Another way to better understand people is to put yourself in their shoes. By doing so, you can empathize on how it feels to be a user, employee, or partner involved in a service.
A specific method to do this is called Mystery Shopping. This method is pretty straightforward. The service designer will test a service as a user and not a researcher. In a way, it’s like being an undercover cop who wants to understand how the mafia works. The service designers want to discover how a service works.
More importantly, they want to experience themselves how it feels to go through the different interactions of a service. By feeling the same emotions the users of a service feel, a service designer can better empathize with them.
Mystery Shopping is done to uncover how it feels to be a user. In the past, I have used this same method to better feel how it is to be an employee or service provider. To do that, I wasn’t a fake user, but worked as a staff member for a few days. In this case, it wasn’t a mystery for the staff members that I was a researcher, but it was for the users. Such variations of the mystery shopping method can be used with partners, staff members, or any other person involved in a service who you want to better understand.
Going further
This article is part of my free course "What is Service Design?" which helps you to discover what Service Design is and why it is powerful to enhance the customer experience.