Service Design and MVS: Digital Solutions Born to Build Customer Loyalty

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In a world where companies are increasingly competitive, finding a differentiator for your product or service is a major challenge. But is the product’s differentiator really as important as the experience your customer has during the purchase, use, and recommendation process?

The traditional business model based on production, when creating products and services, is increasingly migrating to digital. In product development, we look for a problem to solve and offer our product as the ideal solution. Your sales and marketing team is focused on showing your customer how your product can solve their problem. But is this enough to leverage your business’s success? What are large companies doing to achieve a high customer loyalty rate? 

The modern consumer profile, digital by nature, sees much more value in a complete and personalized shopping experience than in the benefits of the product itself. The product changes in importance and should no longer be treated as the end of your business, but as a means to offer a complete experience that strengthens the relationship with your brand. Consumers prefer companies that offer the best experiences, and this experience is usually digital. In today’s world, where relationships are increasingly digitalized, acquiring a product or service has decreasing importance compared to acquiring an experience.

Thus, a new way of designing your business emerges, known as Service Design. 

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What is Service Design?

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Service design is the activity of planning and organizing a service to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its users. Service design can function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create an entirely new service.

It works as a series of practices for stakeholders to design their solutions considering the entire customer experience chain. The focus shifts from the product to the consumer experience. Your business is treated as a series of steps where each step must offer the best possible experience for the customer. 

Each step of the customer’s journey within your service demonstrates quality, which ensures their loyalty in consuming your product.

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Advantages of Service Design 

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By using Service Design and thinking of your offering as a complete experience, your company can achieve a much more positive level of results. Here are the advantages of implementing this trend:

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• Customer loyalty 

With a positive experience from start to finish, your customers will have a positive memory of using your product, which inclines the customer to want to experience that positive feeling again. Products that don’t create a positive impact on the customer tend not to be remembered, and the chance of repurchase and recommendations is smaller.

In a highly competitive scenario, customer loyalty is crucial for your business’s success. Recent research shows that consumers are varying between a larger number of stores to make their purchases. This evidences the difficulty of loyalty. Without a positive experience and with so many options in the market, the customer won’t desire your product. 

With Service Design, the customer experience is the focus of designing your business solution. Thinking of a positive experience from start to finish, the loyalty rate of your product’s consumers, now seen as a complete experience, will be much higher.

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• Real differentiator 

A product that is a complete experience offers a real differentiator in your offering. If you can imagine your competitors fitting into what you envision as a differentiator, then your product doesn’t have a real differentiator.

A differentiated and personalized experience makes customers curious and incentivized to try your product. If your company is unable to deliver a differentiated experience, the consumer won’t perceive the need to choose your solution over the competing solution.

Service Design practices focus on understanding your audience’s behavior, treating the user as a hero user who should be seen completing their journey with ease and success. Not only that, Service Design also analyzes extremes and doesn’t let your solution be too generic and go unnoticed by certain types of audiences.

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• Connect different departments and optimize your business strategy 

With an approach totally focused on experience, the tendency is for different departments, both tactical and strategic areas, to work together to offer an end-to-end experience.

Launching a service doesn’t only go through the product layer, but also talks to sales, marketing, customer relationship, and even other product departments to offer the best experience for the user.

Your business strategy gains much more value because by using Service Design, your company stops working with disconnected products to interconnect areas and offer a complete experience. 

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How to apply Service Design?

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Start applying Service Design now by following the five principles that guide the practices of this new way of doing business:

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• User-centered: Your entire solution development methodology should be centered on the end user. To ensure the experience, it is necessary to deeply understand your customer’s desires, behaviors, and pain points.
• Co-creativity: All stakeholders should be included in the process to connect different departments in the same customer experience line.
• Sequential: The service should be perceived as a series of connected actions where each action is perceived positively by the user.
• Evident: Actions should be perceived by the user as tangible artifacts. This way, the customer easily sees the value and positive experience of each service stage.
• Holistic: Your processes should consider the service environment as a whole, so that each step makes sense and is relevant to the user’s journey. 

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Starting the implementation of Service Design guarantees the construction of an MVS – Minimum Valuable Service, a minimum journey to ensure end-to-end user experience. Building an MVS is divided into two major stages: humanize and crystallize. The humanization phase encompasses all methodologies to study and understand your customer’s behaviors. The crystallization phase materializes each stage of your service journey, considering everything learned in the previous process.

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Have any questions, or want to learn more?

Zappts can help your company build digital products and services that take into account Service Design and the development of your MVS. Since 2014, Zappts has been delivering business results through technology, delivering high-relevance cases using agile processes, best development practices, and software quality, with unique capacity to understand and solve the daily pains of technology development projects.

We contemplate solutions for all phases of digital solution development, from discovery processes to solution sustainability. With defined processes and agile management, our deliveries are always based on expectation alignment, quality, and technical robustness.

Get in touch by clicking here, and learn more about Zappts.

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Continue your studies, check out our material on How to get greater predictability of your digital deliveries: The Definitive Guide to Flow Metrics. 

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