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Why Service Design works for all of us

By 3 August 2018 No Comments

Change is very scary

You, as entrepreneur, know best. You are an expert in your trade, you know your team and customers and are blessed with a very strong opinion about your line of business. Yet you see everything is changing and you would love to know how to profit from these changes.

In this rapidly changing world it is extremely difficult to continue to make the right choices. You need to innovate making the most of all the possibilities out there. But there are so many options and you can only spend your budget once. Every day entrepreneurs are faced to take so many choices our heads tend to spin. How do you decide what to focus on and what to invest in?

Nowadays it is extremely difficult to continue to make a difference and tell your story to the right audience in an entertaining and engaging way. There is an overload of channels where you can get your marketing message across, which channel brings you new clients? Where is your customer? Which channel is worth investing in? Where do you get the best ROI?

Service Design helps you do just that! Service Design enables you to create a toolbox of methods helping you to identify your ideal customer. It helps you to focus on offering the ultimate experience for this customer. It helps you to decide in which channel you can reach this customer. And it enables you to work together as a team, learning even more about your business and how it is perceived by your customers and team.

What’s in a name?

Service Design, Design Thinking, Customer Experience Management. They all seem quite complicated terms for methods that do not apply to us. Terms explained in business language that the average entrepreneur does not want to understand at conferences we do not attend and using examples we cannot relate to.

We have a business to run and are too busy to go to conferences where smart people are talking about these things, mentioning how it works for startups or corporates. The team is not trained to work with it. And it all sounds very theoretical, how do you actually use those methods and apply them to reach your goals?

It all seems very irrelevant to the work we are doing, the challenges we are facing, the people we are managing.

However research shows that it is indeed very much needed for Small Medium Businesses to innovate. The report (“jaarbericht van het MKB 2017”) written by the Dutch Committee for Entrepreneurship and Financing states that 60% of the Dutch GDP is generated by SMB and SMB offers to more than 70% of the Dutch employees a job. These figures seem very hopeful, however these figures are realized by 10% of all Small Medium businesses. 90% of the Dutch SMB companies do not or hardly grow. Secondly the labormarket is facing some challenges; a large group of entrepreneurs feel limited in their development because they can simply not find the right people. Others feel hiring fixed staff is too risky and the education is not matching the demand from the rapidly changing market.

The report shows that there are several developments that require immediate action, but mostly all entrepreneusr need to innovate their business- and organizationmodels in order to adapt to new possibilities and circumstances. secondly new skills are needed in employees in this digitalizing world.

Unfortunately financing of these adjustments, innovation and digitalization is not possible for every entrepreneur. A solution would be to create the skills in-house and hire an expert to guide your company though the changes. The tools used in service design and customer experience management are indeed very relevant and can help every entrepreneurs to create growth and innovation. Improving the relationship with customers enables teams to be better equipped to handle the current and future changes.

Using a unique methodology which combines customer-driven feedback underpinned with digital data analysis to create the ideal customer journey for your business. Understanding what your customer needs and how to best utilise your resources for them, allows you to elevate your customer experience creating a presence which attracts the right customers at the right time to the right place.

You, as entrepreneur, know best. You know what is good for your company, you have a vision and you know your numbers. Yet you would love to create growth and innovate your business. You would love to know who to focus on with which message. Investing in the right channel.

Service Design can do that for you.