Service Design

Service design studies how a service comes into being: the sequence of touchpoints, the processes and systems behind them, and the roles of the people delivering it. It works with journeys, blueprints and the frontstage/backstage distinction, and treats a service as something designed rather than something that emerges from a contract.

Facility services are rarely designed; they are tendered. The result is that the user experience is the sum of separate contracts each with its own logic: a request travelling through three systems, three providers and no owner. Service design gives FM the language and method to draw the service as a whole before it is cut into lots.

• What actually happens from the moment a user needs something?
• Where does the service fall between parties, and who notices first?
• Which backstage processes determine the frontstage experience?
• Which moments weigh heavily in the user's judgement, and which do not?
• What does the service look like when it fails, and is that recovery designed?

• Service Design Network — practice research and case material.
• Academic services marketing and service operations, including work around SERVQUAL and service blueprinting.
• ISO 41001:2018 for the process governance in which the design must land.
• EuroFM research network for application within facility services.

• Design the service before the lot structure; otherwise the lot structure designs the service.
• A blueprint makes visible which handovers are contractually nobody's property.
• Satisfaction measurement without a process picture yields a number with nothing to act on.
• Recovery after failure is a design choice and belongs in the contract, not in an employee's goodwill.

• Workplace services and hospitality
• Service desk and request handling
• Cleaning & Hygiene

• Journey mapping and service blueprinting
• Demand articulation with users
• Designing outcome-based performance indicators

• Regieorganisatie — managing organisation / intelligent client function

  Oversight without service design polices contracts that each comply while the whole does not work.

• Demand organisation

  The demand organisation is where the service design should originate, ahead of going to market.

• ISO 41001:2018 — management system for FM.
• EN 15221-3 (quality in FM), insofar as still used alongside the ISO 41000 series.

The standards section arrives in Part 7.

• Journeys drawn for a presentation and then never translated into process, system or contract.
• Experience confused with friendliness, so structural design faults are addressed with hospitality training.
• Co-creation with a small, unrepresentative group of users, presented as organisation-wide insight.

Most evidence for service design comes from consumer services with voluntary customers. Workplace users do not choose their provider, and what that does to expectation, tolerance and the value of satisfaction scores is still under-researched. How a service design survives across multiple contract periods with changing providers is likewise barely treated empirically.

• Service Design Network, Touchpoint journal.
• Literature on service blueprinting in service operations management.
• ISO 41001:2018, requirements for the FM management system.