Mind the Gap

Very often, government services are designed from the perspective of the people within the organisation. Yet, I agree with John le Carré when he said that:

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”

We often find ourselves saying at Satori Lab “replace assumptions with evidence”. While we’re often thinking about hard data, this also applies to the softer side of things — like “how will the user feel when they experience this service?” We can’t possibly understand that without getting inside the heads of our service users, metaphorically speaking, and understanding what it feels like to be in their position.

As a general rule, as people within organisations get promoted to more senior roles, they move further and further away from the customers and therefore become less engaged with the service users and their needs.

If people at the top of the hierarchy are making decisions which impact on the service user, a dangerous chasm could develop between the users and the place where decisions are made. The bigger this gap in understanding, the bigger the risk that the organisation will deliver services with little or no value to the service user.

This means that the more senior you are, the more conscious effort you need to make to develop empathy for your service users.

So, what can we do to increase empathy among staff; especially those in senior positions?

Here are a few ideas which might help close the gap between the users and senior leaders:

Customer Services

If you’re in a senior position with little contact with users, go and spend some time on the customer service desk fielding complaints. Customer complaints should be seen by organisations as a gift. This is where customers are telling you how you can improve your service. Spending time listening and understanding their frustrations is a fantastic source of evidence.

Listening to your customers’ frustrations can provide a rich source of data

Personas

Personas are fictional characters which can help you to understand the varied needs of many users. They are designed to help staff understand the different lifestyles, ambitions and expectations that customers have as well as what they expect from the services they receive.

It can help people in the organisation move away from thinking of users as one homogenous group, (or thinking only about the loudest ones!) towards considering the different needs of different users when making policy decisions or service changes.

Using quotes from real customer interviews can be really powerful in getting the emotion across to people within the organisation, especially those with little or no contact with service users. Better still, embed videos into the personas.

Customer Personas

You can read more about a persona project we did with Valleys to Coast Housing in the Chartered Institute of Housing Good Practice Compendium 2017 (p.12)

If you want to give this a go yourself, there is some free guidance on the Government Open Policy Making Toolkit and if you’d like some help with doing this for the first time, check this out.

Exposure Hours

At GDS (Government Digital Service) they appreciate the value in making regular contact with users and recommend that all team members should watch real users interacting with their service and talking about it ideally for at least 2 hours every 6 weeks. These ‘exposure hours’ can consist of any research activity where people can watch and listen to real users either face to face or digitally.

This blog on user research explains their approach in more detail.

What’s the point?

Some of these activities will help staff understand:

• the language that people use when talking about your service
• the emotional journey that people take when engaging with your service
• that service users are real people with real needs, not just an homogenous group

Which can help to:

• avoid costly mistakes and white elephants (services that service users don’t value)
• provide a service which service users value and might even enjoy engaging with!
• do what you say — for those in organisations where they say they “put customers at the heart of what they do”

What do you do in your organisation to help increase empathy?

Check out our service offerings around service reviews and creating personas for your organisation.

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