Although service-oriented organizations now comprise 80 percent of the economy in developed countries, a surprising number of organizations in this field struggle to differentiate themselves from their competition. This can leave brands scrambling as they watch their customers select other hospitality options. Securing repeat customers, word-of-mouth recommendations and building a positive brand reputation all become significantly harder for brands that do not know how to use a service-design model.
If these types of struggles sound familiar, then learning about the service-design strategies and how to incorporate them into a particular company can make an enormous difference.
Getting started with service design
As brands compete for the attention and revenue from their customers, they know that they need to learn how to break apart from the competition. They need to provide customers with a reason to turn to their organization over the others. This is where service design can provide immense benefits.
Service design requires organizations to make some changes in how they construct their services. This holistic concept provides businesses a customer-centric model of marketing and process design and how this type of service can then help to encourage a positive reputation and even recommendations from customers.
Those who want to build their organizations moving forward need to nurture their understanding of service design and how to incorporate it into their own organizational culture. The better they can communicate it to others at the company and help them see the value, the easier it will be to make the business-wide changes that will set the business on the path towards success.
To help hospitality industry professionals take those important first steps and begin to incorporate service-design principles, we have selected four posts. These posts provide an excellent overview of the topic and the necessary steps to incorporate the ideas. They will help the reader see the value of this model and empower them to help others understand as well.
If you want to know more about service design, these four posts can help kick start your education.
What is service design? Service design defined by hospitality leaders
This blog post provides an excellent introduction to the concept of service design. It helps better understand what is needed to stand out from the countless other competitors within your niche, even within the same geographical area. You will uncover the basic guidelines for creating your own service design strategy and the role it plays in the business as a whole.
This includes guidelines such as:
- Examining who the plan impacts.
- How to plan for the particular customer touchpoints you want to focus on.
- Understanding how the changes you make will impact your business design.
You will also learn more about what makes a quality strategy and how the modern connectivity of consumers, particularly with social media, makes service design such a critical part of running a business.
This post will help you better understand the thinking behind this strategy as well as provide you with valuable talking points when presenting the benefits to others at your company. The guidelines will then help you take the first steps towards creating a strategy for your business.
The benefits of service design
For those interested in learning more about running a business centered around service design, this post will provide keen insight. Explore the major benefits of this type of strategy with this easy-to-digest post. You will better understand what makes a service design different from other types of marketing and engagement strategies.
This post breaks down the direct benefits that businesses experience when they take a service-design approach. This can provide excellent talking points for those who want to bring the concept and strategy to others at their organization. It also explores how this type of strategy can be implemented. This dispenses important insight into how this type of strategy will impact a wide variety of work processes, including the people involved and the work environment as a whole. When your business understands how to implement service design and how to make the strategy work for you, your organization will position itself to begin receiving the many benefits it can offer.
The general principles of service design
Building a brand that focuses on customers and creating a service-design strategy to help it better connect with their clients and buyers can be a challenge. Often businesses feel unaccustomed to this form of thinking and strategizing. This post provides a strong overview as well as actionable steps that businesses can take as they begin to build their service design.
The post breaks down the concept into a few cornerstone points. It explores the importance of:
- Having services designed based on customer needs
- Services designed with goals that can be clearly seen and achieved
- Having the customer be the primary focus when designing services
- Having services create value for the users they are created for
- Having a service design that can remain flexible enough to account for special events
- Services that help to reduce wait times
- Services that focus on the end experience of the customer
- The importance of creating a unified system for delivering the service design
- The value of prototyping service designs before implementing them.
How to build service design processes?
For your business to effectively build service design processes into your company culture and business processes, it is important to understand the steps that go into designing and ordering these processes and how to bring everyone on board with the new design. This post provides the information that companies need to get started.
By uncovering why incorporating service design plays such a critical role in the organization’s reputation and growth, businesses will feel more comfortable implementing some of the best practices. Understand what customers want to see from the businesses they patronize and use that to motivate your company to take the next step forward.
The article provides helpful, important aspects to consider when designing your own processes. The reader is walked through the following steps:
- Focusing on the customer, exploring what that means for customer satisfaction and how to identify what customers want to see.
- Considering the sequence that would be required to carry out the service design. Readers will learn more about how to plan for each step in the process
- They will also learn about how to incorporate the staff into each part of the sequence.
- Finally, they will discuss how to streamline the processes to maximize their success.
This post provides those in the hospitality industry with helpful information to help them begin their process of incorporating service design into their marketing and positioning strategies.
If you want to help build your business and get your organization to stand out from competitors in your space, then these four posts will provide you with an excellent overview of the topic and how to get started on the steps. They will help you gain a more thorough understanding not only of what service design consists of, particularly in the hospitality industry, but also how you can begin to make it part of your company culture. See how service design can help your organization grow starting right away.
