Service Design resources and insights

We discover why Joe Heapy, co-founder and managing partner of Engine Service Design, still finds service design so exciting – and why it might also be the career for you.

Is your employee experience negatively impacting your customers? Unhappy employees leave businesses, which creates a retention problem. Or worse – they quit and stay, giving you an engagement problem.

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the retail sector, with many stores forced to close at the height of lockdown. During that time, consumers switched their spending to online. The shift back to in-store purchasing has begun, but a far higher proportion remains online than before the crisis.

With the pandemic forcing companies to adapt rapidly throughout to offer products and services remotely, the landscape has changed. Organisations who managed to swiftly take their offerings online were rewarded for their quick response when we all discovered COVID-19 would have much longer-term implications than we could have imagined.

An exceptional customer experience is the key to winning and retaining customers. A good digital experience used to be a differentiator for brands, but now it is a basic expectation. People are increasingly drawn to brands that can offer a more personalised and streamlined service that meets their needs and exceeds their expectations.

Thanks to COVID-19 we have all seen or experienced a seismic shift in both the workplace and workplace culture. Employees are demanding more from the companies they work for, and it is essential leaders find ways to respond in order to avoid losing key talent.

The whole team at Engine Service Design would like to congratulate Grégoire Charpe-Civatte (Director - Customer Experience & Innovation at Majid Al Futtaim), and all MAF teams involved, for winning the Best Experience Design Award for THAT Concept Store's at the 2022 Customer Centricity World Series.

At Engine Service Design, we’re constantly looking to reimagine improved services and experiences for the future. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted some incredibly important areas in education that we believe could be addressed, using service design to improve the educational journey.

We all knew that the education system had room for improvement. The COVID-19 pandemic brought this home (literally) as lockdowns forced schools to provide online solutions, for which most were seriously underequipped.

Considered “unconventional” in the early 2000s, the Chief Experience Officer (CXO), or the Chief Customer/Client Officer (CCO), are relatively new positions at a senior executive level. They were originally only considered relevant to customer-centric companies. However, in this post-COVID world, where the customer experience is the main differentiator, companies ignore this important position at their peril. Indeed, the Harvard Business Review argues that all companies should have a Chief Experience Officer.