In our service-blueprinting course, we often are asked about the difference between UX (or CX) and service design. They are two sides of the same coin.
Comparing User Experience and Service Design
User experience (which, for the purposes of this article, will be equated with customer experience) encompasses all aspects of users’ interaction with a company. It includes anything the end user comes across — for example, an app, kiosk, website, or a mailer. Think of user experience as the ‘what’ — what users encounter as they interact with a brand.
Service design refers to planning and organizing business resources (people, props, and processes) to deliver the customer experience. Think of service design as the ‘how’ — how the user experience gets created and how the internal parts of the organization align to deliver that experience.
For example, imagine encountering an issue that prompts you to contact a company’s support via a customer-service chat. To begin, you must find and initiate the live chat. You communicate your issue, and the chat agent works with you to resolve it. These interactions, as well as the interface itself, make up the user experience. As you ask questions, the chat agent works behind the scenes as needed: checking a database, filling out a form, recording any changes in the database, speaking with a manager, and so forth. These tasks, as well as the people and technology required to complete them, are part of service design.
Poor service design will negatively impact the customer’s experience. For example, in the scenario above, imagine that, after you initiate the customer-service chat, there’s a long wait to be connected with a support agent due to poorly managed matching processes or a lack of support staff. When you are finally connected, you share your personal information and issue, only then to be transferred to a different agent specialized in your type of problem. The second agent asks you to restate all your information, rather than automatically retrieving it from the first agent. In this case, a lack of service design (streamlined processes, adequate staff, and synchronized technology) impacts your experience as a customer.
UX Alone Is Not Enough
Historically, companies have been organized internally according to various touchpoints in the customer experience — that is, around products and delivery channels. This approach has often led to siloed departments for marketing, sales, product, billing, and customer support. Some organizations may even have separate departments (or teams) for different areas of the same product (e.g., homepage, profile, chat, cart).
Collaboration across departments and teams is required in order to achieve a seamless customer experience. This is where service design comes in. To facilitate this collaboration, intention and effort must be spent designing how people, processes, and tools come together to create the experience you aim to deliver to the customer. Customer experience is more than just the sum of user experiences on different, separate channels. Inadequate service design leads to:
- Delivery gaps between what the company wants to deliver and what it actually delivers
- Redundancies and wasted resources, caused by duplication of efforts in different business units
While an exceptional user experience may be designed, it can be sustainable over time only if it is feasible internally. Service design helps mitigate misalignment and also eliminate redundancies and conserve energy, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.
UX and Service Design Together
Optimizing UX and service design should be done parallel, with equal effort. It is important to think about what the end users encounter, while also considering logistically how that experience gets delivered. This relationship is easily visualized in a service blueprint.
Undesirable user experiences are often due to an organizational shortcoming — an internal weak point. In a service blueprint, we map what an organization does in parallel to the user’s actions. Dependencies are visualized and the business can discover a weak leak at its roots. These insights improve not only the user’s experience, but also the employee experience by reducing redundant work and optimizing workflows.
Conclusion
Ultimately, you need strong UX and service design to create and deliver successful experiences. You can’t have a good customer experience without considering the people or processes used to create it, and it’s useless to build something that end users don’t need or can’t use.
Internal problems impact the quality of the user experience. Streamlining internal processes improves the employees’ experience, which, in turn, allows them to create a better user experience.
