ServiceFriday: Customer Involvement in the Service Design Process

What does your customer really need?

Customers possess unique knowledge about usage necessary if companies are to design successful services. But customers also have what researchers call latent needs: requirements or issues that users themselves do not perceive or cannot articulate. To address this, many companies involve customers in co-creating innovations, but seldom do they include customers on design teams. Could customers bring substantial value to the ideation process?

An article in the Journal of Service Research provides some answers that question. The study examined customer participation on design teams during the ideation stage of service design for libraries at three Australian universities. Although not commercial enterprises, the libraries replicate some of the challenges faced by businesses because government funding is distributed based on performance. Two studies were conducted at each library: new ways to access and use library resources, and creation of a new learning environment. At each university, two codesign teams were formed consisting of library users and library professionals. A third team at each library was composed of professionals only.    

The research showed that codesign teams can yield key innovations compared with professional-only teams. “Service designers that utilize in-house professionals with lead users can achieve greater collective creativity by tapping into latent user needs and enabling the elaboration of novel ideas,” the paper reads.

But the authors added this caution: “Codesign teams appear to produce the least feasible concepts, which means that extra time and costs will be required for the subsequent development phases. While user benefit and novelty may outweigh this limitation, it might substantially increase the time to market making codesign less attractive in a dynamic marketplace.”

The study identified a set of conditions to help firms maximize the chances of codesign success:

• Team may be professional-led, user-led or collaborative, but greater success is achieved through collaboration where all are free to contribute their unique skills and perspectives.
• Team cohesion and collaboration can be achieved by coordinating team roles and agreeing on objectives early in the process.
• The service designer should participate as a member of the team, because intrateam dynamics might be hard to observe from the outside.
• Prioritize front-end planning, including the user selection process and the design task definition.
• Newly assembled codesign teams need to be facilitated as they bond, because members may not have previously collaborated and are likely from diverse backgrounds.

Read the full article in the Journal of Service Research, found in Sage Journals at this link: https://bit.ly/2WmzpDy (A fee may apply.)