Hiring a service designer is an excellent step towards creating services that are more useful, easier to understand for your customers and easier to maintain for your employees.
But obviously, hiring one person is not enough. Here are a few of the mistakes I see that organisations can make when they hire a service designer:
Not having a budget for research and prototyping
Specific actions like recruiting testers or prototyping ideas need an additional budget. For example, the service designer might have to work with an external agency to recruit testers faster or needs special tools and material to create prototypes. These things all cost.
Not being ready to do some testing before implementing
Service designers have a specific culture of testing things and prototyping things. This can be "unnatural" or "new" for certain organisations and needs a bit of a cultural change. If the organisation isn't ready to evolve its culture, having a service designer won't be as impactful as it could be.
Believing one person can do it all
As with any position, one person can not do the work that is usually done by a whole team. So there needs to be a clear conversation about what the service designer won't do. We shouldn't speak only about the tasks that the person does but also what we accept that she won't have the time to do and how we cope with that (for example: giving it externally, not doing it all, doing it minimally, etc.)