Co-author of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation and Service Design for Business: A Practical Guide to Optimizing the Customer Experience joins me for tomorrows podcast. An excerpt from the podcast: 
Joe: I’m a firm believer and I’ve mentioned that to you before is that the employee experience mimics the customer experience. Should our Service Design, should part of that be about creating an experience for our own employees or is that too far-fetched?
Ben Reason: It’s funny you should say that; we’re a little bit late with our 206 Service Design Trends article but that’s one of them is more and more I think you’re going to see Service Design employed for the experience for employees or frontline staff. We’ve definitely had a number of projects recently where that’s the case.
I think people like Coca-Cola are looking into that. I chatted with somebody from the Coca-Cola Company who were looking at it in terms of as part of their HR approach; looking at new starters, or retaining employees. We did a project for a call center which was all focused on how do we make this job better so that people don’t leave because it costs us so much every time we have to bring someone new on.
The other thing is that designing that employee experience then has an impact on the customer experience; so you almost need to do two in parallel. We’ve done a lot of work with frontline staff, sales people who are part of the service. It’s hard to separate.
About: Ben Reason is a founding partner of Livework having set-up the company in 2001. He now leads the London studio on service design and innovation projects for both UK and international clients. In his time at Livework, he has worked with multinational companies and start-ups with a focus on service thinking and developing their service design methods and approach. His background is with internet and digital projects having previously worked for a number of large digital agencies.