This idea of a journey goes even further than just your company. People don’t think about services, they think about what they want to achieve ✅. They probably don’t care much about your particular service. Your service might just be a means to an end in a full customer journey.
For instance, as a customer, you would want to go on holiday. That’s the goal of a full journey 🏃♂️. But to realize this adventure, you have to go through a booking service, a transportation service and then some entertainment services once you arrive at your destination.
But in your head, as a user, you don’t really think about each service you use separately 🧠. You think about your general goal: getting to the beach and enjoying some nice cocktails with your partner. You care about the end result, not about each company and the service it provides.
Service designers, therefore, try to make the journey that a customer has to go through smooth, not only between the departments of the same company but also between different companies 🏢.
The Easyjet example
A good example of such a journey between services from different companies can be seen when you book a flight with EasyJet. After getting your flight tickets, you can book a hotel with booking.com or get a car rental from Hertz. All this without switching to a different website or having to create a new account. This example shows that it’s possible to take into account the real goal of the customer and their full journey.
That’s why service designers are not only interested in what happens in your company but also want to discover what your customers do before and after 🔎 they use your service.
Going further
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.