Somebody Always PaysWhat it really costs when a service is too hard to use
A large and growing customer service team is not evidence that an organisation cares about its customers. It is the invoice for a service that has become too hard to use.
Most organisations have no idea what it costs them to deliver a service. They know the total budget. They know the headcount. Ask what it costs to process one application or handle one complaint and the room goes quiet. Without that number, every argument about improving a service runs on gut feeling, and gut feeling loses to a spreadsheet every time.
Gerry has spent years building the practice that closes this gap. It started with a wall of brown paper covered in real customer sentences, run weekly like a music chart until the same problems kept charting in the same order. That persistence is what licenses a forecast, and a forecast is what turns a wall into a reason to act. Over many engagements it became Cost to Serve: a way of pricing what a service actually costs, stage by stage, on the unhappy path as well as the happy one.
The talk covers where the money hides, why the costs below the waterline do the most damage, and the single most dangerous thing that happens when this number becomes a target. It also makes an argument some of the room will resist: that putting a price on exclusion is translation, not a Trojan horse, and that if the money argument is the only one your organisation will hear, that tells you something worth naming.
Field
Forces
Format
Talk
Day
Thursday, Oct 15
Room
Auditorium
Time
05:30 PM
What is the central idea?
Gerry’s Cost to Serve practice puts a real number on what organisations rarely measure: what it actually costs to deliver a service, stage by stage, especially on the unhappy path. The talk gets into where that cost hides, the danger of turning it into a target, and a harder claim: that pricing exclusion isn’t a Trojan horse but translation, and if money is the only argument your organisation listens to, that’s worth naming.
Why is this conversation important now?
Organisations are under real budget pressure and reaching for automation and AI to cut service costs, often without knowing what those services actually cost to run in the first place. That makes Cost to Serve less of a nice-to-have measurement exercise and more of a prerequisite: you can’t make a defensible case for redesigning (or protecting) a service, human-staffed or automated, if you can’t put a number on what the current version is costing you, especially at the edges where people fall through. It’s also a moment where “customer service headcount as evidence of care” is getting quietly replaced by “customer service headcount as a line item to shrink,” which makes Gerry’s argument about exclusion and translation more urgent, not less.
Who is this session for?
Practitioners who have known a service was broken for years and have never had the evidence to make anyone act. Design and service leads who need to argue for the work in a budget meeting. Anyone working in public sector, health or regulated industry where the money conversation is the only one that moves.
Key takeaways
- Why a celebrated support function is often the clearest evidence a service has failed, and how to say that in a room without losing it.
- The difference between showing pain and pricing it, and why the first without the second changes nothing.
- The costs that never reach a budget review: failure demand, reacquisition, eroded trust, and the workarounds that walk out of the door when someone resigns.
- The warning that the cheapest way to reduce cost to serve is to make yourself harder to reach, and how to name that move out loud before someone else reaches for it.
Gerry Scullion
Gerry Scullion is one of the most influential voices in human-centered design. As founder of The Human Centered Design Network, he built the world’s number-one HCD podcast, downloaded over 1.7 million times across more than 140 countries, and grew it into a thriving global community. His forthcoming book, This is Human Centered Design (BIS Publishers), distils over two decades of practice into a definitive guide, and he contributed to the landmark This is Service Design Doing. Through his consultancy Humana Design, he delivers training for organisations worldwide, including the Digital Government Authority of Saudi Arabia, Elexon, Accenture, EY, Dublin City Council, Belfast City Council, Aerogen, Hollister, and Cochlear. With over 22 years of experience across finance, healthcare, media, and public services, he is a regular speaker at international conferences, where he challenges organisations to design services that truly work for people.