CX Game · Innovation

Service Design Sprint

Service Design Sprint is an intensive workshop-style game that challenges teams to design a service from scratch, focusing on maximizing customer satisfaction. This hands-on approach encourages creativity, collaboration, and customer-centric thinking.

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Participants

4-12

Facilitators

Seniority

Any

Level

Hard

Learning Objective

Teams can take a blank brief and produce a coherent, customer-centric service concept — journey, touchpoints, and a tested prototype — under tight time pressure, practising the full service-design loop end to end.

How to Play

Setup

Write 3–4 service briefs on cards (e.g. "onboarding for a first-time banking app user", "returns for an online furniture brand"). Provide each team with a journey-map template, sticky notes, and a persona card. Assign one brief per team of four to six.

Rules

Map (15 min): teams chart the current-state journey for their persona and mark every pain point.
Ideate (15 min): teams sketch touchpoint-level fixes — no idea censored, quantity over polish.
Prototype (20 min): teams build a rough artefact for one key moment — a screen, a script, a physical prop.
Test (10 min): another team role-plays the persona and reacts honestly to the prototype.
Pitch (3 min each): teams present the redesigned moment and the metric it would move.

Debrief

Reserve fifteen minutes — the sprint's value is in the reflection. Ask three questions in order:

Which assumption about the customer collapsed the moment you tested it?
Where did your team default to fixing the org's convenience instead of the customer's experience?
What is the one moment from your design you could prototype for real next sprint?

CX Principle Reinforced

Service design is a discipline, not an opinion. Great experiences are built by mapping the whole journey, designing each touchpoint deliberately, and testing with real users before scaling. The sprint compresses that loop so teams feel why prototyping beats debating — the IKEA effect means people overvalue ideas they argued for in a meeting, while a five-minute test with a role-played customer kills bad assumptions cheaply. Customer-centricity becomes a method the team can repeat, not a slogan.

Format

Format: In-person (materials-heavy) or virtual with a shared whiteboard
Players: 4-12
Duration: 60–75 minutes
Level: Hard

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