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We offer training across a wide range of course formats and disciplines. Speak to our team today to get you, your team, or your organisation digital ready!
Speak to us today!
We offer training across a wide range of course formats and disciplines. Speak to our team today to get you, your team, or your organisation digital ready!
Speak to us today!
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More from Academy Xi
- For Individuals
- Digital Transformation Academy
- AI Futures Academy
- Academy Xi: Nano Labs
Sleek websites and intuitive apps are no longer enough to win customers. Today’s most innovative companies are designing the customer experience from the ecosystem out, not just the interface.
While user experience (UX) design is concerned with what a customer sees and touches, service design addresses the layers beneath: the people, processes, systems, and strategies that come together to create an outstanding end-to-end customer experience.
For business leaders, this thinking goes beyond design jargon. It’s key to increasing customer satisfaction, improving internal efficiency, and generating new streams of revenue.
UX vs. service design: The distinction
UX is the front stage, representing the website that your customer visits or the app that your customer taps through. It focuses on making those interactions intuitive, seamless and pleasurable.
Service design, by contrast, manages the whole performance from front stage to backstage. It maps how internal systems, people, policies, and platforms work in sync to support the customer journey. For example, while a UX designer improves how a customer books an appointment online, a service designer also ensures the internal booking system alerts staff, syncs with calendars, and handles follow-ups.
In short, UX focuses on interactions; service design ensures those interactions are reliably delivered.
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What is a service ecosystem?
A service ecosystem includes every actor, tool, and process involved in delivering a service, including customers, employees, systems, third-party partners, and more. It captures how value is co-created and exchanged across the organisation.
Take a car-sharing service. The ecosystem includes the driver, rider, app interface, GPS provider, payment processor, and customer support. All of these touchpoints must be aligned to create a frictionless experience. If one part fails, such as, for example, the payment processor goes down, the entire service can break.
By understanding the ecosystem, leaders can identify hidden dependencies, eliminate bottlenecks, and design smarter services.
Why service design matters for business
Service design isn’t just a CX tool but also a business enabler. Here’s how it drives business success:
- Boosts customer satisfaction: Great services are consistent, seamless, and tailored. Service design aligns touchpoints with customer expectations.
- Improves operational efficiency: Mapping internal processes often reveals redundancies and inefficiencies that can be optimised.
- Opens new revenue streams: By seeing the full ecosystem, organisations can spot unmet needs and innovate services around them.
According to Harvard Business Review, companies that excel in customer experiences have seen up to 140% higher spend from satisfied customers. Furthermore, organisations have been shown to earn up to $775 million in additional revenue over three years by investing in service improvement, according to Qualtrics.
How to create customer-oriented service ecosystems
Building a customer-oriented service ecosystem requires intention and alignment across the organisation. It begins with understanding real customer needs and continues through collaborative design and continuous refinement.
Here are some core principles to consider:
- Conduct meaningful research through interviews, journey mapping, and observation
- Map the end-to-end customer experience alongside internal systems and roles
- Collaborate across departments to align objectives and processes
- Design and iterate using real user feedback
- Develop future-ready service blueprints that evolve with changing needs
By applying these principles, organisations can deliver services that not only meet expectations but continuously improve to stay relevant.
Ready to equip your team?
Understanding service design is one thing but embedding it across teams is another. Our Service Design for Organisations Workshop empowers businesses to bridge the gap between theory and real-world application, driving impactful service innovation. From mapping journeys to building service blueprints, your team will walk away ready to reshape how your organisation serves.
If you’re interested in learning more, contact us at enterprise@academyxi.com or book a call to see how we can help meet your workforce training needs.
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