When I started my journey in Service Design, Andy Polaine, a great Service Designer, showed the following idea at a conference. Service Design is all about turning around the silos within a company ↩️ so that they work together and people don’t get trapped in between the silos.

Services designers understand that people experience a service through a journey. They pass from one department to the other without ever thinking about the fact that these are different entities.

Your customers pass different touchpoints 🏃‍♂️. They might start their journey by visiting your website: the first touchpoint. Then, they might give you a call and, eventually, visit your brick and mortar shop.

Much of the work of a service designer is to smoothen the transition 🤝 from one silo to the other. Service designers need to make the information available within all teams. In that way, when a customer calls another department of the company, they will feel that they are talking to the same company and not two different entities within a company.

Therefore, service designers try to create journeys for the customers where they never see the transitions 🙈 that occur in the invisible backstage.

This article is part of my free course "What is the Service Designer mindset?" which helps you to finally understand how service designers think and what makes them such a special group of innovators.