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Behind the scenes of Service Design

Senior UX Researcher Dr Marnie Crook explains what Service Design is and how its holistic approach to solving customer problems sets it apart from other research techniques.

Dr Marnie Crook
Dr Marnie Crook

30 May 2025

7 minute read

Digital channels like websites and apps tend to receive the most attention when it comes to improving customer experience, which makes a lot of sense. Digital experiences have become the prominent way customers engage with products and services. But these digital channels are just a single part of what makes up the ecosystem of an organisation – the people, processes, technology, and policies amongst many other elements that sit behind a website. As with any ecosystem, everything is connected, meaning they also influence each other. For instance, when you use an enquiry form on a website and hit submit, that information is captured in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, is accessed by customer services staff and eventually (hopefully) the answer to your enquiry circles back to you as an email or notification. 

But if the organisation has multiple CRMs across different departments and staff are overloaded by needing to manually input customers’ enquiries into the other systems, it doesn’t matter how well designed the website is, how user friendly the form is, the CRM set-up overloading staff means your answer doesn’t get to you in time, and you have to ask your question again, call perhaps, or just give up.

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A user-friendly website is only part of the solution. The value of service design is the holistic approach it takes to creating meaningful experiences for customers.

Service design is the investigation of elements that make up an organisation's services, mapping them and enabling the organisation to evolve and improve those services. It’s a holistic approach that considers people, processes, technology, and policies, ensuring every element is designed to support a smooth, meaningful experience for both customers and the employees delivering the services. In short, it’s designing services.

A well-rehearsed way to explain Service Design is a trip to the theatre. Imagine you are sitting in the audience, watching the actors play their parts on the stage, and as the lights go down, you see the shadows moving across the stage, readying the sets and props for the next scene. This is like service design – you as an audience member, are the customer, and the actors are the customer-facing employees, the human face of the service. Then there are the backstage crew, the employees you don't see, making everything run smoothly. Then, finally, there are the sets, lights and pulleys, these are like the IT systems and workflow processes that keep the service running.

But why use this holistic approach to solving customer pain points? When backstage problems exist, they have frontstage consequences – poor service, frustrated customers, and inconsistent experiences across channels. Remember the enquiry form above and how the multiple CRMs and manual input by staff meant it took too long for your question to be answered? Solving the backstage problems, like lack of system integration, fractured employee experiences, and poor communication (just to name a few), is key for addressing those customer pain points.

As a customer, have you used any services that might have backstage problems, causing issues for you? Here’s a more detailed example… Meet Ruby, she wants to enrol in a leadership course to strengthen her team management skills.

She visits the course provider’s website but struggles to find the right course – there are too many similar options with vague descriptions, and filtering the results doesn’t work properly. After several frustrating minutes, she finally locates the correct course and starts the application process.

The online application form is long and confusing. It doesn’t save progress, so when she accidentally refreshes the page, she has to start over. Eventually, she submits her application and receives an automated confirmation email.

Weeks pass, but she hears nothing. When she calls the college, she's transferred multiple times before someone finally tells her they can’t find her application. After re-submitting it, she’s informed she has missed the deadline because her first application was lost. She gives up and applies to another course provider a few months later.

So, even if the website’s usability issues were fixed – improving search filters, simplifying the form, and adding a progress-saving feature – it wouldn’t prevent the frustration of a broken application system. The other half of the poor experience is a lack of communication between teams and an outdated manual processing system that doesn’t fully sync with the website.

Service Design addresses these disconnects by aligning frontstage experiences (what customers see) with backstage operations (what supports those experiences). But how does Service Design actually do this?

Aligning the customer and employee experience

Exploration of problems and solutions with both the customers and employees is key to creating a holistic solution. This is done by mapping the entire service ecosystem using a service blueprint. A service blueprint has three key sections: a description of customer groups the blueprint will focus on (the audience), a frontstage journey, and a backstage journey involving the services employees, processes, technology etc. Compare this to a customer journey map, which only focuses on a customer's experience with a product or service over time, or in other words, just the audience and frontstage.

Service Blueprint diagram

Customer groups – The theatre audience. Who are the customers the blueprint will focus on? What are their behaviours, capabilities, needs, attitudes and motivations? This section of a blueprint introduces the customers (audience members), whose typical service journey the blueprint will follow. In our example, it’s Ruby.

Frontstage – The customer journey and visible parts of the organisation they interact with. What tasks are customers and employees carrying out? What are their needs and issues? What are the touchpoints used to communicate, both digital and physical? For Ruby, this was when she visited the course provider’s website or filled out the application from.

Backstage – What the customer doesn’t see. What does the service provider do to facilitate the customer experience? What are employees doing behind the scenes? What systems and processes are being used? What are the KPIs, analytics and governance associated with the customer and employee experience? In Ruby’s experience, backstage includes customer service teams communicating with one another (albeit poorly!) and the outdated CMS that doesn't fully sync with the website. 

Line of interaction – This depicts direct interactions between the customer and the service provider. For example, when Ruby sent her application form to the admin staff, or when the admin contacted her about losing her application.

In a service blueprint, the addition of visualising the operations of the service delivery alongside the customer experience is essential because in a business context, it will aid in identifying potential problem areas and gaps in service delivery.

But how is a service blueprint created? This is a highly collaborative research process which is tailored to an organisation’s needs and goals, but the staples are usually a series of workshops and interviews with employee teams, leadership and customers. A multidisciplinary team of experts, including researchers and strategists all guide it.

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This is where the value of service design truly lies, in the doing, the research and collaboration across teams and roles when creating the blueprint.

All work together to understand the service as a whole, creating and using the service blueprint to find where the problems are and what the solutions could be.

As teams and individuals from across an organisation, who may have had little to no contact with each other, map out their respective processes, tech, etc, against the customer experience, there is a transfer of knowledge and learning that is unique to Service Design. Teams learn how their workflows affect one another and the customer experience.

This creates a sense of ownership and begins to engrain Service Design ability into an organisation. This is very different to traditional approaches to customer research, where work is briefed, completed by the UX experts, then presented at the end of the project with documents and deliverables sent over in an email – resulting in a loss of expertise and knowledge.

However, understanding where the problems are and what the solutions could be is just the beginning. The organisational change required to make those solutions a reality lies ahead. Team structures, tech platforms, organisational governance, and even culture, are just some of the elements that could need to be addressed. Accompanying the service blueprint are deliverables like business model canvases, implementation roadmaps, change management plans and metric frameworks to document and realise the path to organisational change. More on those another time… What would you like to change in your organisation? Consider using Service Design to make it happen.

Dr Marnie Crook
Dr Marnie Crook

30 May 2025

7 minute read

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