ThemeProduct & Offering
CardCard 58 of 66
Questions5 to explore

Services

Design, experience, flow & touchpoints

A service is experienced, not just delivered, and the knowledge of how that experience works in practice is rarely written down as clearly as the process that is supposed to create it.

Service documentation tends to focus on the process: the steps, the handoffs, the system. What gets left out is the experience layer: how it feels to go through the service as a customer, where the friction points are, and what the team does (formally or informally) to smooth them over.

The gap between the designed service and the delivered service is where most of the important knowledge lives. Workarounds, informal touchpoints, the things a good team member knows to do that are not in any process document: this is what is at risk when people leave.

Service design documentation is most valuable when it covers both the intended journey and the actual one, including where and how they diverge, and what holds the gap together.

What to capture

For this part of the company brain, what is worth writing down and keeping current. The goal is not a complete archive but a living record that new people can read and returning people can trust.

Service overview

Describe the service: what it is, what it includes, how it is delivered, and what a customer goes through from first contact to completion. This is the map, not the territory.

Touchpoints & moments that matter

Identify the moments in the service where the customer's experience is made or broken, and capture what good delivery looks like at each one. Include where things most often go wrong.

Handoffs & dependencies

Map where responsibility moves between people, teams, or systems during the service. These transitions are where things fall through the cracks, and they need explicit documentation.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

What does the service look like from a customer's perspective, and is that perspective documented anywhere?
Where in the service delivery does the experience most often diverge from the design, and why?
Which handoffs in the service are most likely to fail, and what is currently holding them together?
What do your best service staff know how to do that is not written in any process document?
How does feedback from customers flow back into how the service is delivered and improved?

Things to notice

Process documents describe what should happen; they rarely capture what actually happens. Both need to be documented, or the process document becomes fiction.
Service knowledge is disproportionately held by long-tenured staff who have developed informal expertise. When they leave, the informal layer of the service can collapse faster than the formal one.
Touchpoint documentation often focuses on digital or formal interactions and misses the informal ones (a reassuring phone call, a follow-up message) that customers may value most.