Service Design for Government
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seeing through the noise to discover government's service portfolio

To Improve Your Team’s Performance, Start with Experience

In our view of the world, Customer Experience is the starting point for improving the performance of services. Adjust the angle of your head slightly and the concepts, tools, and methods being used to design better services can also be applied to improving business functions, programs, and operating units. Positioning yourself as a service provider immediately transforms why, what, and how you go about your work.

Here are three ideas to get you started.

Find Your Customers

Services only exist when there is a customer so the first step is to seek out the customer – the people who receive the benefit of the service. It seems like a simple enough concept, until it’s not… in a simple consumer service transaction, the customer is the person who pays for the service.  As transactions become more complex, the term customer can be confused with words like “stakeholder,” “management,” “buyer,’ or “oversight committee.” The ultimate goal here is to deliver services that provide real value to customers – the people who receive the benefit of the service – despite all other distractions.

See Services Where Others See “Business as Usual”

Take a look at the image below; 3D stereograph posters like this were once littered across shopping malls. They enticed shoppers to stop and look; separating by-passers into those who could “see” and those would keep walking because they tried before and it wouldn’t work. I fall into the latter category, but the idea is that you stare at the image deep enough and long enough and a second image will appear out of the clutter – usually a sailboat or a pod of jumping dolphins.

In many cases, looking for services in established organizations can be very similar to seeing the sailboat. It takes some practice at first, but once you get it, it is even harder to unsee it. Government Agencies and Businesses are functionally organized around the work being done, like Operations, Marketing, Finance, and IT. Service Designers must be able to see through these structures and pick out the services that are delivering real value to customers, i.e. outcomes. These are easy to find when a customer buys something – the transaction itself serves as the indicator that there was an exchange of value. It gets more challenging as we dive into the inner workings of organizations – the monthly budget analysis, the provisioning of services for a new customer, or the installation of a new network drop. Each can also be viewed as a service even though no money changes hands. When seeking out services in your organization, look for these 5 attributes:

  1. Intangible – in a pure service, the “thing” of value that is produced is intangible. We often “productize” these things – a dashboard, a report, a legal brief – but the real value is what went into delivering these in the first place.
  2. Inventory – There is none. In a service, the exchange of value happens at the point in time where it is transferred to the customer. The value is perishable in the moment that the service provider transfers their expertise, experience, or insight to their customer.
  3. Inseparable – Just like you cannot have a service without a customer, it is equally impossible to separate the service from the service provider.
  4. Inconsistent – Services are subject to variable demand and are provided on an as-needed basis.
  5. Involvement – There is a certain intimacy involved between the customer and provider where both have the opportunity to influence and customize the outcomes.

Practice applying these filters in your organization and you will quickly see your service portfolios emerge and how well they perform.

Follow the Customer Journey

With both the services and customers accounted for, the next step is to follow the customer journey – the series of decisions and actions that a customer makes from the time they first become aware of your service to the point where they retire it.

As a service designer, taking responsibility for a customer journey may seem overwhelming at first as it will likely the organizational structure. Customer journeys don’t necessarily align with siloed business functions; customers easily move from installation to a technical help desk call to a billing question and expect a consistent service experience throughout. This customer journey exercise often highlights gaps in existing technologies, employee knowledge, and processes in systems that have multiple owners.

Embrace the opportunity to work cross-functionally; the focus on improving customer experience is an invitation to put on your “big hat” and find opportunities to better integrate services that deliver more of the outcomes that matter most to your customer in the ways that are most relevant to them.