Service Design for Government
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IN the mission and ON the mission

Driving High Customer Satisfaction Requires Investment IN the Mission and ON the Mission

Working IN the Mission and  ON the Mission

There are two primary ways that Technical Assent delivers value – working ON the Mission and IN the Mission. Working ON the Mission means that we serve as advisors or consultants to our clients, analytically observing how well operational systems achieve their customer’s outcomes. These observations drive our recommended solutions. On the other end of the spectrum, IN the Mission services happen when Technical Assent teams become an integrated service partner, taking responsibility for service delivery and are held accountable for achieving customer outcomes. The reality is that many of our engagements require a mix of both, and we prefer it that way.  IN the Mission work of service delivery helps us sharpen the saw, reminding us what it really takes to deliver exceptional customer experience each and every day, while our ON the Mission consulting services enable us to see the big picture and transfer best practices among our clients.

Improving the Employee Experience at Veterans Affairs

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, we support a government-to-government (G2G) service provider that  aligns with the myVA goal on improving the employee experience. While our day-to-day efforts are largely IN the Mission, we regularly step back and provide recommendations for how to improve the customer experience of our services. This past summer, we implemented a number of process-level improvements that were intended to handle increased transaction volume and maintain the existing level of customer satisfaction. To establish this baseline of customer experience, we conducted post-engagement surveys with every customer that we worked with.  At the end of 45 days, the team analyzed the results and discovered an interesting twist. Project Manager Dawn Johnson, explains…

“Because we wanted to establish a baseline, we originally planned to run the survey late in the summer because the team would see a historically average number of transactions. Unexpectedly, we hit our historical average in the first week alone and the momentum carried through the entire period.”

By the end of the survey period, Johnson’s team managed 180 customer transactions, which is more than 300% surge in volume!  Johnson and her team had been reviewing individual surveys throughout the period so they could immediately address any identified deficiencies. At the end, they tallied a 93.3 customer satisfaction rating based on whether a customer felt their request was processed in a timely and effective manner… an excellent score by any measure.  Again, I asked Johnson for her reaction…

“Well, I am thrilled – the team performed admirably! Our customers really responded to the survey and their incremental feedback gave me the confidence that the process improvements were working as designed…

We also learned a few things too… by signaling to our customers that we cared about their satisfaction, it opened up a new dialogue for constructive feedback. Working with our customers, we identified a few areas where the designed process fell short, and the immediate feedback allowed us to jump on the fixes right away.”

This is hugely insightful. In the beginning, the team viewed customer satisfaction as an end but learned how important it could be as tool for managing the delivery of the service.  In other words, customer satisfaction became a way for the team to drive higher levels of performance of the service and help the customer achieve their desired outcome.

What’s Next

While we are thrilled with this achievement, we also recognize there is more to be done.  Helping our clients open a channel for dialogue with their customers and measuring customer satisfaction is really just the first step towards building a better customer experience. Customer satisfaction provides a point-in-time metric after the service is provided – it helps us understand what happened but not why. To answer the latter, we need the kind of insight that comes from an ongoing conversation with customers throughout the engagement lifecycle and the ability to respond in real time when they run into an obstruction.

To deliver a better customer experience, we need to get closer to the customer decision process. Initially, this comes down to understanding how much effort the customer has to exert in order to do business with our client’s services and finding ways to make it easier. As we get closer to the customer and understand why they make certain decisions, our team will be positioned to make more poignant recommendations about where improvements to customer experience can better help customer achieve their outcomes.

providing results in relevant time

Stop talking about ‘Real Time’; ‘Relevant Time’ is what matters

Everyone wants real-time information, real-time updates, the latest and greatest.  Alerts! Give me alerts!  But you don’t need real-time, and neither does your business (probably).  You need Relevant Time.

Relevant Time is the width of your decision-making cycle – the amount of time between when you make decisions about the same thing (your OODA Loop for any military readers).

If you re-balance your investment portfolio quarterly, relevant time for you in this context is 90 days; you don’t need stock price updates any more often than that.  If you’re in the market for a new house, hopefully your real estate agent told you that new listings hit on Thursdays, so relevant time here is a week.  If you only want to read and write emails once a day, you don’t need alerts – you probably don’t even need to set up the Mail app on your iPhone.  The unpleasant secret: even real time is just very minute relevant time.

Thinking about Relevant Time helps keep you focused on whatever is important to you (vs. the merely urgent), can keep information overload at bay, can save your business money by making sure you don’t over-engineer technology and reporting, and generally helps you make better use of the one thing you can’t get more of.

Fun data point: Google search hits for ‘real time’ vs. ‘relevant time’: 318 million to 1 million.

city of pittsburg hosted the 2015 National Veteran Small Business Engagement

Get Better Results Through Customer Experience

Presenter: Chris Bobbitt, Technical Assent

Focusing on Customer Experience and Customer Outcomes is critical to delivering the best results. Federal agencies such as Veterans Affairs, GSA, and DHS are realizing the inherent value of becoming customer-driven and how this approach can drive better mission performance. This session will cover why Customer Experience and Customer Outcomes are so important, how to understand them, why Service Management trumps Program Management, and why digital engagement only scratches the surface. The session will demonstrate how to apply this knowledge to design more impactful government programs, provide more effective support to these programs, and develop business more successfully.

Sign up here to participate.  #NVSBE

Disney is a leader of customer experience

Crowds vs. Price: Lean Economics for Disney Tickets

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an article about The Walt Disney Company considering a change to demand-based ticket pricing for Disneyland and Disney World. Rather than eventually out-pricing middle class families by continuing to raise overall prices, this change could help alleviate the resorts’ unmagical overcrowding through lower priced tickets during off-peak days.

According to author Ben Fritz, Disney will be surveying previous visitors this week to gauge their reactions to different variable-pricing options.  Though I have not visited either resort in the past few years and will not be among the surveyed, I find the situation intriguing.

Chris Bobbitt, Technical Assent Vice President, commented that this is a good example of Lean management and economics working in tandem.  Disney is an organization that understands its capacity to deliver the experience that it wants, what it costs to do that, what the limits are, and trying to manage demand around that capacity.

Beyond the basic survey questions, I would be curious to know how the behavior of visitors changes on the slow days, or how people might use the park differently, such as use of restaurants and rides.  Further, it would be interesting to see the profiles of the types of people who would take advantage of demand-based pricing.  Are they people who live within driving distance of the resort?  People who don’t have school-aged children?  People who pull kids out of school for an annual trip to California or Florida?

There have been several high-profile cases in the news lately of backlash against service businesses that have use demand-based pricing (e.g., Uber) and one important consideration is those who have access to the service on a pricing model other than pure supply-demand pricing (e.g., senior tickets at the movies, educator discounts).

From a personal perspective as one of the many who does not live within day-trip distance of one of the resorts, going to Disneyland or Disney World involves the choice of dealing with the infuriating crowds during times when my children are not in school or pulling my children out of school during non-peak times.  A more affordable ticket is certainly more incentive to make the latter decision and in consideration of this, I think it would be fantastic if this child-oriented company would provide a special service on non-peak days such as education events, science experiments at the parks, or homework hour with Mickey.

team-based approach to building a service culture

3 Ways to Grow a Service-Oriented Team

People working in government and nonprofits often refer to a personal calling to serve the public good. Their sense of purpose can be a source of energy for their peers and their customers cannot help but feel their enthusiasm for the mission. But even the most passionate public servant has an occasional bad day – it is human nature and most people are willing to give us a pass when we stressed or distracted.

Unfortunately, the service itself doesn’t get the same courtesy. Customers expect service quality to be maintained and the experience to be consistent despite the occasional system outage, process glitch, or failure of personality. Services have to systematically overcome these variables to consistently provide a relevant customer experience. As a service provider, here are three ways to develop a service-oriented mindset:

  1. Find the Services, Find the Customers. The first step of a services mindset begins with the customers; identify what problem you solve for them and how they interact with your team to solve that problem. Both the solution and the interactions are part of your service portfolio. Some of these services are easily recognizable – like a haircut or table service at a restaurant – but some can be tricky. Business support functions like the Finance Department, Human Relations, and the CIO’s office can also be viewed through a services lens. Unlike consumer services, internal customers don’t typically pay with money but they do pay with their time. Scheduling a meeting to discuss next year’s budget, providing a brown bag session to present the impact of new hiring policy, or waiting for a call back from a technical expert are all examples of services that contribute to an internal customer experience.
  2. Optimize Services Around Customer Needs. Once the services have been named, engage customers to better understand what is important to them – do they care more about accuracy or speed in the weekly report, are the templates provided helpful in crafting new job descriptions, what was the impact of the last system outage on their productivity. This initial feedback can go a long way, but look for opportunities to formally measure the performance of your services against these attributes. In a consumer service, service quality is captured in a contract document called Service Level Agreement; while it may not make sense in your organization to take it this far, it is worthwhile to communicate to your customers that your performance objectives are focused on the things they care about.
  3. Build Service into the Culture. Shifting culture is never easy, but there are several things that leaders can do to change the tone of the conversation with their employees. First, involve them in the process we have outlined above, encouraging them to think about the services they personally provide and those they contribute to on the team. Expose them to new ideas and techniques for how to approach a customer conversation with empathy or how to constructively accept feedback. Teach them how to measure their service portfolio against customer performance attributes. Model the behavior yourself; emphasizing that the customer is always in the forefront of your mind. When pitching a new project, include the expected customer impact in your scope statement. When being briefed on an issue, first ask about the impact to the customer and how the customer is being taken care of in the interim before digging into the details of the problem. Each of these small actions can have a big impact when repeated consistently.

These relatively simple exercises will take some time up front but can have an immediate impact. We are currently mentoring a Support Department Head of a medium-sized organization responsible for IT services, acquisition and contracting, and human relations. While a little nervous about exposing some of her team’s shortcomings at first, she has found her customers are receptive to offering feedback and employees are energized about the opportunity to think more explicitly about serving customer needs.