Service design: The key to improving internal company processes
Service design methodology, including customer-centric approach, is often introduced within contexts where the customer is an external stakeholder. However, service design can also be a key to business success also in internal company processes, where customer is company’s own employee.
In today’s fast-evolving business landscape, IT organizations have started to prioritize business needs and extend their focus beyond the technology to include their services. Within this context, the service design approach can be used to bring genuine value to service customers and improve customer experience. It is a useful methodology even in highly controlled environments, for example, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure library) as an IT service management (ITSM) guidance controls the process and creates limits to service process.
Start to enhance internal processes
To be successful in process design and transformation, it is essential to understand the current process and its maturity level. Diving deep into the facts beyond assumptions requires research to understand the customer service journey and particularly the pain points. To gain this knowledge, several quantitative and qualitative methods can be used, such as content research and surveys. However, what truly reveals the facts is real communication with the customer.
Customers can be approached via surveys to gain an overall understanding, but the deepest insights are delivered through personal interviews. Interviews reveal real thoughts, feelings and expectations, allowing to enhance the customer journey by identifying pain points and potential emotional journey and question lanes.
Brainstorming enables ideation and problems solving
Including several people to ideate around the recognized pain points reveals multiple solution proposals. The strength of a structured brainstorming workshop, including an iterative approach, can be seen in the quantity and quality of the ideas generated, with the feasibility of the fine-tuned proposals being high. When pain points can be tackled or minimized, the value to the company and to the customer is significant.
The actual value can be tested to ensure viability of the idea using methods like value proposition canvas embedded with business hypotheses. When the most critical hypotheses are tested with a minimum viable product, the company can eliminate waste in design and implementation when focusing only on ideas that generate the most positive and valuable test results..
Design, iterate and develop
Releasing the real value from the ideas selected under development requires an iterative design and development approach. Iteration enables incremental improvement, allows feedback loops and finally develops a fine-tuned product or process that generates value for the organization.
Service design can lead to impactful outcomes. With the help of various methods and tools, organizations can design and redesign processes and establish a foundation for future process improvements.
Case company
Wärtsilä, the global marine and energy technology and service provider, conducted a research project to enhance Information Management (IM) organization’s SAP service request process. The SAP service request process follows ITIL key concepts. By utilizing service design methodologies and various methods and tools, the customer journey’s pain points in the service request process were identified, and several process enhancement ideas were delivered.
The project’s decision to prioritize customer experience in the request process led to the development and enhancement of a total of 11 service request forms, along with instructions for future form enhancements. Additionally, the IM organization increased its understanding of the SAP service request process and established a foundation for future process improvements.
Service design played a key role in the project, enabling process improvements and providing valuable insights that could not have been discovered otherwise.
References
Adobe Firefly. (2025). https://firefly.adobe.com/
Pexels. (2025). https://www.pexels.com/
Stickdorn, M., Hormess, M. E., Lawrence, A., & Schneider, J. (2018). This is service design doing. O’Reilly Media, Incorporated
Wiman, V. (2025). Developing SAP service request process through Service Design Methodologies. Turku University of Applied Sciences, Master’s Thesis. https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-202505048850
Figures:
Figure 1. Service design: The key to improving internal company processes (Pexels, 2025).
Figure 2. Start to enhance internal processes (Adobe Firefly, 2025).
Figure 3. Any activity can create new insights and initiate further iteration (Stickdorn et al., 2018, p. 336).