Entrepreneurship und Tourismus

1. Introduction

In recent years customer experience became the decisive success factor in the buying process of touristic products. Gartner Research states that by 2016 89 % of companies expect to compete mostly on customer experience compared to 36 % in 2011 (Gartner, 2014), which is especially important in service dominant industries. However, we still see that the provision of good customer experience is often left to chance. Service design is a user-centred approach to systematically analyse, innovate and improve service processes from a customer’s perspective.

After first setting the stage by laying out the increasing importance of customer experience, this chapter provides an overview on the basics of service design, the iterative design process and three hands-on tools. While this article will remain a constant context to tourism, the methods introduced are successfully applied in various other industries as well.

1.1. Customer Experience & Tourism

Both academia and practitioners established common sense over the fact that customer experience became a decisive factor for successful companies. This is especially true for the tourism industry. However, this realisation evolved ove...