Most of my design experience has been in service experience design for public services or internal employee experience. The similarity with these cohorts is their drive to achieve an outcome - they both usually need to deliver a service, in a monopolised environment, resulting in a lack of choice, as opposed to market driven consumer behaviour where customer insights are key to understand behavioural and motivational drivers for product and service selection in a competitive landscape.
Employees and citizens are a relatively captive audience, and the services that are on offer to them are often limited or singular (i.e. there is only one option, which is often the case with government delivered social welfare services). Innovating a new service offer generally doesn't happen via the design process, it's more the focus on the experience of the service delivery to be optimised, and even making it enjoyable, that becomes the objective. Most projects of this nature are focussed on designing optimised mobile online self-service (digital) experiences for employees to reduce cost and reduce effort via other channels such as phone and face-to-face.
Due to this lack of choice, organisations that offer such unilateral services are rarely motivated to invest in optimising them unless there is a significant Return on Investment (ROI). Measuring ROI is quite a challenge when trying to measure qualitative factors such as ‘enjoyability’.
Employee feedback is only part of your key data set to prove that a change is required. You need to have analysis of service data to prove the experience creates significant effort for employees as well as cost-to-serve, in order to glean support for the need to change - as a designer you may need help with this!
Here are some considerations before kicking off your employee experience redesign initiative:
Many employee experiences end-to-end can be highly complex ('hire to retire', or even just on-boarding a new employee), so simplifying what is usually a very complex range of services to deliver the experience involves a lot of analysis and detailed design by business process engineers, LEAN practitioners, policy specialists, functional business analysts and solution architects engaging with SMEs and change managers.
Running a design process is one thing, but getting the design sponsored, built and implemented to the intended vision is the investment the organisation needs to commit to for success. Establishing these expectations upfront with key sponsors will enhance the chance of the change being implemented to the design intent and vision.
Michelle has had a longstanding career using design-thinking method for Customer Experience (CX), and User Experience (UX) design in digital across multiple industries.
She is based in Brisbane.
To find out more about the EA Learning Introduction to Service Design Course please fill out the below form or click here to view our course range.
Author
Michelle Meek
Introduction to Service Design - Virtual Classroom