Service Designer

Safaricom PLC is a leading telecommunications company based in Nairobi, Kenya, founded in 1997. It provides a wide range of communication services and is a major player in the East African market.

This role focuses on designing and improving end-to-end services within Safaricom's financial sector, ensuring a unified and consistent customer experience across various channels like M-PESA apps, USSD, call centers, agents, retail, and partner systems. The Service Designer will address friction points and maintain context as customers move between channels, owning the integration points where experiences often falter. The position involves enhancing service functionality through changes in processes, channels, operations, and technology, not just the user interface. The designer will engage in the full design lifecycle—Discover, Design, Validate, Measure, and Improve—integrating design early into product development to prevent post-launch issues.

1. Design comprehensive end-to-end services, including current and future state customer journeys across digital and offline channels, and create/maintain service blueprints detailing customer actions, frontstage experiences, and supporting backstage operations and partners.
2. Base design decisions on evidence, utilizing user research, service audits, and both qualitative and quantitative data to understand customer needs, identify pain points, and iterate designs effectively.
3. Validate service concepts through prototyping and testing with real users to identify and resolve issues early, refining designs before implementation and scaling.
4. Establish journey-level experience measurements (e.g., jNPS, CES), interpret results, and translate them into actionable improvements that are tracked and owned, ensuring a closed loop between insights and actions.
5. Collaborate closely with Product & UI/UX designers, customer journey specialists, researchers, product managers, engineers, operations, call center, and partner teams to align service and technical design, influencing stakeholders through clear communication and evidence-based storytelling.
6. Adhere to the Service Design standard and playbook, contributing to a consistent and high-quality practice, and documenting each engagement as a service design case study.
7. Champion human-centered and inclusive design principles to ensure services are effective for all customers, including underserved populations.

1. Hold a degree in design, human-centered design, business, technology, social sciences, or a related field, or possess equivalent practical experience.
2. Have experience in service design or a closely related discipline such as UX/UI design, customer journey mapping, design research, systems/business design, product, or operations, with a trajectory towards end-to-end service design.
3. Present a portfolio showcasing design thinking and problem-solving abilities, ideally including end-to-end service design work like journey maps and service blueprints, and demonstrating customer or business impact.
4. Possess experience in producing user experience deliverables such as journey maps, service blueprints, flows, wireframes, or prototypes.
5. Have experience working across multiple channels and collaborating within cross-functional or multidisciplinary teams.
6. Demonstrate a working understanding of human-centered design, design thinking, and inclusive, accessible design principles.