Professional and knowledge-intensive service organizations are concepts that are sometimes used interchangeably. Both concepts refer to expert services that rely on a substantial body of complex knowledge, which is often seen to be characteristics of highly skilled employees. The project investigates the potential of service design to design a digital service concept for professional services that retains knowledge and applies insights that could noticeably improve the effectiveness of or-ganizations. The focus is on the customer’s value creating processes, where value emerges for customers and is perceived by them. Service design is a process that implies work on projects to integrate new service systems into organisations.

1. Designing a Digital Service Concept for a Professional
Business Service –
Case Työeläkelakipalvelu
Sofia Nyyssönen

2. Background of the thesis
o Organizational challenges.
o The dynamic nature of knowledge creation.
o Service design approach could potentially identify inefficiencies and make
communication and collaboration between departments more important.
o Innovations a consequence of customer specific solutions, in which the
knowledge base may evolve constantly.
o Customer experience.

3. Description of the case organization
o Providing legal guidance services relating to earnings-related pension
provision;
o Providing planning, training and communication services related to
earnings-related pension matters;
o Providing support in the preparation of guidelines and legislation;
o Providing services relating to the implementation of pension provision, e.g.
allocation of costs and actuarial services;

4. Main research question and sub questions
 How to design a digital service concept for a professional business service?
 The sub-questions:
What does the innovative service concept accomplish?
How can value creation be facilitated with the service concept?
How to design user-centered content?

5. Theoretical framework 1/2
 Professional service organization
The professional and knowledge-intensive service organizations are the concepts that are
sometimes used interchangeably.
 Service design
Service design in this research is considered to to improve the delivery, the process and the
strategy to provide services in a more user-centric fashion.

6. Theoretical framework 2/2
 Value creation
Value creation is a process: every customer has its own value creation through which it
creates value in its business operations.
 User-centered design
User-centered design in this thesis is considered to be an iterative development cycle
where the specifications of the service account for both user needs and organizational
objectives as well as specifying the context in which the service is to be used.

7. Service design process

8. Elements of user experience

9. Collection and analysis of empirical data
 Expert Interviews: aim of understanding organizational challenges and gaining
perspective on customer experience.
 Focus groups: Focus groups were used to gather information about users' experiences
and preferences.
 The viewpoint of research was to learn and emphasize users and business rather than technology.

10. Understanding: Stakeholder map

11. Thinking: Affinity diagram

12. Filtering: SWOT

13. Generating: Feature tree

14. Explaining: Rough prototyping/UI

15. Realising: Use case: customer

16. Use case: content creator/service provider

17. Conclusion
 A service concept that creates value for both service provider and service user.
 The service concept aims to be a platform for creating exchanges and contact between staff
and users as well as other service users in the field of earnings-related pensions.
 User experience design focuses mainly on the individual digital touch points.
 The underlying view is that service design is a way to bridge the gap across the silos and
develop services in a more user-centered way.
 However, as both disciplines have a user-centered approach to designing a service, they were
complementary.