Greetings, dear reader,
And welcome to another issue of Ask a Service Designer. If you have a burning question about service design, submit it! This newsletter needs questions like hungry hungry hippos need those little marbles (yum).
This edition's question is an awesome one, and when I read it, I knew just the person to invite to guide us. Andrea Chan is a Director of Service Design at CIBC, and is also a process engineer by training. I've always loved chatting to Andrea about the differences between process engineering and service design. She kindly agreed to answer this question for us, based on her extensive experience.
Take it away Andrea!
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Q: What's the between service design and process development/re-engineering etc.?
I’m excited to be the guest author for this issue of the newsletter! I thought giving you a quick summary of my background might be a good place to start.
I studied Manufacturing Systems Engineering in school and am a stats nerd at heart who worked as a Process Engineer at a Canadian bank for the first 11 years of my career. Then about 3 years ago I was asked to help stand up a Service Design practice at the same bank. At that time, I had never heard of Human-Centered Design or Design Thinking before. So it’s been quite a journey for me! I now co-lead the bank’s first Service Design practice at the enterprise level, and work with an incredible team of 10 diverse, multi-disciplinary service designers.
So the question of “What's the difference between service design and process engineering?" is one that I have spent a lot of time contemplating over the last few years, as I transitioned and reconciled all the skills and experience that I once used as a Process Engineer into my new role as a Service Designer.
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Let’s start with a quick synopsis of each methodology. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll refer to Process Engineering in the same vein as the Lean Six Sigma methodology, which the American Society of Quality (ASQ) defines as follows:
“Lean Six Sigma is a fact-based, data-driven philosophy of improvement that values defect prevention over defect detection. It drives customer satisfaction and bottom-line results by reducing variation, waste, and cycle time, while promoting the use of work standardization and flow, thereby creating a competitive advantage. It applies anywhere variation and waste exist, and every employee should be involved.”
The Process Engineering Methodology looks like this:
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In contrast, Service Design can be defined as a methodology that solves complex problems through a human-centred approach in order to design desirable service experiences across channels and touchpoints for our customers, employees, and stakeholders.
My team’s Service Design Methodology looks like this:
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So back to the question at hand. What’s the difference between Service Design and Process Engineering?
At their core, Service Design and Process Engineering are both holistic problem-solving methodologies with a proven track record for designing experiences that meet customer needs and drive business results. They share many common goals and desired outcomes, but it is their problem-solving approach that is distinctly different.
While this is not an exhaustive list, I’ve tried to boil things down to what I believe are the 3 most notable differences between Service Design and Process Engineering that I have experienced in practice. They are:
- Both methodologies care deeply about understanding customer needs, but go about discovering them in very different ways.
- Both methodologies seek to uncover insights and tell compelling stories about the problems to be solved, but favour different types of data to do so.
- Both methodologies strongly believe in collaborative design, but their skillsets and tools tend to focus them on designing different aspects of the end service.
I’ll take some time to explore each of these in detail, and have included an illustrative example of how I experienced those differences play out when I worked as a Process Engineer versus a Service Designer.
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Difference #1: Both methodologies care deeply about understanding customer needs, but go about discovering them in very different ways.
Process Engineers and Service Designers both fundamentally believe you must always start with a deep understanding of your customer needs before anything else. But the key difference I’ve found is that Process Engineers assume that customers know (and can articulate) what they want, whereas Service Designers do not.
- As a Process Engineer, I would collect the “voice of the customer” through listening to customer calls, reading through complaints, observing the service in action or, if we were really lucky, by surveying the customers themselves. This would be translated to “critical to quality” measures.
- For example, if our customers complained that getting a loan with our bank took too long, we would then create “critical to quality” measures around the speed to get a loan approved and the number of input fields required to submit a loan application.
- Using the 80/20 rule, we would focus on what the majority of customers said they wanted from the service, and determined our project goals from there. Typically, these targets would fall into the broad categories of speed, cost, quality/accuracy and satisfaction.
The breadth of exploration and curiosity in understanding customer needs is distinctly greater on Service Design projects than it ever was for me on Process Engineering projects, which I believe is the most important difference between the two methodologies.
- On Service Design projects, we learn to empathize with our customers through explorative, generative and participatory research methods. We also accept that most customers do not act rationally or predictably.
- We spend a lot of time “sitting in the customer data” as we try make sense of it all in context, pairing it with knowledge from secondary research findings and relevant behavioural studies, and eventually synthesizing our research findings into insights about our customers’ unmet needs, desires and problems.
- These needs may or may not be easily quantified or measured at this point in time. But these insights form the critical framing for setting our projects in the right direction, and we will continue to learn and deepen our understanding of our customer needs over the course of the project.
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Difference #2: Both methodologies seek to uncover insights and tell compelling stories about the problems to be solved, but favour different types of data to do so.
- Process Engineers use a quantitative data-driven methodology. Their bread and butter is in exploring how data can help to uncover insights about what might be influencing our customer needs metrics.
- Process Engineers explore root causes by looking for patterns in their data sets, setting up hypothesis tests to explore what factors might be influencing key metrics and designing experiments to evaluate how to improve performance.
- Service Designers love qualitative data - collected through qualitative research techniques like ethnographic interviews, contextual inquiries, journal studies, in-context observations and participatory research activities.
- Qualitative data is often unstructured and messy. It requires a different set of skills to analyze and make sense of. Though more difficult to describe and teach, I have learned that this qualitative analysis is still rigorous and methodical in nature.
Ideally, you have a balance of both types of data and analysis on any project you work on.
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Difference #3: Both methodologies strongly believe in collaborative design, but their skillsets and tools tend to focus them on designing different aspects of the end service.
- Most of you will know that one of the core tenets of Service Design is to involve our customers and employees at every stage of the project. We research, co-create, test and refine with them “at the table.”
- Many Service Designers are surprised to learn that Process Engineering is also a hugely cross-functional and collaborative methodology - founded on the notion that in order to deliver the best quality output for our customers, all people across the value stream who play a role in delivering the service must be involved in the problem analysis and development of the solution itself.
- However, what is quite different from Service Design projects is the fact that the end customer is not typically included.
- Process Engineering methodology puts a lot of focus up front on understanding customer needs and requirements to shape the project focus, but does not typically reach out to the customers again until the new process has been designed.
Interestingly, both Process Engineering and Service Design methodologies would claim that they put equal weight on designing for the front stage and back stage of a service, but in practice I find that’s not often the case.
- Process Engineers focus predominantly on optimizing and improving the back stage business processes in order to achieve the project goals.
- In contrast, Service Designers will focus more efforts on re-designing the front stage customer experience interactions and flows. This seems like a natural consequence of the skillsets and tools from each methodology.
So which methodology is best?
It really depends on the problem to be solved. When the customer need and business goals are rooted in internal process issues around efficiency, speed and cost, Process Engineering has a distinct advantage because of their proven methods in reducing waste, variation and cycles times. But when the problem to solve is rooted in customer experience or relies on understanding human behaviours and motivations, then Service Design really shines in its relentless exploration of context, culture, meanings, and behaviours that enrich our understanding of the problem space and its co-creative and iterative approach to designing with and for users.
Each methodology specializes in and excels in different aspects of designing end to end services, so wouldn’t it make sense to pair teams of Service Designers and Process Engineers together? I sure think so!
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If Andrea's amazing answer has got your curiosity going, some recommended further reading on service design and process engineering:
Until next time!
P.s. I'm writing a post for Adobe about the best books for experience designers. Have a book that's influenced your practice you think everyone should know about? Tell me here!
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