Design Thinking for Service Brands

For service brands, every customer interaction is part of the brand. The experience is the product. From onboarding a new client to delivering after-sales support, service brands live or die by the quality of those interactions.

Yet designing a consistently great service experience can feel challenging. Unlike products, services are intangible, deeply human, and prone to friction. That’s where design thinking comes in — a creative, empathetic problem-solving framework that can transform how service brands deliver value.

In this article, we’ll explore how design thinking applies to service businesses, why it matters, and how you can begin using its principles to improve experiences that truly connect with your audience.

 

What Makes Services Unique?

Services aren’t like tangible products you can touch or test on a shelf. Instead, they are delivered moment-by-moment, often through human interactions, processes, and environments. This intangibility creates unique challenges:

• Inconsistent delivery: Service depends on people, who can vary day to day.
• Expectation gaps: Customers bring their own assumptions that may not match your processes.
• Invisible processes: If there’s friction, customers can’t always see why something went wrong.

Because of these realities, service brands must pay close attention to how their experiences are designed. Every detail — from tone of voice to waiting times — shapes customer trust and loyalty.

 

How Design Thinking Fits

Design thinking is a human-centered approach to solving complex problems, built on empathy, ideation, and rapid experimentation. For service brands, that mindset is a game changer.

Here’s how:

• Empathy — deeply understanding the emotions, needs, and context of customers during every step of the service journey.
• Ideation — exploring creative ideas to remove friction, enhance value, and surprise customers.
• Prototyping & Testing — quickly trying out improvements (new scripts, digital tools, staff processes) and refining them with feedback.
• Iteration — continuously evolving the service as customer needs change.

Unlike traditional design methods that focus on static assets (like a logo or packaging), design thinking helps you shape the living, breathing, human-centered interactions that define a service.

 

Practical Steps for Service Brands

If you want to embed design thinking in your service brand, here’s how to get started:

1. Map the customer journey
   List every step a customer takes with your service — from first inquiry to after-care follow-up.
2. Identify pain points
   Where do frustrations happen? Where do people get confused, drop off, or feel neglected?
3. Co-create solutions
   Gather your team (including front-line staff) to brainstorm fixes — no idea is too small.
4. Prototype changes
   This could be as simple as rewriting an email, tweaking a booking flow, or testing a welcome script.
5. Test and gather feedback
   Try these improvements with a small segment of customers, measure the response, and refine.
6. Repeat and scale
   Continue adjusting and improving — design thinking is an ongoing mindset, not a one-time exercise.

 

Case Example: Coah Restaurant Lagos

Coah Restaurant Lagos, a modern dining destination rooted in culture and contemporary hospitality, approached Kle to help build its brand identity. As a service-based business, Coah understood that branding could not be separated from how guests experienced the restaurant itself.

Our work focused on defining and designing a cohesive brand identity — from their tone of voice to their visual assets — that would support a warm, memorable, and consistent guest experience. While Kle did not redesign the service operations directly, the identity system became a foundation for how Coah’s team delivered hospitality: setting expectations, communicating clearly, and aligning every touchpoint to the brand promise.

This shows how design thinking, even when focused on brand identity, can play a key role in supporting service experiences. By empathising with guests’ expectations, prototyping storytelling elements, and refining brand assets, we helped Coah deliver an experience that felt intentional and authentic at every stage of the guest journey.

It’s a reminder that for service brands, brand identity isn’t separate from the service — it’s part of it.

 

Final Thoughts

Design thinking empowers service brands to deliver experiences that are more human, more efficient, and more memorable. Rather than relying on assumptions, it encourages curiosity, experimentation, and empathy — the core ingredients of any meaningful service brand.

By making design thinking part of your culture, you can build services that truly resonate, adapt to changing expectations, and grow trust over time.

 

Ready to transform your brand experience?

At Kle Design Studio, we help service businesses build human-centered brands that go beyond the surface — designing for connection, consistency, and growth. Let’s talk about how to bring your brand vision to life.