Service Design for Business

Chapter 3The Customer StoryUnderstanding Customers Better Provides the Basis for Customer-Driven Service Improvement and Innovation

Customers have stories—stories about what they are doing in their lives, about their work, leisure, and journeys. These stories have highs and lows and make up the experiences of life. Customer stories—their experiences—are impacted by the services they use, whether it is the bus to work, the hospital visit, or the insurance claim while on holiday.

Customer stories cut through the jargon of business, even the jargon of customer experience and service design, and focus on people and the things that improve their lives and work—things that add value.

Understanding customer stories also helps service providers to think about what story they want customers to tell about their experience with the organization. Will the story be positive, will they recommend you, or will they complain?

First, service design offers businesses or service providers an approach to understand and capture customers' stories in ways that make their experience easier to understand. Second, service design methods enable businesses to develop new stories about how they can provide better services.

This section of the book focuses on these two aspects of service design. It will help you introduce these methods into your organizational practice and guide you in how to use them to ...