I wrote this Editor's Letter to introduce Touchpoint Vol. 9 No. 2, with the topic 'Measuring Impact and Value'
I’ve been lucky enough to have attended quite a few service design conferences over the years, and heard peers in the community stand on stage and share their advice, techniques, questions and insights.
While they all have had value to me, a small handful stand out as offering what I saw as ground-breaking insights at the time. One of these talks took place in 2012, at the SDN’s Global Conference in Paris.
Livework’s Ben Reason took to the stage and explained how his agency had started pairing service designers with in-house business analysts. This partnership provided a role which could speak the language of business people, applying number-crunching skills to both justify investments in service design projects before a project started, and measure results and ROI towards the end.
Being able to measure the impact of service design activities has always presented a challenge. Services are often complex, comprised of multiple interactions with multiple touchpoints, over widely varying time spans. While the re-design of a touchpoint (let’s say a website focussed on sales) can deliver concrete numbers indicating success (e.g. conversion), things get much more complex at a service level, when multiple touchpoints come into play.
In this issue of Touchpoint, we have tackled precisely this challenge: How can service design best measure the impact it achieves? Service design must become more mature in justifying itself to decision-makers, both before and after it is applied. I hope the insights and methods herein help you answer that question, when you next sit down to plan or review a service design project.
Touchpoint is published three times each year by the Service Design Network
