Recently, I had a mentoring session focused on Service Design. As it often happens with knowledge work, the thinking doesn’t stop when the meeting ends. The topic stayed with me, and I started reflecting more broadly on common service design challenges. Here are a few that came to mind (certainly not an exhaustive list):
- Inconsistent experience across touchpoints
Customers interact with a service across multiple channels – web, mobile app, customer support, in-person, billing, etc, but often the experience feels disjointed. Each department or team designs and delivers its own part without aligning on the end-to-end service journey. The result: broken transitions, duplicated steps, or contradictory information depending on the channel. - Strategic intent doesn’t cascade into design decisions
Organizations define high-level strategic goals like “expand into new customer segments” or “increase customer loyalty,” but these don’t translate into concrete service offerings or touchpoint-level improvements. Teams are left to prioritise based on their own assumptions or KPIs, and strategic alignment gets lost in day-to-day delivery. - Siloed functions lead to fragmented service delivery
Designers, engineers, marketers, legal, compliance, and support – all operate on different timelines, using different processes and tools. Collaboration is transactional and happens too late. Service cohesion suffers, dependencies are unmanaged, and integration issues are discovered only after delivery. - Slow or ineffective integration of customer insights
Organisations gather valuable customer insights from interviews, surveys, support calls, or analytics, but these insights often sit in decks, tools, or research reports, disconnected from ongoing work. The feedback loop from insight to implementation is long and unreliable, and service decisions continue to be made based on intuition or internal priorities. - Unclear ownership of the end-to-end journey
Different teams “own” different pieces of the service – product owns onboarding, marketing owns acquisition, customer service owns support, but no one owns the full lifecycle from the customer’s perspective. This leads to gaps, handoffs that fall through, inconsistent messaging, and competing priorities. - Improvement initiatives lack consistency and structure
Service improvement efforts tend to be reactive, isolated, or driven by internal complaints. There’s no systematic way to identify service weaknesses, prioritise improvements based on impact, and track progress over time. The same issues keep resurfacing, and service quality stagnates. - Local optimisation undermines the end-to-end experience
Each function or team focuses on improving its own metrics: faster development cycles, reduced call centre time, improved form completion rates. But without a shared view of the full journey, improvements in one area can introduce friction in another. The service becomes a sum of misaligned parts.
The list could go on.
While these challenges vary in nature, the path to solving them doesn’t have to. Flight Levels offers a flexible toolkit to design tailored solutions for each unique context. You define which levels to work with – FL1, FL2, FL3, based on where the real pain is. Most service design problems above sit at FL2 or FL3.
Then you apply five core activities within those systems:
- Define and measure outcomes
- Visualise the current situation
- Create focus
- Establish agile interactions
- Implement improvements
You don’t need to cover the entire organisation. Start where the pain is. The same goes for the activities – you’ll likely need all five, but their relative impact depends on your challenge. Sometimes visualisation is the breakthrough. Sometimes it’s about creating focus. Other times, it’s all about better measurement.
This reflection on how Flight Levels supports service design wasn’t unexpected, but it was a good reminder of how versatile and grounded the approach is.
What’s your take? Where have you seen similar patterns?
0 Comments