Creating Successful Services with Service Design Thinking – A Crash Course
Immersive Hands-On Training in Service Design and Innovation (Case Study)
- Problem: Service Design Thinking helps service providers to be innovative, customer-oriented, competitive and efficient, but not everyone can afford to engage in a 1-2 year Master’s program.
- Solution: An immersive learning experience in the form of a 3-day project-based crash course in Design Thinking and Service Design.
- Goals: Equip people with knowledge, tools, methods and practical experience to get started with customer-oriented Service Innovation and Improvement in real life.
- Clients: Individuals and teams from all types of organizations and sectors.
- My role: I designed the training format, created the contents and facilitated more than 50 workshops in different contexts with groups of 3 to 15 people.
- Outcome: The feedback surveys at the end of each workshop consistently indicated that participants found the course highly valuable. Some participants keep reaching out even years after attending, sharing how they successfully applied the learnings in their companies and mentioning that they continue revisiting the course material for reference and inspiration.
Why Service Design Thinking?
- Service Innovation: With system-oriented and human-centered tools and methods Service Design Thinking helps to identify opportunities for innovation and strategically develop new services that are valuable, attractive and easy to use for people while controlling and optimizing resources.
- Customer Experience Excellence: When people use a service, they get in touch with a variety of interfaces and communication channels. The customer journey along these “touchpoints” needs to carefully designed in order to avoid gaps and breaks in the customer experience. Service Design helps to orchestrate a cohesive and delightful overall experience across all touchpoints.
How to get people started with Service Design and Innovation in just 3 days?
People registering for my Service Design Thinking Crash Course have diverse backgrounds and experiences and come from various sectors. Some are UX Designers who already have experimented with Service Design methods, others are Customer Service Representatives or CEOs entirely new to Design Thinking and Doing. The challenge is to bring them all onto the same page and provide a valuable learning experience for everyone.
In the beginning of the course, I provide a short introduction to Service Design to ensure a shared understanding in terms of terminology and a general approach. Subsequently, course participants directly delve into a design challenge, forming teams to develop their own services. This approach allows everyone to leverage their individual skill sets and learn from one another.
In addition to the course experience, students receive the following support material:
- Handout with theoretical background, references and further reading
- Research and design templates
- Exemplary project plan for a pilot project
Project-based learning: fun and effective
On day 1, each participant can propose a problem they are facing as a user. Then all participants select the problems they are most keen on solving and form teams. The participant who has proposed the problem joins another team working on a different problem as a designer.
While a bit more challenging than working with preselected standard problems, this allows participants to experience the importance of talking to real users and how this contributes to coming up with unique ideas and solutions beyond the obvious.
After selecting the problem to solve, participants embark on a creative journey through the design cycle, covering stages from discovery and insight generation to ideation, envisioning, experience prototyping, and testing. They also develop service specifications using customer journeys and blueprints. Along the way, they get to try out top research, creativity, and design methods and tools.
It’s always amazing which innovative and sound concepts can emerge in just 3 days by taken a human-centered approach.
During my courses, participants have designed and redesigned all sorts of services. Examples include:
- A service to find and book a kindergarten place
- New medical services
- Next-generation video-on-demand services
- Bike repair services
- Novel job interview & onboarding experiences
- New learning experiences for university students
- A service solution for freelance skippers navigating ships
Impressions
Outcome
My past course participants left with hands-on knowledge they could immediately apply in their daily work and a wealth of resources to delve deeper into the field of Service Design and Design Thinking.
Feedback on the course was very positive, both in the survey handed out right after the course and in the messages I received on LinkedIn and Xing. It’s truly gratifying when people say they’ve gained valuable practical knowledge, or when they mention revisiting my presentation or using the templates in their daily work even years later.
Who has participated so far?
My Service Design Thinking Trainings are designed for anyone interested in using human-centered design thinking and design methods and tools to innovate or improve services and experiences.
Past participants of my crash courses, training-coaching programs, or quick dives had the most diverse backgrounds. Here are some examples:
- Individual employees and teams from startups and companies such as Weleda, Swarovski, Red Bull, M.A.N., Daimler, Porsche, Volkswagen, Renault, Lufthansa, Henkel, E.ON, Deutsche Bank, Bosch, RTL, Deutsche Telekom, Allianz, Indeed, Deloitte, etc.
- Employees of NGOs, foundations, and public institutions
- Employees of health insurance companies
- Universities and Research Institutions
- Tourism operators
- Independent consultants and designers
- and more
