Each year, we always know when autumn is drawing near: days grow shorter, the warmth of summer becomes a fading memory and the service design community congregates for the global SDN conference.

How important is corporate culture in delivering a great service? Over Forrester’s past fourteen years of research on customer experience, my colleagues and I have asked hundreds of executives at some of the world’s top companies about their organisational barriers and how best to overcome them.

After Nabeel Hamdi’s very inspiring speech, our chief editor asked him right away if we could publish his talk in Touchpoint, so the readers can enjoy the spontaneity of his speech;

In most global companies there are competing interests that can be reduced to tensions between centralised strategy and local implementation. Finding a balance between a unified global presence and regional and local adaptation is one such challenge.

Practitioners and researchers are very much aware of the fact that we all live in a service economy. And, in particular, a service economy that must be endlessly innovative.

Small to medium-sized (SMEs) manufacturing companies with limited budgets need service design. Service designers can offer them valuable and cost-effective projects that still turn a profit.

The belief ‘My home is my castle’ runs through our culture: it is about status, ownership, privacy and, ultimately, about who we are. And yet it seems that as we grow old and develop a need of care, we can no longer sustain the way we choose to live.

The SDN’s Paris conference offered participants the opportunity to hear several different viewpoints on the intersection between services design and change management.

Internationally there is a quest for governments to design policies and services that are more efficient, effective and better meet the needs of citizens.

As designers and innovators of services, we try to step into the shoes of those who will be using and delivering the services we create.

In this article I described how two important trends (living services and the intention economy) will impact service designers and described a scenario where mobile and sensor data combined with intention could completely transform our day-to-day experiences.

Today’s ever-changing social, cultural and technological environments have led a growing number of companies to promote flat-organisations to facilitate their multidisciplinary innovation initiatives.

The 2012 Service Design Network Global Conference in Paris brought together over two hundred people who all wake up in the morning with the same itch: how can we improve the world around us, interaction by interaction?

Growth is no value. When I started teaching in 1995 as the first-ever professor of service design, there was neither concept, framework nor curriculum for teaching and no market for service design.

Nancy Birkhölzer and Melanie Wendland delivered a keynote at the National Service Design Conference organized by the German chapter of the International Service Design Network.

“A company’s primary responsibility is to serve its customers. Profit is not the primary goal, but rather an essential condition for the company’s continued existence. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.”

Service design claims to build a better future through exceptional services that improve people’s lives. Ironically though, most of the currently employed user research methods deliver only insights valid for the past – or the present, at best.

The Service Design Network Germany conference (SDNC12.de) is the premier service design event in Germany and one of the largest in Europe, where the service design community comes together for face-to-face interaction and the sharing of ideas.

Digital services, such as Google Maps and Foursquare, are a fast-growing part of our daily lives. These services can be beneficial and much loved, like Amazon Prime, but poorly designed services can create bad feeling, causing customers to terminate brand relationships.