A Customer-Centric Approach to Identifying Problems in Service Operations
Need help with customer service journey mapping, read an open call for design researchers. This was the start of my learning journey a couple of years back!
The Problem
The client had received feedback that they could look into improving experiences of professionals such as teachers and social service workers (SSWs) interacting with their office, in particular, the process of intake of child abuse cases. They needed help to identify problems in the journey of such professionals interacting with child protection services and wanted to learn a user-centred process of doing so.
Desk Research
First, I conducted desk research to define the potential impact of the customer journey mapping project. This would be important for my clients who worked with policy and planning to convince their ministry of the project’s findings and recommendations.
I found some shocking statistics (2019–2020):
- 21% increase of number of child abuse cases
- About 44.9% increase in number of family violence inquiries
- 13% increase in family violence case investigations from 2019–2020
I plotted the proportion of child abuse cases against the number of social workers across 10 years and found that the workload had increased by more than 3 times.
The desk research comprising of academic studies and news articles also revealed the following:
- Complaints of high workloads and poor work-life balance by SSWs
- Increasing difficulty in retention of social service professionals
Beyond problem identification, the research also lent some suggestions to solve the problems of workload and resultant attrition, which was to facilitate onboarding and engagement of the social service professionals.
User Research Synthesis
Affinity Mapping
To focus the research, we identified SSWs to be the main customers of the client due to the high frequency of engaging with their office. I interviewed SSWs from various social service agencies before mapping the findings in an affinity map.
I was able to share with the client the various problems (post-its in red) reported by the SSWs from the affinity map. With the map, we could identify that communication between SSWs and the client was a key pain point.
“Wait, but if you’re not here, how are we going to do affinity mapping? And how do we know what insights to get?” said my client.
Research Data Visualisation
To address their concern, I shared with my client the use of research tools, and chose to use Dovetail (as it had a free trial back then) to demonstrate what they could do if they wished to have the option of using an insights tool. Besides the wonderful research management tools such as storage of video interviews, auto-transcription and tagging, my clients were most impressed by the data visualisation feature.
The insights were interesting. The radar plot on text volume based on the automated tags helped to identify that Communication, and working with stakeholders (people and clients) were of key interest to the users. We were able to identify the contexts (two northward spikes in volume) for communication issues and the modes of email (being frequently used) and WhatsApp (least used).
Since Communication was of interest, I guided the client to use the tool to search the tag to surface relevant excerpts for Communication. We would then have to make sense of all that was said pertaining to Communication to identify if it was a pain point.
Deep Dive into Experience Touch-points
I was interested to understand why Email was mentioned so frequently by the SSWs and not other touchpoints. Hence I decided to analyse the various touch-points in the customer service journey, from the interviews. I found a gap where the current work environment was not what the SSWs were familiar with in their day-to-day lives.
This was particularly important because SSWs were often in their first career in social work. If the touch-points within their work environment were different from what they were used to, SSWs faced a steeper learning curve or greater dissatisfaction if the work touchpoints were difficult to use.
Persona Generation
From the interviews, I was able to generate the persona of Sally with rich details of what she does, needs and her pains. This was important to enrich my client’s understanding of SSWs and key to fostering empathy.
Customer Journey Mapping
What I hadn’t mentioned so far, was how exactly were the interviews conducted. As you might have noticed from the artifacts above, questions on touchpoints, day-to-day tasks and behaviours were posed. They were not the only questions within the interview scripts.
I requested for SSWs to walk us through their interactions with the client for various user journeys. In each step of walk-through, if it was not elaborated, I would pose questions on their thoughts, what they were doing and how they were feeling. This is akin to getting the inputs for an Empathy Map. The tool I had chosen though, was the user journey map as I wished to identify which processes within the journey could be identified as problem areas.
I walked the client through the creation of the customer journey map and we mapped the emotions experienced on the same map. My client expressed how the map was useful because they could see how the problem area directly related to the specific points in the journey and if they needed to understand Why SSWs were experiencing problems, they could reference the other rows in the same column.
We identified two problem areas which related to Communication Issues. The first was in relation to the intake of cases and the second, in relation to subsequent follow-up. The frequency of problem area 1 was higher and of business priority.
Problem Statement Identification
The problem statement for this project could be derived as follows:
Social workers need to repeat their assessments (which is a lot of information), multiple times before they can present it to the Intake worker. This causes delay in addressing the case.
Service Blueprint and Omni-channel Evaluation
Using the same journey map, I expanded it further to create a service blueprint. You can read more about service blueprints here if you wish to learn more about service design.
I created a simpler service blueprint for my client so that they could replicate the process for Part 2 of their research which would be another user (e.g., Teachers) other than SSWs.
First, I created a row for Touchpoints (in Grey) and another row to capture the human-to-human interactions (mapped post-its).
Omni-channel Evaluation
Using the journey map, we conducted a pulse check on satisfaction. Where the persona interacted with the client’s services, we filled in yellow bars on top of mini-charts next to each of the post-it. We could then gauge the points of low (shorter bars) or high (taller bars) customer satisfaction.
At the bottom of the map, I listed the five components of the omni-channel user experience: Consistency, Optimization, Seamlessness, Orchestration, and Collaboration. Next, I used the 5C Framework to evaluate the components and their score next to the start of each row of the component.
The ratings were as follow:
- Consistency — 12
- Optimisation — 9
- Seamlessness — 9
- Orchestration — 7
- Collaboration — 8
Orchestration, which is where the business uses data to anticipate users’ needs and providing the right content at the right time, had the lowest score.
However, orchestration solutions came with high costs of entry. Together with the client, we completed the map above and identified solutions for Optimisation (lower cost of entry).
Ideas Prioritisation
We plotted all the ideas on an Impact-Effort matrix and identified three solution opportunities which the client was keen to work on immediately.
With that, I created a To-Be Journey Map for the client incorporating the three key ideas. On hindsight, I found it interesting that the eventual ideas identified were a more tangible representation of the suggested solutions from the initial Desk Research.
Meanwhile, the other ideas would be valued for a subsequent roadmapping or planning exercises aimed at improving the customer experience.
Conclusion
During the project, and interview processes, I keenly felt for the customers and client who were doing such meaningful work. It was perhaps one of the driving factors for my delivery in this project. Close partnership with the client was a huge bonus as well.
If you’re reading this article to learn more about journey mapping, I hope the various ways it has been used in this project is useful for you too!
