What Service Design Means Inside an Agency

Service design is the act of crafting an agency service offering, from the granular steps all the way up to the packaged positioning.

That covers a lot of ground on purpose. It starts with who does each step of the work and how long it takes, and it runs all the way up through what the service is called, what’s in it, what it costs to make, what you charge for it, and how your account team explains it to a client. People hear the term and picture customer journey maps. What I mean is designing the service your agency sells, top to bottom.

Most agency leaders I talk to never think about this at all.

Nobody sat down and designed the service you sell today

Somebody figures out they can trade a service for a fair amount of money, and it snowballs from there. The first client pays for it, the second client asks for something a little different, and the shape of the offering comes out over time instead of being decided up front.

Then the offering gets passed from the founder to their first hire. As that person moves up and the agency grows, it gets passed along again, usually to whoever runs the department today. In a lot of agencies, the core services are years old.

It gets better over time. Every person who owned it improved their piece. But there’s never a clean point where somebody zooms out, looks at the whole thing end to end, and asks whether we can be doing this better. Whether we SHOULD be doing this better.

The second question matters more than the first. “Can we” is about efficiency. “Should we” is about whether the service still fits the agency you’re running now, the clients you’re selling to now, and the margin you need now.

Start with how the work gets made

When I look at a service line end to end, I start at the bottom, with the work itself.

Can we be more efficient at any step in this process? I’m looking for the steps that exist because somebody added them once and nobody ever took them out.

Are the right people touching the right pieces, or is our most expensive person doing low level QA? That usually happens because it’s how things worked when the team was small, and nobody revisited it as the team grew. The agency ends up paying senior rates for a checklist, and the senior person has less time for the work only they can do.

How well does the team communicate and hand work off to each other? Handoffs are where work stalls. If the input to a step is a Slack message instead of a finished piece of work, the next person starts by asking questions.

Are we on current tools, or running on something somebody bought a decade ago? I’ve seen agencies operating off tools that were built ten years ago and haven’t kept up, with the team building workarounds on top of workarounds.

Then judge it by what the client gets

The second set of questions is about the output, which is the only part of the service the client ever sees.

Is the deliverable shaped the right way, or does it sit in a Drive folder and never get opened again? A deliverable can miss in a few ways. The client doesn’t understand it. It’s too long or too short for what it’s supposed to do. The client can’t take the outcome and share it with the people they report to. Or it goes into a folder and never comes back out.

Is it working, and is it producing results? Does our report accurately reflect the outcomes, and can the client take them to their own execs?

That last question is the one I put the most weight on. Your contact at the client has a boss. If your report doesn’t help them make the case for your work upstairs, they’re defending the budget on their own, and eventually they stop.

The money question comes last for a reason

What is it costing us to produce compared to what we’re charging the client for it, and are those two numbers in line with the model we’re running the agency at?

Almost every agency owner I talk to can tell me what they charge for a service. Very few can tell me what one of them costs to make. You can’t answer that until you’ve gone through the questions above, because the cost is every step, every person, and every tool in the process added together.

The answer also has to be checked against the agency’s model. A service can be profitable on its own and still drag the whole agency’s margin down if it runs well below the target the rest of the business is built on.

“It works. Why would I touch it?”

That’s the fair objection. The service is selling, clients are renewing, and the team knows how to run it. Opening the whole thing up feels like a risk with no obvious payoff.

I’d answer it two ways. A service that has only ever been improved piece by piece usually has a few pieces that don’t fit together anymore, and you can’t see that from inside any one piece. The people doing the work often know exactly where it breaks. They’ve never been asked to look at all of it at once, because that isn’t anybody’s job.

And the questions don’t have to lead to a rebuild. Sometimes the answer to “should we be doing this better” is no. The service is in good shape, and now you know it from the numbers instead of a feeling. That’s worth something the next time you set a price or decide whether to hire.

The answers change how you sell it

There’s one more piece, and it comes out of everything above. How the account team talks about the service with clients, and how sales pitches it, should come from what you learned about how it’s made and what it produces. When the team knows why each step is there and what the client gets out of it, they can explain the service in their own words.

When you’ve got those answers, the account team has a better story to tell clients, and your margin on the work goes up.