Why Service Design: A Practical Guide to Creating Customer Centric Services Could Become a Defining Book for Service Design Professionals

Service design is maturing fast.

What was once seen as a discipline focused solely on journey maps, sticky notes and customer touchpoints is now becoming one of the most important capabilities in modern organisations. Today, service design sits at the centre of digital transformation, operational improvement, customer experience, business architecture, business analysis and organisational change.

And yet, despite the growing importance of service design, many organisations are still delivering broken services. We experience it constantly:

• A person struggling to coordinate care for a loved one across disconnected healthcare systems.
• A traveller trapped between an airline, airport and app during a cancelled flight.
• A customer passed between departments trying to make an insurance claim.
• Someone attempting to switch banks only to hit confusing processes, duplicated forms and inconsistent communication.

The problem is rarely a single bad interaction. It’s the service itself.

Disconnected teams. Legacy processes. Siloed decision-making. Transformation programmes that sound customer-centric but fail to improve the real experience.

This is exactly why the new BCS book Service Design: A Practical Guide to Creating Customer Centric Services matters.

Written by Dr Debra Paul and Jonathan Hunsley of AssistKD, and due for release on 1 July 2026, the book arrives at a critical moment for the profession - when organisations increasingly understand the importance of service design, but still struggle to embed it effectively at enterprise scale.

For many service design professionals, this could become one of the defining practical guides of the next phase of the discipline.

A Book About Fixing Services That Don’t Work

What makes this book especially timely is that it appears to address one of the biggest challenges facing service design today: consistency.

Service design has matured rapidly, but the profession has often lacked shared standards, common language and enterprise-aligned ways of working. Teams frequently approach service design differently across organisations, making collaboration, governance and scaling difficult.

That matters when organisations are trying to deliver large transformation programmes across multiple departments, channels and technologies.

This book helps move the profession forward by providing a structured and practical foundation for service design practice — one that supports stronger collaboration, clearer alignment and more effective delivery across complex environments.

In many ways, it represents an important step towards a recognised professional approach to service design.

Because the future of service design is not isolated workshops or disconnected innovation exercises. It is the ability to consistently improve services across entire organisations.

Why Dr Debra Paul and Jonathan Hunsley Are the Right Authors

The credibility behind this book is significant.

Dr Debra Paul, non-executive chair at AssistKD, is one of the most respected figures in business analysis, business change and professional development. Her work has consistently focused on helping organisations bridge the gap between strategic ambition and practical implementation.

That perspective is increasingly vital in service design, where professionals are expected to operate across customer experience, governance, operational improvement, transformation and business architecture.

Jonathan Hunsley, CEO of AssistKD and founder of the Service Design Forum, has spent years helping organisations and practitioners mature their service design capability in the real world - not just in theory.

Together, they bring something the profession needs: a combination of strategic thinking, enterprise experience and practical delivery expertise.

This is important because service designers today are no longer simply designing touchpoints. They are helping organisations redesign how services operate end to end.

That means working across:

• digital transformation,  
• operational teams,  
• customer experience functions,  
• business analysis,  
• AI-enabled services,  
• organisational change,  
• and enterprise delivery programmes.  

Few people are better placed to write about that reality.

Service Design Needs More Than Inspiration

One reason this book feels so relevant is because many service design professionals are facing the same frustration: organisations say they want customer-centric services, but continue operating through siloed structures and fragmented delivery models.

The result is that service design teams are often expected to solve systemic problems without the organisational alignment, governance or professional maturity needed to sustain change.

That is why the profession increasingly needs:

• shared approaches,  
• clearer language and defined standards,  
• stronger enterprise integration,  
• and practical methods for scaling service design capability.  

This book speaks directly to that challenge. Not by positioning service design as a creative add-on, but as a serious enterprise discipline capable of driving meaningful transformation.

The Importance of the A4Q Certified Service Designer Qualification

The book also sits alongside AssistKD’s wider contribution to the profession through the A4Q Certified Service Designer qualification.

AssistKD architected the qualification specifically for modern organisations, wanting to achieve strategic goals including operational improvement and meaningful customer centric digital transformation.

The qualification reflects the same shift this book represents: the movement of service design from isolated practice to embedded enterprise capability.

For professionals looking to develop a more structured, scalable and strategically aligned approach to service design, that alignment is significant.

Why This Matters Beyond Business

At its heart, service design is about making life easier for people.

When services fail, people feel it emotionally:

• the stress of disrupted travel,  
• the anxiety of navigating healthcare systems,  
• the frustration of broken digital journeys,  
• the exhaustion of repeating information across disconnected teams.  

Good service design reduces that friction.

It helps organisations deliver services that feel simpler, clearer and more human -— even within highly complex systems.

That is why this discipline matters so much right now.

And it is why Service Design: A Practical Guide to Creating Customer Centric Services feels bigger than simply another business book.

It reflects a profession becoming more mature, more strategic and more essential to how organisations operate.

For service design professionals trying to create meaningful change inside complex organisations, this book is arriving at exactly the right moment.