Imagine two hotels side-by-side, each with a pool, a nice lobby, beachfront views, and competitive prices. Service design is what makes you choose one over the other. In the battle for our attention, loyalty and wallets, it is often the experience that differentiates one solution from another. And this extends to all the retail endpoints like rental cars and airplanes — and is also equally applicable to healthcare, government services, industrial supplies, architecture, and a wide range of other categories.  

Service Design is a human-centered design (HCD) approach that places equal value on the customer experience and the business process, aiming to create quality customer experiences, and seamless service delivery. HCD uses a range of models and maps such as service blueprints, empathy maps, and customer journey maps.

At Teaming Worldwide, we approach Human Centered Design as a practical art that can help make small improvements, or lead to large transformations of the business. Experience mapping is often used as a process improvement tool — a way to make tweaks and adjustments to existing service delivery models. But the secret of Service Design is that it can be a truly transformational tool for the business. The visual representation of the customer’s journey from initial awareness through the purchase process and beyond can drive deep insights into the value chain, highlighting key moments, emotions, and pain points along the way. 

To that end, we’ve put together a template to chart customer experience. The purpose of this template is to understand the consumer experience through various types of mapping tools, leveraging Service Design. A human-centered design (HCD) approach places equal value on the customer experience and the business process, aiming to create quality customer experiences, and seamless service delivery. HCD uses a range of models and maps such as service blueprints, empathy maps, and customer journey maps.

This template should result in a clear understanding of the consumer experience for your business. Keep in mind what the customer remembers and how it affects their behavior. These mapping techniques should derive from our strategies and attitudes about customers, and the orchestration and delivery of products and services. Remember that there are a wide range of experience analysis and definition methods that can be employed, so it behooves the team to investigate the various methods and select the appropriate ones for the hypothesis to be tested.