Service design includes a broad scope covering user experience (UX) design and customer experience (CX) design, aligning, and optimizing an organizations operations to better support customer journeys providing more useful and more desirable outcomes for customers. Whether creating an entirely new service or improving an existing one, service design focuses on what customers really need at each stage of their interaction with an organization. The philosophy is to ensure the service delivers a great customer experience to enable service users to complete their interactions quickly and easily whilst allowing the organization to benefit from smooth transactions, increased customer loyalty and market share. The process involves identifying how the vital parts of any service encounter; actors, location, props, associates, processes interact using customer journey maps and personas to create a service blueprint; an elevated form of customer journey map that helps reveal the full spectrum of situations where users/customers can interact with the organization. Service components are broken down into front-stage and backstage, depending on whether the customers sees them or not. To design for everyone concerned, you must appreciate the macro- and micro-level factors that affect their realities. Using the blueprint can help identify opportunities for improved customer relationships, and uncover potential improvements and ways to eliminate redundancy. Streamlining front-stage and backstage processes improves the overall’ experience, which, in turn, creates better customer experience outcomes.
Arm Flexible Access was a end-to-end service design project to provide customers with a new way of understanding, accessing, and working with Arm IP. Using customer journey mapping and persona creation the complete customer touch-point interaction with Arm for the process of semiconductor chip design and manufacture was broken down into the micro and macro level factors and modeled into a series of service design blueprints covering the end-to-end process. This allowed the design, product, commercial, and engineering teams to see the relationships between the customer and the various parts of the organization and to uncover opportunities for streamlining the process, such as the challenges customers face in selecting the right IP for a design, being able to consider different options, provide easy access to download IP components in a usable format, and enable different actors involved in the semiconductor chip design process to have visibility of the IP products. This approach was able to shape the Arm Flexible Access concept into a successful customer experience from both a commercial and outcome perspective, allowing the sales team to create more effective business models, the product team to combine IP modules that enable customers to do more, and engineering teams to package the IP bundles in a way that is easier to consume and use in IP design projects.
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