Two kinds of organisation

Some organisations consistently provide experiences that are so entirely unremarkable, they're almost impossible to remember. Believe it or not, that's not intended as a criticism. Quite the opposite, in fact.

They function so smoothly and reliably that they pass through your day almost unnoticed, rarely giving cause to be anything other than a mere footnote to everything else you have on your plate. No friction, no repetition, no drama. You’ll close the app, get on with your life, and stay happily oblivious to the thousands of tiny cogs that whirred perfectly in the background to make that 'nothing-happened' experience possible. Like a well-run theatre production, the magic depends entirely on you never once thinking about the stage crew.

And then there are the others.

You know the others. You know them very well, indeed. Their digital product may be excellent, but there's always cause for severe frustration. The left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing. The answer depends entirely on who picks up the phone. Opening hours seem elegantly chosen to exclude anyone who happens to have a job. Delays are endless. Delivery windows are so wide they make a mockery of the word "slot".

We've all felt our blood pressure rise during these encounters and, for some unfortunate people, navigating them can feel like a daily ritual.

The gap nobody designs

Business and product investment generally tends to flow outward, towards the more 'traditional' elements of customer interaction: the interface, the brand, the feature set, the marketing. Whilst all of these are, quite obviously, of critical importance to an organisation's success, they only paint half the picture.

Service design draws a line through every business, separating what customers see from what makes it possible. The frontstage is, as above, everything a customer directly encounters. Meanwhile the backstage consists of the people, systems, and processes working away behind the curtain to deliver on whatever the frontstage has promised. A great experience is one where the two move in harmony, the backstage making the frontstage look effortless.

It’s rarely bad intention that opens a chasm between the frontstage and backstage, but rather the slow residue of operations built reactively. A team bolts on a process because something broke, a tool gets adopted because someone found it handy, a handoff gets improvised, accountability blurs. No business leader in their right mind ever sits down and decides to make an internal system purposefully muddled. It accumulates, one well intentioned patch at a time, whilst everyone's attention is focused elsewhere. Scaling up compounds matters further by taking this pile of improvisation and turning it into a genuine liability.

This may all seem abstract, but it certainly isn’t once you follow the money. Organisations that feel competent have higher customer retention rates, earn more word of mouth, and spend far less mopping up complaints. Economically speaking, this translates directly into lower costs, more sustainable growth, and healthier margins.

THE ENERGY COMPANY BREAKING THE MOULD

Energy probably isn’t the first sector you'd think to raid for customer experience lessons. It's a commodity business, operationally contorted, weighed down by legacy infrastructure and decades of regulatory friction. Which is exactly what makes Octopus Energy so instructive.

In Ofgem's most recent national satisfaction survey, nine in ten Octopus customers reported being satisfied or very satisfied. These are the highest levels recorded since the tracker began in 2018, with Octopus ahead of the market on every major metric. In an industry where the baseline emotional state hovers somewhere around mild exasperation, that is no accident.

Become an Octopus customer and you're handed to a dedicated team of energy specialists, usually ten to fifteen people, who are wholly responsible for a defined group of customers. Each team runs like a small business inside the larger one, with its own accountability and its own culture, so that even across millions of customers you tend to reach the same handful of people every time. And just like that, the problem of having to repeat yourself, arguably the most universal indignity in all of customer service, is nothing more than a bad memory.

Banking gives you the same logic at Monzo, where an operations designer's remit explicitly covers the internal tools and processes the customer service team spend their working days living in. Support, in other words, is treated as a user group in its own right, with the same design rigour applied to its experience as to the customer's. 

In both cases, what employees encounter backstage turns out to have a direct, measurable effect on what customers feel out front. The organisations that grasp this are, reliably, the ones that just work.

The direction of travel

Service design is absorbing a few significant shifts, and the direction is worth watching.

The biggest of them has the sharpest organisations abandoning the idea that customer experience and employee experience are separate projects, to the point where the boundary between the two has all but dissolved. This is the thinking behind the “Total Experience” model, which treats how customers feel, how employees feel, and how the systems linking them behave as a single design problem.

It's fast becoming the default for anyone serious about consistency at scale. The logic is hard to argue with, since an agent wrestling with three disconnected tools to answer one simple question will always lose to an agent with a coherent environment to work in. 

Then there's AI, pouring fuel on all of it. The genuinely valuable work undertaken by service organisations is, increasingly, the human thinking that decides how intelligent systems are orchestrated. The journey design, workflow architecture, and experience mapping required to facilitate successful business outcomes cannot coherently be built by the currently available models alone.

AI in service design is best to be thought of as an amplifier that turns up the volume on whatever's already playing. Feed it a service that's well designed and it gets meaningfully better. Feed it a fragmented one and it simply gets faster at producing the same frustrating outcome, the mess now even more headache inducing.

A question worth asking

Service design maps the full system: from customer experience, to employee experience, to how information moves and where decisions get made. The parts that don't fit are redesigned, for both the scale organisation is at today and the one it's aiming towards.

Those organisations that just work have made a deliberate, structural choice to design the parts of the business their customers never see with the same care they lavish on the parts they do. Designed well, that advantage accrues year on year, until, from the outside, it starts to look a lot like luck.

If you're a business owner, you probably already know how much attention your organisation gives to the backstage compared to the frontstage. The more important question is whether you're actively trying to close the gap.