Multidisciplinary Design Team

The organization shall mobilize a multi-disciplinary team to perform all design-related efforts and should enable an open environment that cultivates their creativity and structured thinking.

An enthusiastic, committed, and competent design team are the first step to excelling in the service design process, with the following roles and requirements:

Steering the process of service improvement in its initial stages by correctly framing the problems encountered by service users, baselining the current state of the service with respect to customer experience, ideating and iterating possible solutions, as well as time traveling into the future to anticipate developments in service trends through time.

Possessing both knowledge breadth of the service design process and knowledge depth in a specific area of expertise.

Originating from a variety of disciplines (e.g., data analytics, marketing, engineering, and technical service provisioning, and research) and backgrounds that reflect the composition and diversity of their wider community.

To ensure internal cohesion within teams, it is also useful to select individual members based on complementary and/or matching characteristics revealed through individual difference assessment measures such as personality and values tests.

Access to important customer information and feedback, as well as the freedom and access to feedback and expertise of relevant external stakeholders when appropriate.
Team members should also be provided with the appropriate communication tools to share ideas and information between themselves in a clear and transparent manner.

To maintain a sense of motivation and purpose, it is also best that the design team is made aware of their own task objectives and how their work aligns with wider organizational outcomes, vision, mission, and CX strategy, as well as their social, political, and economic context.

Problem Framing

The organization shall establish a deep understanding of the problem and identify the problem statement clearly based on holistic, reliable, and timely data to baseline the current state of the service.

Problem framing is a design thinking method that has proven highly relevant in facing public sector challenges which often involve addressing complex issues that have multiple causes.
It is based on the process of service baselining which involves remeasuring the as-is service scope over different customer segments and channels, collecting customer perceptions of services across all touchpoints of possible journeys, as well as measuring the current operational state of service in terms of staff productivity, service times, and service unit cost.
Collecting holistic, reliable balanced, and timely data specifically related to the framed problem allows design teams to not only conceptualize the problem statement more clearly, but also guide the subsequent exploration of solutions.
Once the service challenge is initially explored and a general awareness of the challenge has been established, it is critical to use external research to validate and support any generated conclusions. While customer perception results, feedback, service cost and usage data, and staff productivity data are valuable tools for this process, it has become increasingly popular to employ modern automated tools such as AI analytics, data scraping, and big data to uncover key themes and trends in CX pain points within a customer journey.

Ideation and Iteration

The organization shall deploy suitable ideation and iteration techniques to propose and refine possible scenarios for effortless and seamless customer experience, considering the service innovation’s ecosystem and with an informed foresight about future state of the public sector and society at large. 

Generating a successful solution to a design challenge requires creative ideas and their iteration. While ideation is about generating and gathering new ideas and exploring design alternatives, iteration is the process of incrementally improving these solutions through continuous feedback loops. The process is inherently creative and non-linear in nature, often taking multiple rounds of intense collaboration amongst all involved stakeholders.

Prior to beginning an ideation session, all members of the design team must possess a sufficient understanding of organizational direction, ambitions, aspirations, and CX strategy, as well as any legal regulations, laws, and policies related to the service in question. They must also have a thorough understanding of their customer’s needs and expectations which can be ensured by encouraging the participation of the concerned public and working across organizational boundaries with relevant stakeholders.

The field of CX will continue to change and develop, calling for the need to reimagine current CX practices with informed foresight into any upcoming developments in the field, taking into consideration predictions about future customer needs and preferences, CX trends, technological developments, and the state of the public sector at large.

Action Planning

The organization shall develop, monitor and update its action plan that defines the roadmap for realizing its selected initiative as part of its CX strategy.

An organization’s action plan builds on the CX strategy and defined initiative to answer the question of “How do I get there?”. The implementation process considers the following points. Defining and communicating the rationale for the previously defined CX initiatives to build momentum and support for the upcoming changes.

Specific members of the CX transformation team should be entrusted with clearly articulated roles and responsibilities in the implementation process to ensure engagement, simplify the monitoring process, and make it easier to reward exceptional performance. These include various approval and control responsibilities that may occur within the organization or externally with other stakeholders.

Other logistical requirements involve defining the financial and non-financial resources needed for implementing the CX strategy, generating timelines for implementation that include key milestones, as well as specifying any key performance indicators that will assist in subsequent review and monitoring processes.