The purpose of this article is to explore how the application of service design can support financial organisations to implement their customer-centric business strategy.
This explorative research leaned on a subjective philosophy of interpretivism and followed an explorative qualitative approach by applying in-depth interviews. An abductive mindset was used for theory development.
The paper introduces a model that explains how service design can be used to implement customer-centric business strategy in financial organisations. The model explains the link between the business strategy and service design and highlights five principles of service design – namely customer-centred, co-creative, holistic, contextual and systemic – which guide designers and business developers when applying service design. In addition, customer journey represents an essential method of service design when aiming for a superior customer experience.
The research implications of this study relate to novel knowledge of applying service design to implement a customer-centric strategy. The paper encourages managers of established financial organisations to use service design to implement their strategy for a superior customer experience. Our results recommend the customer journey as a main method of service design for this purpose and highlight the prospect of making customer journeys at various levels across organisations.
This paper contributes to literature by integrating knowledge about business strategy, customer centricity and service design in a novel way.
