguring the organization.
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