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      Design is trending in business. Business gurus are writing about design and the value it offers to more traditional business practice to enable innovation, collaboration, and creativity. Forrester Research describes service design as “the most important design discipline.” Businesses like Apple, Dyson, and Philips have raised the awareness of the value of design to business. Other major businesses are bringing design capabilities in-house. IBM is building its Design Studio. Capital One Bank acquired leading design agency Adaptive Path. Mayo Clinic has its own design practice. The U.K. government is hiring designers in areas including tax and revenue and justice. Leading management consultancies are recognizing the value of design, too. McKinsey has bought design studio Lunar. Accenture acquired Fjord in the digital design space.

      In light of these developments, we want to help business and government organizations understand what design can do for services – but what is service design? Service design is the design of services. When we started Livework in 2001, we wanted to have a positive impact on the way people live and work. Service design is helping us make that impact – it improves and innovates the services we use day to day. Banking and insurance, health care, transportation, business services, and a wealth of government activities are all services.

      Organizations spend significant time designing tangible products. Services receive less design attention; however, to succeed in today's marketplace, this needs to change. Generally, services are less productive and cause more frustration to customers than products. We love our BMWs more than our banks. Service design addresses this quality and productivity gap.

      Service design has been around for 20 years and has matured from a niche design discipline to a more comprehensive and accessible way to tackle customer, business, and organizational challenges. However, it is still under-recognized and undervalued by businesses. This book aims to address this in two ways: first, by putting the value of service design into business terms, and second, by showing how service design can connect to core business outcomes and capabilities.

      Reading this book should give you a clear understanding of how you can use service design for specific challenges in your organization and what results to expect from doing so.

      Who This Book Is For

      This book is for people in businesses or large organizations. It aims to be valuable to those involved in business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and government services. As all services ultimately service human beings, there are common principles and tools that can be used across all sectors.

      Service design can help start-ups, small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs), and large organizations design better services. In this book, we focus mostly on challenges faced by many large or established organizations. Start-ups can use service design effectively, but we have focused on challenges that we see faced by our clients in large or established organizations. These are the challenges of change, collaboration, innovation, and customer focus that many big outfits face.

      We identified three types of audience that we think will benefit from this book.

      Our first group is people who care about customers, or who are in a role where customers are a key consideration. You work in customer experience, insight, marketing, customer service, innovation management, or digital roles. Or you may be a leader who understands the importance of customers to your business and strategy.

      Many people in these roles understand customers well and have insight into their experiences and needs. Often, though, you struggle to turn insight into action. You struggle to develop designs for improved customer experience, to generate concepts for how to compete for customers' attention and loyalty and to make these ideas tangible and realistic.

      You may also struggle to connect customer insight to change in the organizations we work for. Great ideas fall on deaf ears and either fail to get support or get watered down in implementation when they encounter the challenge of changing the way a business operates. This can be due to the challenge of communicating to others, collaborating on a shared vision, or understanding the mechanisms that need to change.

      For you, this book starts on familiar customer territory. It

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