PurposeA good customer experience means meeting the customer expectation. Thus, unexpected customer experience is usually a good point to initiate improvement or innovation for product or service design. Attempting to enhance the customer experience in the customer journey, this study aims to demonstrate a customer journey centred service design approach to receive the design requirements based on customers' needs and to use a systematic approach to generate solutions.Design/methodology/approachA holistic service design method named 3E model was proposed. It integrates customer experience journey map (CXJM), the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) and service assembly and service replacement mechanism into three design stages. In stage 1, CXJM is enhanced with emotional range analysis to identify the customer pain points as well as customers' requirements (CRs) in exhibition, tourism and hotel sectors for initializing service design. Stage 2 investigates the specific design requirements (DRs) of the smart exhibition system and the contradictions. Then, the innovative principles were analyzed. In Stage 3, expected exhibition service system was designed.FindingsThe new service system which named the smart expo system based on information and communication technology (ICT) is proposed. It consists of “Tourism Link assists”, “i-Kaohsiung hotel service center”, “Smart AEC” and “O2O e-tickets”.Originality/valueThe proposed 3E model builds a systematic and coherent design method for the smart exhibition service area. It provides the linkage and action-oriented guidance from customer pain points, service parameters, innovative principles to solutions.
