The Advocate Is a service design enthusiast and familiar with service design as an approach: is a designer or has been to a class/education. Decision making factors: – agency brand and reputation – agency’s expertise and person brands Appreciates: – being part of the design team and process – getting design support Pay attention: The Advocate has authority to make decisions and implement outcomes. If not, support the Advocate by involving organization’s gatekeepers in the project.
The Advocate's project process
them in the internal PR and buy-in of service design. The primary objective is to involve all the people, including the gatekeepers and the decision-makers during the sales process, in order to ensure a successful sale, implementation and customer satisfaction at the end of the project. The Solver Solvers can be directors from different parts of the organisation: from development, HR, marketing, customer service, accountants or even CEOs. The Solver’s mission is to tackle the problem at hand and they are most likely to seek different approaches for this. From the service design sales point of view, this broadens the number of competitors in pitching situations since the approach to solving the problem is not yet locked down. Solvers are familiar with buying ready-made solutions from traditional consulting and marketing services. They 30 Touchpoint 7-3
often develop services and products in traditional ways and are usually not so familiar with involving customers in their processes. Solvers will make decisions based on their belief of what approach will solve their problem the best. With this profile, you have to reserve much more time in the selling process for understanding their situation and strengthening the trust towards service design. Even if the Solvers like the proposal and the methods, they might struggle in actively engaging their internal stakeholders and developing customer-centric mindset. In order to succeed in this ‘leap of faith’, the sales team need to support Solvers in building a firm trust in the service design process. The Solvers hesitate until they truly understand and trust the impact of service design. The entire selling process is often about creating security and trust between people. One part of the trust towards the agency comes from the recommendations
