[Book] Service Design for Business

Service Design for Business: A Practical Guide to Optimizing the Customer Experience
Ben Reason, Lavrans Løvlie, Melvin Brand Flu
Wiley Publishers
December 2015, 208 pages

Abstract

Service Design for Business helps you transform your customer’s experience and keep them engaged through the art of intentional service design. Written by the experts at Live|work, this practical guide offers a tangible, effective approach for better responding to customers’ needs and demands, and provides concrete strategy that can be implemented immediately. You’ll learn how taking a design approach to problem solving helps foster creativity, and how to apply it to the real issues that move businesses forward. Highly visual and organized for easy navigation, this quick read is a handbook for connecting market factors to the organizational challenge of customer experience by seeing your company through the customers’ eyes.

Livework pioneered the service design industry, and guides organizations including Sony, the British Government, Volkswagen Procter & Gamble, the BBC, and more toward a more carefully curated customer experience. In this book, the Livework experts show you how to put service design to work in your company to solve the ongoing challenge of winning with customers.

• Approach customer experience from a design perspective
• See your organization through the lens of the customer
• Make customer experience an organization-wide responsibility
• Analyze the market factors that dovetail with customer experience design

The Internet and other digital technology has brought the world to your customers’ fingertips. With unprecedented choice, consumers are demanding more than just a great product – the organizations coming out on top are designing and delivering experiences tailored to their customers’ wants. Service Design for Business gives you the practical insight and service design perspective you need to shape the way your customers view your organization.

Authors

Ben Reason is a founding partner of Live-work—winners of the prestigious Designweek ‘Design Team of the Year’ award in 2014. As director of the London studio he continues to pioneer the discipline and is a visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art, London.

Lavrans Løvlie is a founding partner and Director of Livework. His work includes projects with the BBC, Sony, Orange, VW, several of the largest hospitals in Norway and the United Nations. He has taught at universities across Europe and is a board member of the Norwegian Design Council.

Melvin Brand Flu is a partner and the Director of Strategy and Business Design at Livework. He has over 25 years of experience working as a business and strategy consultant.

Book review

Published by Erik Flowers on PracticalServiceDesign

If I had to recommend one book to be the first book someone read about service design, it would be this one. One of the main benefits I can see for those reading this book is that it will give them a real clear view of where they need to start with their personal focus, as well as the focus of their business. It’s easy to take the information and say here’s where I fall short, and here’s what I can do about it. Here’s where my organization falls short, and here’s what we can do about it. Once these questions are answered, then further reading can be done on methods, techniques, processes, and so forth.