Service Design for Business

Chapter 4Business ImpactDesigning a Service around Customers' Needs Provides a New Way to Address Age-Old Business Challenges

Businesses have goals and challenges—growth and competition are two big examples. They generally employ the best tools they can find to achieve their goals and meet their challenges. Industry, technology, and markets evolve, and so do the tools required to operate. In a complex, networked, digital, and customer-driven world, service design can have impact on key business agenda.

Business impact is the ability to move forward—to understand a situation, develop solutions, and take them to market. Or is it the ability to adapt to new technologies and refine your ability to compete in a market? Often these situations involve customers—customers who must adopt, migrate, buy, use, or remain loyal to your business. With government services, impact is being able to have better results for less cost—these results are often outcomes for citizens in terms of health, well-being, and employment. Business impact regularly requires successful engagement of customers.

Thinking of business impact as being highly dependent of successful interactions and relationships with customers provides a new lens to tackle your challenges or strive for your goals. This lens is a way of seeing the business through the customers' eyes.

Service design provides an approach for understanding ...