2 It is co-creative

Everyone can be creative!

Putting the customer at the centre of a service design process involves facing the reality that potentially there is more than just one customer group, and each group possesses different needs and expectations.

Furthermore, providing services also demands consideration of the various stakeholders, such as front-line staff, back-office employees and managers, as well as non-human interfaces such as vending machines or websites. Thus, a single service proposition can involve a number of actors and different customer groups as well as different employees and interfaces. During a service design process we need to involve customers as well as all other stakeholders involved in exploring and defining the service proposition.

How can we integrate the stakeholders of a service into the process of designing it?

Think of the various stakeholders involved in creating, providing and consuming a service, for example managers, marketers, engineers, designers, front-line staff and customers. Now that we have agreed on the common language of our customers, we need to come up with some ideas about how to design a new service or improve an existing service. Therefore, we should involve all these different people in the process and we need to be creative. However, creativity is not so much a gift as a process of listening to the ideas “flowing” through one’s head and being prepared to articulate them. Service designers consciously generate an environment that facilitates the generation and evaluation of ideas within heterogeneous stakeholder groups. There are a variety of methods and tools for gaining genuine insights from different user perspectives in the creation of services and for the development, prototyping and testing of these service concepts. This is co-creation, and facilitating this in groups representative of your stakeholders is a vital aspect of design thinking and a fundamental part of service design.

Furthermore, co-creation during the design process facilitates a smooth interaction between the stakeholders during the actual service provision – essential for both sustainable customer and employee satisfaction. Through co-creation customers get the chance to add value to a service in partnership with the service provider early in the development of the service. The more a customer gets involved in the service provision, the more likely this service is of evoking co-ownership which in turn will result in increased customer loyalty and long-term engagement.