Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
24
Service design
Co-creating meaningful experiences
with customers
Marc Stickdorn
Why tourism needs service design
Customer experience is increasingly becoming the decisive success factor of tourism products.
The provision of good customer experience cannot be left to chance and, thus, the design of
services and the whole service ecosystem is becoming vital in an environment of growing
competition for customer experiences. Service design is a user-centred approach to systematically
analyze, innovate and improve service processes from a customer's perspective. This fi rst
section of this chapter provides an introduction on the increasing importance of customer
experiences not only for the tourism industry. The subsequent parts provide an overview on the
basics of service design in a tourism context, outline the service design process and present three
hands-on tools.
Customer experience
Practitioners and academics - also beyond the tourism fi eld - agree that customer experiences
become a decisive factor for the success of brands, products and services. This realization is far
from being new, but rather has evolved over more than 40 years (e.g. Toffl er 1970; Holbrook and
Hirschman 1982; Schulze 1992; Pine and Gilmore 1999). However, only recently have companies
become increasingly focused on offering superior experiences as a main source of their
competitive advantage (e.g. Hsieh 2010). The evident impact of social media can be seen as one
of the main factors driving this change across all industries, since customers increasingly trust
more the verdict of other customers than classic corporate communications (Stickdorn and
Schneider 2010).
In its early years marketing focused on goods. Services only gained importance in marketing
from the 1970s onwards as researchers realized that the economic value of services was beginning
to exceed that of other kinds of activity (Kimbell 2010). In this context, Booms and Bitner
(1981) expanded the classic marketing mix (product, price, promotion and place) by three
additional factors: participants (i.e. people involved in the service encounter), processes (i.e.
procedures, mechanisms and fl ows of activities) and physical evidences (the surroundings and
tangible objects).
