 This is Erik Roskamp-Abbing and this is the Service Design Show. In the Service Design Show we talk to people who are shaping the service design industry. In this episode we have a very special guest also from the Netherlands, Erik Roskamp-Abbing. You might know Erik because he's the author of this book, Brand-Driven Innovation, already a classic I think in the industry. Erik is also the founder of Silver Innovation and he's a teacher at the Technical University in Delft related to service design, customer experience design and of course Brand-Driven Innovation. Welcome to the show Erik. Thank you Mark, good to see you. Did I forget something in that introduction? No, you didn't. I mean, yeah, I mean those are my work credentials and then I also have a private life with a great family and kids and all that. But we'll skip that topic for now. Well, okay. Erik, do you recall your first memory of service design? Yes, I do very clearly. It was an article published by the BNO in their monthly magazine about service design where I think Silver and 31 volts and design thinkers and Eden Spiekermann were mentioned as the Dutch protagonists of service design. And to be very honest, that was the first time that I've read my name associated with the word service design and my reaction was, ah, is that what we do? And talking to many people in the industry, I know that many of us have had that sort of realization where ah, service design, ah, that's what I do. So I think the name sort of represents what we've been doing all along but it clicked. And I think this was what, six years ago, seven years ago or something, I'm not sure. Okay, so this was a magazine from the Dutch Association of Designers, right? Exactly. They put a label on you that you're a service designer and that you're doing service design. Yeah, yeah. And I've been a bit recalcitrant in a way. I thought now, you know, I was raised in Delft with user centeredness and with taking the business aspect into consideration and human technology and all that was part of my upbringing. So I had a bit of trouble framing it as a different design discipline because for me it was very much, you know, this is what design should be about anyway. So why should we put a label on it? But service designers become so big and the community is so great and even our clients are embracing it as a good framing. I've stopped fighting it and now I'm wholeheartedly part of the community and proudly so. Good. Erik, let's explain the format of what we're going to do for the viewers who are actually watching this for the first time. It's really easy because I have three topics here written on a nice piece of paper and you also have a few papers yourself with some question starters, right? That's right. I have here, for example, why and how much. All right. So what we'll do, I'll be holding up a paper with a topic and you'll associate a question starter with that and it's up to you to start your rant about the topic based on that question. Easy, right? Easy. Okay. So let's move on and I show the first one. So I won't start with that one. I'll start with this topic and it's called On the Inside. On the Inside. Nice. Yes. I think what I would like to do with On the Inside is the why. So the question would be why are more and more organizations internalizing their experience design and service design capabilities? I think only two or three years ago this was something you clearly outsourced to agencies and now more and more we see that our customers have internal customer experience departments. They hire service designers, they have service design as a discipline on board internally and why is that? And I think, let me first of all say that I'm very optimistic about this development. I think it's a great sign of maturity. I think it's a great sign of the value of what service design could be. I also think it's a sign of the importance. When you internalize something, it means it's vital to your business, right? The things that are not vital you can outsource, the things that are vital you keep inside. But the why question is interesting because I think we could talk about what makes these companies realize that this is something that they want to learn and that is so key to their business that it becomes part of the full-time capabilities they have on board. And I think this has to do with a few things, the urgency of being really customer-centric and not only as lip service but as something you actually put to practice every day. Does urgency has increased in the recent years? I think the urgency to actually start doing something about it has increased in the sense that I think it has been fashionable to say that you're customer-centric for a long time. I think more and more companies are realizing that this takes a lot of effort and a lot of work and that you actually have to put your money where your mouth is and start doing things. Which has consequences for HR, for IT, for everything, for how you organize your business, how you structure it, for all the channels you operate in. And it's simply too big to frame this in sporadic projects that you do on and off. No, this is part of your ongoing business. This is what you are or what you should be. Exactly, exactly. So I think organizations are starting to realize that and they're starting to realize that customer-centricity and service design or design thinking are all part of the capabilities that you need to have on board in order to put this to practice every day of the week. Next to all the other efforts you're doing and all your business capabilities and marketing and sales and purchasing and you name it. So then you see customer experience departments emerge where this capability is founded and where people are responsible for the customer experience within the company. It's a good sign. I see these departments struggling because they have very little political power and maybe their budget isn't big enough and they end up hiring external help anyway. But together they are a step in the right direction, I think. Other companies, I see one of our clients, a large car rental company, has actually put a customer experience lead in the board of directors. So that means that on the very highest level they have someone responsible for the customer journey. I think that's even a stronger sign because he works with IT, he works with operations, he works with sales with all the channel managers, with all the country managers and I think that's a better way of really infusing this way of thinking in the organization. But then again he needs more people around him so he's starting his own department as well and I think we'll end up with some kind of hybrid form that works. But in whatever way you organize it, I think it's really a sign of maturity that companies need this, want this. Another thing I see happening is the digitalization of many channels, has put user experience at the forefront and a lot of UX people are embracing service design just as a more holistic way of looking at... So it's a logical transition or a logical evolution. Exactly. So for many banks or many insurance companies or many of our clients, the transition towards internalizing service design starts with the internalization of UX, which is a logical step simply because there's so much work to do, it's too expensive to outsource to agencies and then it starts from there. And then you can question the level of service design if you approach this from UX. I think it's always a bit too digital, I think the customer journeys are always a bit too much about the customer using our touchpoints rather than the life of the customer. But that's a different topic. So if you would have to summarize why organizations are internalizing service design would be one that the need is becoming high, a greater majority of the field and two is maybe that it's growing from the inside, from UX. Yeah, I guess those two are the main reasons. You could also say that on the... So the demand side is growing, but the supply side is also growing, right? We have more people leaving great educational programs and enter the market as service designers. So you see that it becomes a profession and that might be a third mechanism that is going on. Has your conversation with clients changed over the last two, three years in that sense? It has and we embraced this development because it has brought us a lot of work and what we get is our clients say, listen, we want to internalize these capabilities, do this project with us and teach us how to do it. And so next to our consulting practice we have quite a nice training practice that we are developing where we're actually teaching our clients how to do it themselves. Partly, I think partly you always need specialized agencies or consultancies, but the training value proposition has grown in our business because our clients ask to learn, which is great. I think over the interviews that I've had so far, this seems to be a really key topic at this moment. And it's really interesting to see how it will be developed because you already said some are setting up service design departments. I've talked with Anna von Ostrom who said service design shouldn't be a department. So it's really, really interesting to see how this will play out. Exactly. Well, if you see what happened to marketing in the 60s, 70s, 80s of the last century, that also matured from something you bought at an advertising agency to something that was part of the board. And now you have CMOs everywhere. So I guess it was external and then it became a department and then it became a capability and then it became a function, etc. And I wouldn't be surprised if we sort of entered that same evolution. And I fully agree with Anna that it shouldn't be a department. On the other hand, a department is better than nothing. And I think it's a logical step in an evolution. Exactly. Right. Erik, let's move on to a second topic. Yes. I've written down here experience prototyping. Yes. I think I will have the what if question there. What if we would prototype experiences like we prototype products or like we, you know, in the lean startup world we prototype apps or MVPs or whatever. I think prototyping is one of the most interesting and most powerful aspects of design. Because it really allows you to take a step in the future without being hurt too much and really projecting yourself into the future, looking around, learning from it, going back to the now and applying that learning on whatever it is you're developing. And I think there's a huge potential for prototyping services, prototyping customer experiences, etc. And I think there's a lot to be learned there and a lot to be developed in terms of tooling and methodologies, a lot to be explored in terms of what is the effect of it. And because we were so curious about it, we said, what if we just apply this in our projects and we just try to sell it to our clients and say, listen, we're designing all these wonderful customer journeys for you and personas and whatever, but let's just go out and do it. So for this same car rental company, we've chosen 10 initiatives in different countries that help them improve their customer experience. And for each initiative, we went to the rental station, worked with the local staff, co-created solutions, built them in a day and tested them with their clients. And it was a wonderful experience. It brought so much in terms of real user feedback, commitment from the staff, solid business cases as to what will this actually do for the business. Commitment from higher up, people said, what do you mean with customer experience? I want this. So it was the famous oil stain, people embracing it. Can you say something about how did you actually prototype the service because I think a lot of people that I speak to find it really hard to imagine in their head how you prototype something that is not tangible. Yeah, that is of course the challenge. And I think that's part of why I like this topic so much. There are no golden rules for it. It really depends on what you're doing. One of the things we did is we chose experiences that have a relatively low digital aspect to them. So we chose, let's say, analog services. For example, you come to rent a car. And as a desk employee, I try to explain to you what insurance options you have. This moment is always experienced as pushy and as very commercial. And just give me my car. You know the feeling. Whereas actually it's of course from a business case perspective it's a huge source of income from the car rental. But also from a customer experience perspective we knew that people who leave the station well insured feel better. So there is some value to be gained there. So we looked at this experience and we redesigned it very much from a communication perspective. So how can you rather than selling someone this insurance explain it better to them? So basically what we did is we designed some tools, just visible, tangible tools that help these desk employees explain the value of the insurance better. And this was imagine some kind of card where you can leave through or you can turn a wheel to explain some things. It's just tangible stuff. And so in this case we went from some user insights, some business insights to a personal interaction that you can facilitate through physical tools. And there's a lot to be gained and you don't have to invest in any app or IT system or CRM system or all these things. So one way of framing experience prototyping is keep it very small, keep it at first, keep it tangible, keep it in the form of how can we interact better and role play it and see what happens. And we just built the thing, we tested it for a day, we had I think 50 client interviews and all of them, you know, we did something with MPS and MPS was raised by a number of digits and it was just simple stuff but it was very clear that this was helping people. So my first tip would be keep it small, keep it analog and also be creative because things can be prototyped that at first exactly like you're saying seem very hard to prototype. But I've prototyped business models with Volkswagen in the form of role plays, you know, and it's just this tremendous abstraction is all of a sudden turned into something that you can embrace or improve or work with just by making it tangible. I think also the hard part with prototyping services is that a lot of people focus on how it should look instead of how it should feel. And I think once you focus, once you get that into your mind, it's not that hard to actually prototype it. And that's really good that you say that because this has to do also with the imagination of users, right? If you give users something that they can give their opinion on and you say, listen, it's not finished yet and it looks like crap, we know that. But hey, if you would be able to use something, would you like it? And just take them along in your storytelling and take them along in the prototyping and make them feel comfortable with something that's unfinished, you get great responses. So it's also about the courage to be unfinished and to be messy and to show it to your user. And that's also I think a very big topic because there isn't a lot of space and room within large organizations to actually be messy. True. And again, that's where it really helps if you're an outside consultant where you say, hey, we are from the outside. We made it messy. It's not the brand itself. It's sort of a nice way of making mistakes legitimately because it's always, the consultant here does it, not them. You can blame us, yeah. Yeah, exactly. But in prototyping, this is a huge topic. Are you allowed to make mistakes? What kind of mistakes are you making? Are you designing the mistakes? Are you making them small? Are you preparing the customer for it and are you taking them along? This is all very key and very vital and I think not a whole lot of people are very good at this. And from the service design community, from the supply side, I think also we have a lot to learn there to help our clients embrace this kind of early trial and error. But also in a focused way, if you look at what the Lean startup does with this continuous learning and sort of shut off all assumptions and just learn, that's also not fully the thing. I don't fully believe in that. I think there's huge power and intuition and in very focused prototyping where you have your design approach where you have this very strong intuition based on user insights and based on business savviness of where an opportunity might lie and then you prototype from there. So it's different than the classical MVP approach, I think. Interesting. I think this should be a topic that we basically, I think also need a lot more case studies showing how it works, what it delivers, what the value is. Yeah, exactly. And what we've been doing is we've been offering it very cheaply to our clients simply because we want to learn. So that is one way of growing your own experience. And making sure that you develop a body of knowledge and a repository of case studies. Interesting. Erik, let's move on to the third and last topic that I have here in front of me. And it's called DIY. It sort of relates to the first, I guess. It does relate to the first topic. Do you have a question starter that goes with that one? Yeah, so when will, and I think it relates to the first topic, but I like to frame it a little bit more from an individual level. When will HR departments start to require a certain element of design thinking or design early approaches or people-centeredness and creativity in any function, whether it be a sales function or a purchasing function or a marketing function? Because, I mean, if you see now the huge sort of increase in interest in these kind of approaches, you could imagine that five years from now, everyone in any function is doing this themselves. And I have an accountant who is embracing a lot of our approaches in his work simply, and I didn't tell him to, simply that's his intuition. He thinks accountancy should be more human-centered. It should be more creative. It should be more customized. It should be more iterative, et cetera. So he's DIYing, you could say, design thinking in his own practice. And I think that's a very interesting development. And also, I mean, we cannot claim this, right? This is not invented by designers. This is not ours to protect or keep. This is simply, if you're optimistic like I am, this is where the world is moving towards. And I think this will do a lot with our educational systems. This will do a lot with how we run businesses, with how we co-create, how we run municipalities and cities, how we look at co-creating solutions for environmental issues, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this is very much about embracing this kind of thinking on a very individual level and start doing it yourself. So what you're basically saying is everyone should at least have a design attitude and mindset somewhere within them and probably already has. Exactly, yes, exactly. And that's another thing that I find really inspiring is that when I work with people, I try to trigger this in them and I try to sort of wake up the silent designer in them. And it works. When you put people at ease and when you make people understand sort of in the context in which we are innovating and you make it safe and understandable and inspiring, you see many people embracing this uncertainty and embracing this human-centeredness and embracing this what-if quality of what if we do things differently. So that's really interesting. Another thing that when I thought of this DIY topic is also we've been putting a lot of stress on putting the customer at the heart of everything we do. But as a service design community. As a service design community, but let's face it. I mean, this is not ours. We didn't invent this. This is all marketing and the whole digital community is very much about user-centeredness, et cetera. What I always find interesting is there's this very nice quote by Ayn Rand who you can think of what you want, but she had at least one really nice quote where she says, you can only say I love you if you can say I. Meaning there has to be an individual, there has to be someone feeling that love. And what I sometimes miss in a lot of companies is that they say they want to be human-centered and they want to put the user at the heart of everything you do. But what about them? What about you? What do you stand for? What are your core values? And what are your beliefs? And what are your dreams? And then it's quite empty there. So I try to teach them DIY. First look at yourself. First discover in yourself what it is you really need, what it is you're dreaming of. How can you relate your business objective to your personal aspirations and your brand values and your future vision? And then it's a lot easier to go outside and meet people and connect with them and build meaningful relationships through the products and services you offer them. So start on the inside, then go outside. And a lot of our work has been on the inside of companies, teaching companies to first look at themselves. Yeah, I see this really happening in our projects too, is that we tend to focus more and more on internal services. You can't be customer centric if you are not dead for your employees. Exactly, exactly. What is the reason why people get up out of bed and go to work, right? Exactly, yeah. And then it's not about user centricness, but it's about people centricness. And companies are people and should be people at least. So is this the next frontier within our community that we'll first have to fix internal organizations before we can actually start looking at customers? Well, I do think that... I don't know if it's the next frontier, but I think we're facing a few frontiers, but I think it's one very important element in what we need to learn and what we need to become good at. We need to really understand how organizations work. I mean, if you're working for a startup or a small business owned by the founder, then the complexity is much less and then you can do great work with them because usually the guy at the helm or the woman at the helm is the one with the dreams and the vision and then it's rather easy. But these big organizations, they're very hard to work with and I do think that that is where a lot of the magic really happens. If you can work on the inside and like you say, design internal services or make people feel important and have every vote count and have people genuinely co-create together throughout the silos on the basis of a shared vision and a shared understanding of what they're good at and the goals they want to reach, that is hugely powerful. And I think also there's now a lot of interest from the business consulting community, what we do, and I think the overlap is very interesting. I think there's synergy possible. Alright, let's leave it at that for this topic. Erik, you're a teacher, so you will probably get this question a lot, but what would be your most valuable tip for aspiring service designers, people who want to get into service design? That would be your most valuable tip. I think right now, I mean I get maybe 10 or 20 emails per week of people wanting to work in service design and wanting to be part of what we do, which makes me very happy and very proud. But what I usually see in the emails I get is a certain type of naive belief in creativity and user-centeredness. And I think, I mean I don't want to put it down because it's really important, it's really nice, but it is commoditizing. I can get good user researchers quite easily. What's a lot more valuable for me, for us, is people who can combine that with a business understanding and with a real keen sense of how to translate that into business language and how to sell that to the clients and this sensitivity of how companies work and how user-centeredness and creativity can be put to work inside an organization. This is what I'm really looking for. So I would advise any service designer who's now doing some form of education to focus on that element more and to learn there and to invest in business literature, doing internships at companies, getting inside these organizations. Because I think there is some lacking talent. And the challenge is always to keep combining it with your design skills, to put on the right hat at the right moment and to switch perspectives and to switch roles. But that requires a lot of experience. I think it starts with just being open to gaining the right knowledge, reading the right books, going to the right conferences, doing the right kind of internships, those kind of things. Maybe designers focus too much on design at this moment. I fully agree with you. And we've said it a lot. We're a little bit too much in love with our own process. But let's face it, it is great. It's easy to fall in love with. But it's only part of the magic mix. And I think what, ultimately, what companies are buying from us is not this creative stuff you see here in the background. What they're buying from us is outcomes. Business outcomes that make them money in a good, sustainable way. Which we can offer them if we combine this within their ecosystem. This is your opportunity. Do you have a question for people that are actually watching this episode right now? What would be your question for them? Ooh, that's a good one. Nice. Yeah, I think if we take this last topic and turn it into a question, why would a big company, a big bank, a big oil company, a big insurance company, why would they hire you? What is the value that they see in you? What kind of qualities do they see that make them want to work with you? And I think if you cannot answer that question very clearly, you still have some learning to do. So I think that's the mirror I would like to put in front of the community. That is, the service designers watching this movie, I hope a lot of non-service designers watch this movie. And from them I would like to hear from your perspective, what do you see changing in your business? What are the transitions that you're facing? Where old, let's say, methodologies and tooling don't work any longer, and where you're looking for new ways of solving problems. So what made you watch this video? What made you watch this video? That's a great question actually. Really interesting. Really curious how people will react. So Eric, we need to leave it at this. So very much thank you for your time. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to tap into your mind and know what is going on and reading a bit about the future of our profession. So Eric, thanks again. You're very welcome. I really enjoyed it. It was great to talk. Thanks for giving me this opportunity. What are your thoughts about the topics we've just discussed with Eric in this episode? Also, if you have any suggestions on who we should invite next to the show, be sure to let us know down below in the comments. If you enjoyed this episode and like to see more interviews with service design pioneers, be sure to subscribe and check out some of our past episodes. With the service design show, we help you to stay one step ahead by talking to the people that are actually shaping the service design field. Thanks for watching.