Customer experience is the subjective interpretation of all interaction regarding a company – both direct and indirect (Meyer & Schwager 2007). Customer experience management is the actions a company takes to support experience formulation. Depending on the company’s relation to customer experience, companies can be divided into three categories based on their customer experience management practice. These categories are preservers, transformers and vanguards. (Klaus 2015.) The target of this thesis was to research whether service design can enable customer experience management practice evolvement to further categories.

The thesis is a research-oriented development project utilizing service design methodology to examine the hypothesis via a case study. The case company of the thesis is Paulig and team within customer service, offering consumer guidance and service recovery. The development project began with a problem Paulig Consumer Service had: the amount of customer complaint samples arriving for examination had been declining for some time. The objective was to research influential factors causing this problem and create solutions to enable a change in the trend. To understand the context of the research, the theoretical framework creates a knowledge base on dimensions of customer experience and customer experience management (CEM). Service design, customer experience and customer experience management synergies were examined in the theoretical framework to understand the hypothesis testing in the case study.

The empirical part constructs of a case study on Paulig Consumer Service’s development project. The project was formed based on Service Innovation Process grounded on Foresight and Service Design by Ojasalo, Koskelo & Nousiainen (2015). Paulig Consumer Service’s CEM practice before the development project was evaluated to the first stages of a preserver category. The service design process constructed of methods fit to context and target of each phase of the process. The data on context was gathered with surveys, contextual interviews, observation, service safari and customer journey mapping. Thematic analysis was used to ex-plore the data. Solutions to customer experience development were formed in a workshop. 18 months after the workshop all challenge themes had been improved with key driver based initiatives ideated and prototyped in the workshop or due to it.

Evaluation of Paulig Consumer Service CEM practice after the development project supported the hypothesis of the thesis. The category had not changed, but development within the pre-server category was noticeable. Customer experience development within service recovery team is preventing the organization from developing to transformer category. Future research opportunity would be to examine whether exceptional service recovery can trigger embracing customer experience strategy.