The best service design book most service designers have never read.

What makes one organization or service better designed than others?

What makes a business’ value proposition stand out against the competition?

I got into a brief discussion about that in a discussion with the excellent service designer Marc Fonteyn who created and runs the Service Design Show. Marc created an early service design meme been adopted by designers around the world. It went like this:

“When you have two coffee shops right next to each other that sell the same coffee at the exact same price, Service Design is what makes you walk into the one and not the other.”*

[Dear readers: too many of you are highlighting the above quote. But it is incorrect. If you’re highlighting it, you’re missing the point of this post!! RN 8/18/22]

don’t think that’s quite right. The above makes no assumption about prior knowledge. The only thing that helps you choose is the branding of the two shops. One of those will speak to your liminal thinking of what you prefer in a coffee shop. Since you haven’t experienced either, you haven’t experienced the effects of service design.

I think a better description is this.

“When you have two coffee shops right next to each other that sell the same coffee at the exact same price, Service Design is what makes you choose to become a loyal customer of one and not the other.”

And really, the organizations that stand out in creating loyal customers and designing great services have one thing in common: they are customer obsessed.

If you want to learn how to become a customer-obsessed organization, that is how to apply great service design to whatever it is you do, the best book to read is on that never mentions service design. It is a book about a deli bakery, Zingerman’s Deli in Michigan. It is the book I’ve lent to more clients than any other (and I’ve lost my copy because I can’t remember the last person I gave it to!).

Here’s what I wrote back in 2016:

”One of the most interesting customer obsessed businesses I’ve found is a small deli-bakery in Ann Arbor, Michigan named Zingerman’s. Started in 1982, the owners soon realized that they would flourish or flop based on one simple measure: customer experience. They spent time sitting and talking with their customers. They chased after seemingly confused people who left the store out on the street to get them to come back inside. Despite their busy day, they committed to understanding what people felt, rational or not, so that they could make that experience better.

The most amazing part of this story is that they didn’t stop there; they actually took their customer-obsessed actions and made it into a process. They trained employees to act with more empathy. They provided steps that staff could implement and then gave them a way of tracking and measuring their actions. But it didn’t stop there either! Flush with the realization that this customer-focused approach led to rapid business growth, Zingerman’s decided to share their experiences, through a book named “Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service” and with a global corporate training program called Zingtrain.

Today Zingerman’s is a community of nine unique businesses, with almost 700 employees and over $55 million in annual revenue.

The most striking part about all of this is that gaining empathy about the people you sell to or work with is simply common sense. And yet, we’ve designed ways to minimize this empathy and understanding. Time and time again, successful organizations can show that customer obsession is a competitive advantage. Businesses ignore it at their own risk.”

Great service design encapsulated in three relentless steps: deep empathy for customers AND employees along with systems and tools to help employees deliver and live up to the value proposition. They not only design the service to maximize customer enjoyment and retention, they design it to maximize employee enjoyment and retention. Then they use this approach to innovate into sometimes surprising opportunities.

And yet, I’ll bet that the vast majority of service designers have NOT read the Zingerman book. Which is weird since so many designers use the coffee shop comparison.

We can learn a lot about great service design from organizations that have no formal connection to service design. Let’s start with learning customer obsession.

* Mark Fonteyn informs me that “I’ve only made one update to the sentence since its creation 14 years ago by adding ‘….come back often and tell your friends about it.” at the end.’”

Just to be a hedgehog, I’d still say the first part is branding, the second is service design. But open to be proven wrong!