My older brother Matt works as Lead Researcher, The Circular Economy at British Telecommunications (yes, he is older than me, although I get the bald head and grey beard). He recently gave a talk at Nesta’s Smart Resources event about his role on a project to redesign and rethink BT’s HomeHub router. Although the initial focus was on reducing resource consumption, you will hear him talk a lot about service design and customer experience benefits too (he is speaking around 2:24). He also talks about how this is also about a cultural change as much as any engineering or design challenges.
Social engineering may just be the most important skill service designers need to learn.
There’s also an interview snippet it with him at 3:00 here, again talking about how important the service design aspect is: