I wanted to write this post to explain what service design is at the Co-op. Service design helps build more inclusive teams as well as products and services that meet user and business needs.
What we mean when we say ‘services’
To understand what service design is, we need to understand what a service is. A ‘service’ is something that helps someone complete a task, like finding information or getting something done.
At the Co-op we help our customers do lots of things, for example, we help them:
- make a will with the Co-op Legal team
- arrange a funeral with Co-op Funeralcare
- register to become a Co-op member
We also help our colleagues. For example, we help:
- Food colleagues find out how to do something in stores through the How do I? website
- Funeralcare colleagues spend more time face-to-face time with bereaved families and less on admin through Co-op Guardian
- Food colleagues check information about when they’re due to work with the Shifts website
These are just some of the services within the Co-op. Some of them are customer-facing, some are colleague-facing, some include elements of both. Some tasks can only be completed online, some can be done entirely offline, but most will include a mix of both.
Service design at the Co-op
And that’s what service design is at the Co-op: it’s designing the sequence of interactions a user has with us. It’s a holistic approach which considers the end-to-end experience, online and offline.
A Co-op service begins the first time a potential customer interacts with us (whether that be online or coming into one of our stores), or at the point a colleague is asked to sign up to one of our online services. The service goes right through to them achieving what they set out to do.
Digital teams can’t design services alone
In Co-op Digital we refer to service design constantly, but we don’t own it.
Service design includes colleagues from all around the organisation – those from legal teams, marketing teams, colleagues in customer-facing roles, as well as those who speak with customers from our call centre. And everyone in between too.
We cannot design good services that meet the need of our users without the expertise from around the organisation.
Mapping out the service to see the big picture
When we design or iterate a service, we map out each interaction, by each type of user, chronologically. This is service mapping.
We try to understand a customer’s mindset when they come to use a service. What task do they want to complete? For us to design an experience that meets their needs we need to know where they’ve come from, why they’re here, and what they’re here to do.
Service maps:
- show the whole user experience, visually
- join up multiple user interactions and channels, beyond digital
- show the end-to-end experience from awareness through to completing a task
An inclusive way of working
We have walls dedicated to service mapping which we update to reflect anything that has an impact on the service, like if we’ve learnt something new in user research or if the business strategy changes. We map services openly like this so that everyone can see what’s been worked on.
Service maps help teams work better because they:
- align product teams around a shared understanding of their users’ journeys
- communicate the user journey to stakeholders
- help everybody see problems at a glance
- help the team empathise with the journey their users are on
- allow anyone to contribute their knowledge of how a service works, or ideas to help improve it with a post it
- put research and data into the context of the wider service
This photo shows our pharmacy ‘blueprint’ (a type of service map) created by Louise Nicholas and Derek Harvie. It maps the stages of the service, and customer interactions and operational touch points.
This is Jack Fletcher’s Membership storyboard which illustrates customer interactions throughout the service, online and offline.
A way to make better decisions
User research helps us identify problems. Highlighting them on a service map within the context of a user journey gives us a visual prompt about where we should focus our efforts. Being able to see problems, clearly, helps us prioritise what we need to improve.
Service design also helps us see where operational inefficiencies are and therefore where we can prioritise commercial gain – business goals are as important as user needs.
We use service maps to make better decisions because they help us:
- highlight pain points and problems
- spot gaps in our knowledge and the service itself
- find opportunities to improve the experience
- raise business inefficiencies
- prioritise what we should try and fix first
- pivot as a business to focus on the right things for our customers, members and business
Here’s the Food business’s ‘Store Hub’ service map designed by Kathryn Grace. It shows the reality of how colleagues in stores use systems and processes.
We need everyone’s knowledge and expertise
For it to be effective, the whole team should participate in service design. At least initially, a designer will lead the work, but the whole team needs to contribute for it to work. In a discovery, service design will shape how your service needs to work. In later phases, it should inform iterations and strategic direction.
For anyone working at Co-op, the research, content and design teams will be hosting a showcase of our ways of working on Monday 10 December. Come along if you’re interested in finding out more about service design, all welcome. Location to be announced.
Head of Design