Service Design X Customer Experience Design

I think CX is the child of Service design, though Liliana Petrova argue that it's the other way around. But it only matters of from where you see it, how you define service, is it equal to product (then its like product design) or is it an act of helpful activity; help; aid.

The important thing is that they do overlap each other.

What CX do is implementing service design with the customer as the primary object.

So the goal is to making the consumers better and do feeling better through the brand product/services.

And there is this grandchild; UX design, the smaller scope, which I wont talk about it here.

Service Design

I bring here my bias whereas I like the Service Design description from Wikipedia

Service design is the activity of planning and arranging people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality, and the interaction between the service provider and its users. 

It's not directly point out the user as customer because it can be employee or other stakeholder. In fact my first official service design project was creating a printer instruction for my campus (I noticed this small annoying problem long before).

Customer Experience Design

Christopher Meyer and André Schwager from Harvard Business Review describe Customer Experience as 

The internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company. Direct contact generally occurs in the course of purchase, use, and service and is usually initiated by the customer. Indirect contact most often involves unplanned encounters with representations of a company’s products, services, or brands and takes the form of word-of-mouth recommendations or criticisms, advertising, news reports, reviews, and so forth.

They make examples that I think most people will agree; 

Microsoft Windows is about right for corporate IT director, but many home users prefer Apple’s Macintosh.

Now, what is Customer Experience Design, IxDF says

Customer experience (CX) design is the process design teams follow to optimize customer experiences at all touchpoints before, during and after conversion. They leverage customer-centered strategies to delight customers at each step of the conversion journey and nurture strong customer-brand relationships.

 

So what's the different?

I think mostly the same, the only different is the scope, service design can be for everything, small and big project. While CX is focus on customer and the brand.