Senior Service Designer (For independent contractors)

At Booking.com, our mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. In Customer Service (CS), we deliver on this promise by ensuring that when our travelers or partners need help, the experience is effortless, empathetic, and efficient. We view Customer Service not just as a support function, but as a strategic asset. Our ambition is to design world-class services that turn every interaction into a distinct competitive advantage for Booking.com.

As a Senior Service Designer, you will act as the strategic architect and custodian of the end-to-end customer experience. You will bridge the gap between high-level business ambition and on-the-ground operational reality. You are not just designing processes; you are owning the Service Strategy and managing the overall experience health for our most critical business tracks (e.g., CCaaS, AI-First Support, Differentiated Services).

In this role, you will champion the "North Star" vision, ensuring that as we scale and integrate new technologies, we maintain a coherent, consistent, and frictionless journey across all channels. You will orchestrate the complex ecosystem of people, technology, and data required to turn ambitious strategies into seamless realities.

Key Responsibilities

1. Own & Champion the Experience Strategy (Think Big)

• Holistic Experience Management: You are responsible for the consistency and quality of the experience across the entire CS ecosystem. You look beyond individual touchpoints to manage the cumulative impact of our services, ensuring that a guest transitioning from a Chatbot to an Agent, or from App to Email, feels a seamless sense of continuity.

  
  

• Define the Vision: You will create and own the Experience Principles and Service Concepts for major strategic domains. You define what "good" looks like for the future of Booking.com support.

  
  

• Strategy Realisation: You are responsible for the "Strategy Realisation Framework." You will take abstract strategic goals (e.g., "AI-driven efficiency") and translate them into tangible, human-centric Experience Requirements.

2. Service Architecture & Orchestration (Succeed Together)

• Holistic Service Blueprinting: You will move beyond simple mapping to create comprehensive Service Blueprints that connect the Frontstage (Customer Journey) with the Backstage (Internal processes, tooling, routing logic).

  
  

• Lifecycle Management: You ensure the service experience is managed as a living product. You actively monitor the "pulse" of the live service, using feedback loops to identify where the experience is degrading over time and intervening to correct it.

  
  

• Operational Design: You will not just hand off requirements; you will actively design the "How." You will collaborate with multiple departments, in and outside CS, to ensure the operational setup is capable of delivering your designed experience.

  
  

• Guardianship: As solutions are built, you act as the design authority. You ensure that technical constraints do not dilute the quality of the service, maintaining the integrity of the original vision.

3. Innovation & Future-State Design (Learn Forever)

• AI & Hybrid Service Models: You will partner closely with Product teams to define the End-to-End Service Experience. You will architect the "handshake" between automation and human talent, defining exactly when and how a customer transitions from digital self-service to an empathetic human agent.

  
  

• Opportunity Discovery: You will act as a strategic scout for the business. By proactively identifying friction points in our current ecosystem through data and research, you will influence roadmaps. You will pitch validated service opportunities to leadership, ensuring that our innovation pipeline is driven by genuine user needs rather than just technical possibility.

4. Leadership & Methodology

• Set the Standard: You will function as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Service Design, introducing and refining frameworks (e.g., Double Diamond, Journey Management) to elevate the wider team's capabilities.

  
  

• Mentorship: You will guide and advise junior designers and operational stakeholders, helping them shift their mindset from "solving tickets" to "managing holistic services."

Success Profile: The "Three Lenses"

• The Strategist: You can look 12–18 months ahead, understanding how today's routing decisions impact tomorrow's brand loyalty.

  
  

• The User Advocate: You relentlessly champion the user, using empathy and data to push back on decisions that might degrade the overall experience.

  
  

• The Pragmatist: You understand that a strategy is useless if it cannot be operationalised. You speak the language of Operations (WFM, OpEx, KPIs) to ensure your designs are viable and scalable.

Requirements

Education & Experience

• 8+ years of relevant professional experience, including significant exposure to Contact Centre environments or complex Customer Support Operations.

  
  

• Minimum of 5 years specifically in Service Design, CX Strategy, or Experience Management, ideally designing for high-volume support ecosystems.

  
  

• Bachelor’s degree required; a Master’s degree or background in Design Thinking, Psychology, or Business is advantageous.

Specialised Skills

• Strategic Mastery: Proven ability to build and own an Experience Strategy from scratch for a complex, multi-channel environment.

  
  

• Total Experience Management: Experience in managing the full lifecycle of a service, including measuring success via CX metrics (NPS, CES, CSAT) and driving continuous improvement.

  
  

• Advanced Service Blueprinting: Mastery of mapping complex ecosystems (Frontstage/Backstage/Support Processes). You map the future state, not just the current state.

  
  

• Operational Fluency: Unlike a pure UX designer, you possess a deep understanding of Contact Centre mechanics (CCaaS, WFM, Routing, Agent Cognitive Load).

  
  

• Senior Stakeholder Management: Experience presenting to and influencing Directors and VPs. You are comfortable challenging the status quo to protect the customer experience.

What this role is NOT:

• It is not a Programme Manager role (you define the what and why)

  
  

• It is not a pure UX/UI role (you design end-to-end service flows and operational logic, not just digital interfaces).