Service design focuses, primarily, on the customer. If you want your customers to have a wonderful experience and return to you, then every touchpoint of their journey must be friction free and positive. Although this might seem obvious, we’ve all experienced sub-standard service from all sorts of organisations, and we go on to tell friends and family about them.  

Good customer service is not just a ‘nice to have,’ it is essential to the long-term health of your organisation. Sir Jony Ive, pioneering designer at Apple, said on a recent Desert Island Discs that he has never been driven by technology – he is driven by wanting to create something useful for people. As the first trillion-dollar company, Apple may have been onto something here.  

Certain attitudes and actions will hinder good service design in your organisation. Here are seven to avoid:

1. Staying silo-ed

Service Design is not about intuitive tech or clever App design. For your service design strategy to work, you need everyone in every area of your business to pull together, putting the interests of the customers first. If your processes are clunky, with gaps in communication or care, the customer can feel it.

2. Leaving customer service to the customer service team  

Thinking your customer service team is the only department responsible for customer service is short-sighted. Customer satisfaction should not be ‘someone else’s problem,’ it should be everyone’s goal. The most successful companies of the future will be those who remove friction from the customer journey, responding to pain points pro-actively. Every team in an organisation should have KPIs focused on delivering a better customer experience.

3. Not having a business strategy dedicated to customer satisfaction

You cannot deliver a great customer experience at every touchpoint without a coherent strategy. Your organisation needs a plan in place focusing on the needs of the customer, to ensure consistency and value.  

4. Forgetting about your value proposition

You sell stuff and that is enough – right? Wrong! When you sell a product or service, your value proposition is your promise that your product or service will meet customer expectations and needs. You persuaded your customers to choose you, but if you do not meet their needs and live up to your value proposition they will wish they had chosen your competitors.

5. Not walking the walk

You can tell your teams and anyone else who will listen that you are ‘customer first,’ but if you do not do anything it is just empty talk. You need to invest in operations and customer service if you are serious about a customer first approach.

6. Basing your strategy on ‘gut feelings’ rather than data

You will have your own instincts, and you will listen to the opinions of your internal stakeholders. However your customers show you the impact of your service design every day, and the answers are in the data. Watch, listen, analyse, and iterate the changes needed.

7. Thinking AI is the answer to everything

AI is a tool, but it is only as effective as you make it. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. In the last week, I have had three separate companies send me into an endless AI loop when trying to resolve what I thought were basic problems. What is your backup when AI just is not enough?

Business Service Design

If you would like to make Business Service Design a focus for your organisation, AssistKD offer a number of Service Design training courses, including the A4Q Certificate in Business Service Design. This course (which counts towards the A4Q Service Designer qualification) helps you develop and link the 4 mindsets that lead to great service design:

1. Systems Thinking
2. Service Thinking
3. Design Thinking
4. Lean Thinking

AssistKD is also committed to supporting the Service Design community through:

1. The Service Design Forum. In July 2025 AssistKD initiated the Service Design Forum as a platform for discussion and events related to service design, allowing professionals in the field to meet and network with peers. The Forum is invitation-only, focused on curating a community of practitioners who not only represent the profession but actively shape its evolution. If you are interested in getting involved, please contact jonathan.hunsley@assistkd.com.
2. Service Design apprenticeships. As Service Design is an emerging professional discipline within the digital change industry, AssistKD offer a fully audited Service Designer Apprenticeship programme to ensure exceptional standards. This includes expert one-to-one mentoring (with a low mentor-to-apprentice ratio), classroom taught courses, a suite of eLearning, and wellbeing support from Assist’s dedicated Apprenticeships team. The Service Designer Apprenticeship offers a pathway for professional development in the field, and has already delivered industry leading completion, pass and distinction rates.
3. The Service Design textbook. Dr Debra Paul and Jonathan Hunsley, co-authors of the book Business Architecture: A Comprehensive Guide, are bringing their thought leadership to Service Design with their textbook Service Design: A practical guide to creating customer centric services, due to be published in 2026.

FURTHER RESOURCES

The dedicated Service Design area of Assist’s Learning Zone is packed with free learning resources, with new and topical content added regularly. You will find relevant articles, thought-provoking service design related BA Brew podcasts plus free bitesize learning videos on the latest service design tools and techniques.  

You may be interested in these articles by Debra Paul:  

The Rise of the CX Professional

Putting the Service into Service Design

Find out more about AssistKD’s Service Design courses here: Service Design Courses.