Lecturer, Management Center Innsbruck, Austria
1. In your view, how is your research/work related to Service Design?
My background is in strategic management and marketing in the field of tourism. I work at the MCI – Management Center Innsbruck where I lecture service design and service innovation and do various research projects in this area. Besides, I consult companies and guest-lecture at various design and management schools on service design thinking.
Tourism is a service industry and depends on the creation of superior service experiences. Thus, over the past decades a lot of research has been done to interrogate how to generate customer satisfaction for tourism, travel, leisure activities and the like. In fact many of the basic concepts we use in service design can be found in service marketing and tourism management literature from the past 30 years, such as the extended service marketing mix (Bitner & Booms, 1981) or how to analyse services holistically as a sequence of points-of-encounter, i.e. customer journey consisting of a series of touchpoints (Kotler, Bowen & Makens, 1996). Therefore, some experts in this field struggle with service design as they do not see the value this approach can add to their well-researched discipline. Nevertheless, I am certain that service design thinking offers great value and potential also for these well-established disciplines because of its true interdisciplinary character. With my work I strive to establish service design thinking as a kind of common language, process and toolbox across different disciplines.
Bitner, J. & Booms, B. (1981) “Marketing strategies and organizational structures for service firms”, in Donnelly, J. en George, W. (Eds.) “Marketing of services”, American Marketing Association, Chicago.
Kotler, P., Bowen, J. & Makens, J.C. (1996). Marketing for hospitality and tourism, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River.
2. In your view, what is the most/less interesting aspect of Service Design?
I agree with the answer from Alison Prendiville in the previous interview. One of the most interesting aspects of service design is its true interdisciplinarity. When it comes to the skill set required to design services, many people like to refer to the T-shaped person with a broad knowledge across disciplines and a deep knowledge in one discipline (See also Geke van Dijk, who introduced the idea of the “drippy T” during her closing keynote at the SDN conference 2010). To stay in this picture, I would refer to service design thinking as a broad and common approach people from various backgrounds can agree on when working in interdisciplinary teams. Service design thinking offers many tools and methods enabling effective co-designing of services in such teams.
Another appealing aspect of service design is the idea that this approach provides answers to the apparent change in society and economy as described in the experience economy (Pine & Gilmore, 2001), service dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) and the impact of increasing customer power through social media to name but a few buzzwords in this context.
Pine, B. J., II, & Gilmore, J. H. (1999). Experience economy: Work is theater and every business a stage, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.
Vargo, S. L. & Lusch, R. F. (2004). Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing. Journal of Marketing. 68(1), 1–17.
Vargo, S. L. & Lusch, R. F. (2006). Service Dominant Logic: Reactions, Reflections and Refinements. Marketing Theory. 6(3), 281–288.
3. Can you tell us about a Service Design research project(s) you did or read about?
My recent research projects concerned the application and potential of mobile ethnographic research for service design. During a first project, I developed a mobile ethnography application for mobile phones called “myServiceFellow” (http://www.myservicefellow.com). In a following international research project funded by the EU, we will further develop the technology and test it in different tourism destinations and events. Furthermore, we will establish a knowledge network on service design in tourism and develop a website and print media to communicate a kind of “do-it-yourself” manual for service design to the predominant small- and micro-sized companies in the European tourism sector.
Another recent project was the development of the “Customer Journey Canvas” (published in the recent textbook “This is Service Design Thinking” and available under cc license on the website http://www.thisisservicedesignthinking.com) as a model and template for service processes along the pre-service, service and post-service period and including the most important influencers of the decision making process such as advertisements, public relations, social media, word-of-mouth and past experiences of customers. The canvas can be used to quickly sketch a certain service from different perspectives or stakeholders and reveal different perceptions, e.g. between customers, front-line staff and management.
4. Are there area(s) that you would like to do or see research on?
I am particularly interested in seeing more research and publications on introducing service design thinking into rather classic management approaches following the management saying “if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it”. I am myself working on a concept called “touchpoint portfolio”, an approach to include quantitative statistics into service design to observe, analyse and predict the impact of single touchpoints on the customer satisfaction and thus to report and justify service design activities to the management level of service providers. I know that colleagues are working on similar approaches, e.g. using the balanced scorecard, and I am very much looking forward to their findings and concepts.
Moreover, I am interested in any case study delivering evidences (a hat tip to all ServDes.10 participants and twitter followers at this point..) for the impact of service design on customer satisfaction, company revenues, cost structures, organisational structures or even strategic orientation of service firms through new service concepts.
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Your suggestions for the blog:
Who would you like to invite in this conversation about Service Design Research?
I would be very interested to hear more from practitioners what they would be interested in service design research and in particular which research questions and results they would find useful and interesting for their practise.
What is the question do you have about Service Design?
Will service design still exist in 5 or 10 years?