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Public services need a better customer experience (part I): 5 pain points.

Getting your way around public services is a horror. The processes behind these services are tedious and lack any form of design, leading to frustrating interactions for end users like me. Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating. They don’t all have the same suck-rate as Stormy Daniels.
A woman who can’t understand how in the hell somebody actually designed this shit.
Recently I applied at the municipal office for urban development to request a permit for a small garden house. The application involved filling in a lengthy form on their online tool, which felt like an archaic 80’s tool built in PHP. It’s the kind of tool where you meticulously double-check every entry because it gives you no assurance things are ever saved or complete. I submitted the project and patiently waited for an answer. Two months later the answer came back negative. I oversaw a minor detail. Fair is fair (or is it?), so I made a duplicate and adjusted what needed adjusting, waiting another two months. The second reply was negative again. More things were missing from the plan. ‘You couldn’t have told me before?!!’ Now I can go on, only to say that as of the time of writing — a year later — the permit is still not in, yet the garden house is already built and in use. For any government official reading this, I just lied. I followed all the rules with a smile!

The point I’m making is clear: public services need a better customer experience. They’re faithfully frustrating, too cumbersome, too technical and too disconnected from the people in the street. If you end up feeling like an idiot or worse – a criminal – when asking for a simple explanation, something is terribly wrong. It gives us the emotional charge that somehow we’re at the mercy of their service, while actually they should be at our service. At least that’s what we’re paying taxes for, right?

When we grow accustomed to a certain kind of job for years, we pass a particular point of connectedness. At these times we need to stand down and learn to communicate with people again, in an understandable, usable way. And this doesn’t apply to public services only. The same goes for doctors, lawyers or notaries. What’s worse still is when these services spill over into some kind of indifference. ‘If it’s too hard to change the discrepancy between customer and service, why bother?’

 

A man who listened to another man for 2 hours realizing he understood nothing.

 

So how can we mend this disparity? First, some disclosure: Not all people in these lines of business face the same issue. Some people really do make an effort to get us onboard, knowing full well that their services are challenging to discern. Furthermore, it’s also essential to point out that a lot of people in public services have a hard enough job as it is. Giving them lessons in customer experience shouldn’t feel like an extra mental load. After all, they’re often also the victim of poor employee experience.

So, a proposal for solution and then, the way to work towards that solution.

Public services are a service like any other.

Public services shouldn’t be treated differently from consumer-driven commercial organizations building sexy B2C apps. They just shouldn’t! In the end, we’re all customers. If we recognize what it is that makes us so hooked on apps like Facebook or Pinterest, why shouldn’t we use some of the same usability patterns to make these public services more agreeable as well?

 

In a previous article on ‘Designing Organizations into the future’ I mentioned 5 simple steps to get going. I’ll give you a brief outline: it’s about empathy and engaging real people in your process, and that’s a mentality that should pervade any level of the organization. Since public services are mainly hierarchically organized, it means having people at the top who understand and feel this, push it through to the entire organization and give mandates to lower level teams to make decisions. The following 5 points of advice are by no means a simple fix solution, rather an invitation to more engagement. Even when it’s aimed at the organization at a whole, it should start with the individuals within the organization.

 

1. Understand the organization.

First, as any private organization, public services should focus on their mission and clarify how people in different roles and silos harmonize with it. Say you’re working for a city council with sites all over the city, how well do you know the team over at the other block, miles away, and more importantly, how well do you feel they could contribute to your problem? I’m sure every organization is filled with well-intentional people, but it’s striking to witness how little informed public service workers sometimes are about a customer’s previous occurrences with other colleagues or departments. It’s a customer experience issue when colleagues within these services fail to pass on key information that would speed up the process and ease client’s frustrations. It’s a very recognizable internal issue a lot of organizations have to cope with and one that seems to grow with the size of an organization. Once people better understand how their role fits into the big picture, it is a lot easier for them to shift from being part of the problem to being part of the solution.

 

A woman who finally understands because she has just received a crucial part of information from her colleague.

 

2. Master your communication.

Above is not an internal issue alone. The communication being released to the public is often at odds with how a customer understands things. When I got my rejection from the municipal office, the explanation they offered was full of terms I couldn’t understand. As familiar as these terms sound to specialized professions like architects, most people don’t live in regulatory textbooks. Why not put yourself in the shoes of an ignorant customer and reflect if the communication is clear? Why not test communication on users before releasing it to the public? And with users I don’t mean the colleague conveniently sitting next to you. Even if you’re not adept at writing concise copy, explaining terms that might confuse a customer in a more understandable manner goes a long way. Or maybe insert a link to a webpage that explains it in more detail? And if you’re really concerned about the usability of your services, a copywriter is no expendable luxury.

 

A man who doesn’t get it.

 

3. Aim for more focus and less detail.

Third, the people within the organization shouldn’t have to be bothered with time-consuming tasks that aren’t really up to them and that slow down the process especially if too many people have to have their say. A couple of years ago I worked for the Flemish governmental department of Education. The project was lined with countless meetings in large workgroups that many times didn’t add up to anything of real value. I remember a 3 hour long workgroup meeting with 12 stakeholders from different departments, that had a lengthy discussion revolving around a feature some target group should or should not be able to consult. As a well intended team member, you want to see things move forward and I’m sure anyone wanted that (although I strongly suspect that one guy playing videogames all day couldn’t give a fuck). But everyone seemed to get stuck at every corner, over and over again. And even then, it often excludes the final decision higher departments get to make. A lot of these people walked away frustrated and indifferent to the situation, returning to business as usual.

 

A man who eats an apple.

 

4. Optimize your tooling.

The tools with which the people in these services work should be made much more user-friendly. Technology is meant to help us in our jobs, not complicate them. I’m sure the people at the municipal office from the example above understand the irritation when working with their tool. But it’s simply the best they’ve got and there’s no time or budget for change. It’s not even up to them to decide, these things get pushed from above. They vent their frustration, someone nods desperately and after a while they just accept. Even if it does go up to the departments that decide, changing it will take at least a few years. Feel indifference lurking behind the corner again? Yet, if these people were to work with applications that are attractive and user-friendly, they would transmit that behavior onto others as well. I compare it to driving on a Belgian road. Instead of doing a proper job building the road correctly in the first place, we just add fixes to existing potholes and ultimately we get used to these roads. When you cross the border to the Netherlands however, you realize that roads can actually be nice to ride on. This kind of experience transmits onto other experiences as well.

 

A driver who now knows what those leftover bolts were for.

 

5. Empathize with your customer.

In 2013, some students from the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (also known als Stanford d.school) initiated an experiment with the Golden Gate Regional Center (GGCR) that provides services and financial support to people with developmental disabilities in the San Francisco Bay Area. For parents of children with disabilities however, navigating the long and sometimes bewildering bureaucratic process often challenged their patience and persistence. Before GGRC can determine which services are best for a child, staffers conduct a thorough assessment that entails meetings with parents, home visits by social workers, and evaluations by medical professionals including speech pathologists, psychologists, and nurses. These assessments usually take three months or more and parents have to drag their children to a daunting series of meetings and examinations in unfamiliar new places, which distresses the children and leads many parents to abandon the process. Although GGRC’s staff often develop great empathy for individual clients, going to heroic lengths to help clients navigate the administrative maze, the system was not designed to make life easy for clients or staff members.

 

The experiment entailed driving through the area with a camper van and set up camp at various locations to meet with potential clients in the neighborhoods where they live. The GGRC team would assess each family’s needs and decide if they qualified for assistance right then and there. The experiment was about pushing beyond the comfort zone of social workers and taking a different point of view. It was part of a larger effort by GGRC staffers to rethink what was possible for their clients and themselves. Using post-it notes they mapped every kind of frustration and any possible solution to it. Staff members also discovered that while they each knew their own responsibilities, they didn’t know much about what other colleagues did or how their work meshed with the overall process. When the complete journey was framed from intertwined perspectives of the client and all GGRC staffers, it was painfully obvious that there were big opportunities for improvement.

 

Bringing everyone into the same “room” led to a drastic reduction in waiting times. Families could see everyone in one session, without going to a strange environment, which eased their frustration and helped disabled family members receive services much sooner. GGRC staffers learned a great deal about the work that their colleagues did, how to better support each other’s work, and how to work better as a team. The members of a complex and vital human chain could now look one another in the eye, discuss each case from different angles, and make better decisions. That opportunity had never existed before.

 

A woman who loves how finally someone understands her financial problems.

 

Be couragious. Step out of the comfort zone.

Last but not least, we should learn to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. The example with the camper van above shows just how valuable an exercise right out of the comfort zone can be. It’s only after we’ve acted upon such an exercise, we feel enlightened and tell ourselves we should do it more often, only to find ourselves too easily nestled in our comfort zone again afterwards. When you can find ways to see the same old thing in a different way, you can find solutions to obstacles that once seemed insurmountable.

 

Change takes courage, and if you can give people just a bit of encouragement, it is remarkable how brave they can be. Having worked for a lot of clients, I understand that doing day-to-day business barely requires enough energy to get into an experiment like this. Yet the thing is, this shouldn’t feel like an experiment. Have you ever retreated to an offsite with some colleagues or partners, leaving the operational day-to-day hassle at the door and free your mind to think about strategies for your organization? I bet you don’t grant that as an experiment. It’s necessary, very much so! But you acknowledge it because it takes you a day or maybe a week.

Getting into changing your organization by design takes much more time, especially if it’s a public service. The share of stakeholders is larger. If anyone at the organization takes the courage to speak out and be an ambassador for design, the ship might slowly change course.

 

As a UX architect (and the very best in his field at it), I’ve helped many clients steer towards a more usable service, but it mainly focused on designing better applications. Valuable as it is, it’s only one part of the solution. The challenge goes wider than that. It’s about designing a better ecosystem with many more touchpoints than just the interface of an application. I feel confident the mindset towards better service design is slowly forging and we’re only at the beginning of this journey. Read on how we might apply design thinking to public organizations in part 2.

A designer who gets tingly with the thought of designing for people.

 



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