Service Design: prospects and challenges on its adoption

Purpose

Service Design emerges as a holistic, iterative, collaborative, and human-centered approach that aligns the customers, business, and other relevant stakeholders’ needs. It is relevant to understand the reasons underlying its relatively scarce utilization, how to encourage a larger adoption of Service Design, and to anticipate the prospects of its future utilization.

Design/methodology/approach

To accomplish the aforementioned purpose, from a global perspective as well as from a country perspective, a Delphi analysis was promoted.

Findings

Experts predict a change of focus on Service Design, which will evolve from a customer-centered to a life-centered design approach. Furthermore, digitalization will be a driver for bringing customer experience to the development of services, mainly in the large B2B and B2C groups.

Service Design practices are rare in Portugal, and possibilities of further developments are discussed in this research.

Research limitations

The main limitation of the study was the difficulty in selecting experts to participate, namely due to the lack of people working in the field as well as their willingness to contribute. Nevertheless, after a significant effort, a reliable panel was achieved.

Originality/value

 The effectiveness of Service Design is undisputable, taking into account its ability to keep pace with changes towards a “desirable future”. This piece of research tries to anticipate this movement, stressing the trends that will shape the future of Service Design, thus contributing to outlining the most promising research streams in the field.

Paper type: Research Paper

Service Design, Customer experience, Co-Creation, Delphi Method