Productization of Services

A slow revolution which has been brewing up for quite a while now is the Services Revolution. As more and more companies across the world are formally recognizing services as products, we as designers need to think what it means for us. Before I go into details, we need to clearly define what a Service is. Definitions vary, but broadly we can say that a Service is an amalgamation of Products and Processes, which jointly fulfill a user’s need. A Service comprises of both Tangible and Intangible components as opposed to a product, whose physicality is its defining feature. Also, a product is typically manufactured before it is used, whereas a Service comes into existence at the same time as it is being used.

In retrospect, probably the shift towards a Services mindset was inevitable as the need for integration between various product lines to provide end to end solutions to the customer became crucial. There is a distinct shift in the way a company looks at its offerings today, not as Products (which is a decidedly corporatish view), but rather as End to End Solutions, which is looking at it from a User’s point of view. In keeping with this, Enterprise software companies like SAP, are moving towards E-SOA (Enterprise Services Oriented Architecture) which is end user scenario oriented, not product oriented. We can no longer afford to look at Products as silos, and expect users to switch between half a dozen softwares, to complete a single task. There needs to be much stronger seamless integration between these products, so much so that they appear as one to the end user.

Now, what it means for us as designers is:

• The focus on user Experience in a Services approach is much more than before, since that is the whole idea of a service: to look at your offering from an end user’s point of view.
• We need to stretch our focus from traditional Product Design into areas which previously may have been covered by other teams like Service Definition, Business Model etc. Our approach needs to be much more holistic.
• Service Design is much more inclusive than Product Design, because more often than not, the users of a service are heavily involved in designing it as well.
  
• The Triad of Designers, End Users and Service Providers need to work closely together to define and manage the services.
  
• Customization and the flexibility to customize becomes much more crucial because One size doesn’t fit all. We may increasingly have various flavors or schemes of the same offering to suite different user groups.
• Service Design is a much more evolutionary process.It involves many iterations based on user feedback and satisfaction assessment.
  

However, Service Design is still an evolving field, and there are many Open Issues which need to be answered. For example, Who 'owns' the Service: the user, the designer or the service provider? Can we even look at ownership in the same way as we look at for Tangible products? How do we measure the User Friendliness of a service? Is there a standard process to design a Service, like the UCD Process to design products? Probably these questions have already been answered by someone somewhere on the repository of collective intelligence called the internet, but they are certainly open in my mind anyways...