Service Design

Challenge

The client is a government agency with 3 distinct business units looking after 3 different public service offerings. One of the 3 business units had plans to implement a CRM system to support their customer service operations. To minimise the risk of implementing 3 separate CRM systems that needed to be integrated in the future, the client wanted to see if feedback handling across the business units could be aligned.

Approach

We were a team of 3 service designers bringing together backgrounds in customer experience, user research and UX design.

Discover

Kicking off the 7 week project, we immersed in client background documentation to understand existing customer insights, feedback logs, service offerings and business processes for each of the 3 distinct business units. These insights helped us create the bare bones of the current state customer and staff journeys.

We conducted

• Customer interviews via phone to learn more about the customer’s experience of the agency, including their journey from awareness of the agency to resolution of their ask, pain-points and suggestions for service improvement

• Contextual inquiries with call centre agents from each business unit to experience the feedback and enquiry calls first hand

• Staff individual and focus interviews across different stages in the feedback management process to define the actual business processes followed day-to-day and understand pain-points

Some of our key findings during immersion:

• Customers perceived the agency as one whole agency with no distinction between the business units, and they expected each contact with the agency to be informed by their last contact

• Staff had a perception that each business unit’s feedback handling process was different, when in fact, there were many synergies and few points of distinction

• Staff were frustrated with the inconsistencies in customer information on their system which made it difficult to resolve customer enquiries and complaints in a timely manner. It was particularly troublesome during follow-up conversations.

After the immersion and research phase, we facilitated 3 discovery workshops, one with each business unit. In these sessions, the immersion phase findings were played back to the participants for validation. In groups, we mapped the current state customer and back-of-house journey maps, validating the steps that we had lifted from immersion. Each customer touchpoint was mapped to a staff action, which was mapped to the data and/or technology used.

Synthesising the journey maps, we facilitated a discovery playback workshop with the 3 business units altogether. This session was instrumental to the success of the project as participants began to realise the synergies between their business units and the possibility of having one aligned feedback handling process for everyone.

Define

We facilitated a North Star workshop to co-create an agency-wide customer service vision. Participants collaborated in exercises to define what values the organisation stood for, create service promises that the organisation commits to deliver to customers and describe what the successful future of feedback handling will look like.

Ideate

With a common understanding of the vision for the future state customer experience, we facilitated a series of ideation workshops to identify what back-of-house enablers were needed so that the organisation could achieve the vision.

Participants could all have a say via a round-robin/musical chairs style ideation where each person had the opportunity to ideate on each problem statement, using sticky notes. Finally, each group nominated a representative to present back some of the most interesting and relevant ideas.

Design

Synthesising the ideas generated, we developed a future state service blueprint visualising the future state customer journey mapped to back-of-house business processes and underlying technologies.

As an extension to the service design engagement, I also mapped 8 revised business processes and documented the functional requirements for a CRM system that will enable a 360-degree view of the customer.

Outcome

30+ stakeholders across the 3 previously disparate business units within the agency were now aligned on a consistent feedback handling process.

Team leaders and team members from each team were excited by the future state of their work, and committed to deliver on the processes, systems and ways of working they had co-created.

8 actionable and prioritised initiatives were recommended for the organisation to move forward towards its strategic vision. These initiatives involved data optimisation, knowledge management, people and culture.

As a bonus, staff from different teams became friends after meeting and understanding each other’s work 😊