As much as service design has evolved as a discipline to deliver better results and become more attractive to organisations, there is still a lot of people that are not even aware of the importance of delivering great services. The new book by Livework Brazil’s founding partner, Luis Alt, intends to lower the volume on service design to first spread the word about the impact great services can have.

How to sell Service Design?

As the first Service Design consultancy in the world, we have been in the position to ask ourselves how we should approach organisations many times. Our perspective has changed quite a bit over the years and an answer that could enable us to reach most people might be to not mention service design at all.

People and Organisations

We spend most of our days interacting either with people or organisations. Sometimes, we interact with a person that represents a specific organisation. Other times we use some organisation’s machines in order to interact with people in our personal circles. At the end of the day, what will make us feel happy or sad is the way those relationships happened.

Service (Design) Awareness Levels

There are three types of business leaders inhabiting our planet. The ones that are already convinced of the value that service design is capable of bringing to their organizations, the ones that know the importance of providing great services but haven’t heard of service design yet and the ones that just don’t care about the experience their clients have. The way we approach each of them should be different.

Push versus Pull Strategy

For a long time, service design consultancies, in order to get new projects, tried to sell methods and tools, bragging about their own processes and how they lead to great results, in a sort of push strategy (service design turns into great results). Times have changed for many organisations. They have now realized that it is better to do the exact opposite: they start showing that great business can be generated through the use of service design. It is mainly about the results, not the process.

Many people don’t care!

Although the later, pull strategy, is still probably the best approach to sell service design for people who are looking to deliver great experiences, there are still a lot of people that just don’t care about that. What about the rest of the executives that don’t even realize how important it is to deliver great services? What about the organisations that are not mature yet to understand the value of their clients and therefore keep looking at the market with an inside out perspective? Well, in order to reach this people we should first make them aware of the importance of delivering great services.

Skipping Service Design

It is important to understand the need of our customers and future customers (as service design agencies). Some people are not yet ready to get the full message and should therefore only be convinced about the importance of delivering great services. Later, in the long way, they will get to know and value service design, but in the beginning of this journey, it is important to stop talking about tools and methods and start delivering simple messages about great services and its impact.

With great power comes great responsibility

If in some level, our life experiences are shaped by how we coexist with other organisations, then service design is an important discipline that can help human beings to have a better life. But in order to accomplish that and make organisations better (with the help of many other areas and professionals, of course) we should first forget service design and understand there is a path to be walked by people, a ladder to be climbed. It is to rescue those people that the new book by Luis Alt is being written.