In a world where service users demand ever-higher standards, the public sector must constantly adapt to feed their needs. Stuart Watson reports on a round table that discussed how service design can move forward.
As Woody Allen once said: “A relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward, or it dies”. The same is true of public services – they must continually adapt to an ever-changing world.
This is especially important at the moment, as services respond to new technologies, expectations and resource constraints. Users increasingly demand digital, high-quality, responsive services, available at all hours and configured for mobile devices.
Gone are the days when a top-down, one-size-fits-all service, designed for the convenience of the provider, will satisfy service users. The requirements to save money, deregulate, and work across departments mean that civil servants must properly understand citizens’ views, needs and experiences before they design services, reducing the need to make costly changes and ensuring service durability.
For civil servants to meet these challenges, they’ll need to engage with citizens directly, and develop a range of new tools to understand the communities they serve. In a bid to identify these tools, Civil Service World teamed up with digital marketing agency SapientNitro to hold a round table that brought together service design specialists from a wide range of government departments and agencies.
Assessing need
As the event got underway, the MoJ’s Peter Scott summed up one of the discussion’s crucial points: “Without insight, you’re using limited information and lots of assumptions, then implementing something and then defending why you did it,” he said. But there are many ways to develop insights into service users’ needs – and not all of them involve asking people questions.
The MoJ, Scott explained, is beginning to use ‘big data’ to better understand policy outcomes and providers’ effectiveness – gathering a mass of information for analysis in an attempt to bring down re-offending: “Where have [offenders] been brought up? Where do they live? Do they have job prospects?” he asked. “Sometimes the offending is a symptom and there are some causes there that we need to tackle. Big data allows us to take the various bits of information and start to tease out some of the things that probably aren’t obvious to us.”
Siobhan Coughlan of the Local Government Association, who arrived at the round table armed with a set of case studies, pointed out that many existing government records and databases can be mined for insights into how existing systems operate. “Before we even think about designing something or fixing something we need to understand the customer’s current experience,” she said.
“Often it is the simple things like going to see what is happening or talking to frontline staff, because they will know what the problems are,” she added. “Looking at MPs’ or councillors’ complaints or casework will tell you an awful lot about what’s wrong with some of the systems and processes.”
Mike Browne from the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman’s office said that case summaries of each complaint investigated by his department will be published online: “There could be themes coming out that public services can look at and see where things need to improve,” he suggested.
However, SapientNitro’s Mark Parnell warned that understanding service users through data can sometimes be problematic, particularly if it is based on what users say they need or do: “You need to understand any unexpressed needs they have; any actual behaviours they engage in, but don’t report. You need some kind of observational research,” he said. He questioned the use of focus groups and recommended ethnography, shadowing people and diary studies before conducting user tests. “Behaviour is the key, and it is the hard one to get insights about,” he argued.
Involving citizens in service design
An increasingly popular method for incorporating more information from citizens into policymaking is to make them part of the service design process. Involving community groups and self-help networks can be valuable, suggested SapientNitro’s Lillian Shieh: “A lot of these networks are purpose-built around a single topic. They have a lot of lived experience about that problem, so it’s a great resource for finding out more about the issues,” she said.
The LGA’s Coughlan cited examples of two projects in local government where this approach has been adopted: a web portal for sufferers of dementia and their carers in Cheshire; and another website enabling a rural community to discuss the issue of immigrant agricultural workers: “Sometimes giving people the tool and then just stepping back is a very scary thing to do, but it does enable the community to take the lead,” she said.
Chalky Langley said that his agency, the Met Office, has restructured its national weather warning system in line with feedback from service users: “They wanted to know what the impact of the warning was going to be on them,” he explained; so the Met Office devised a set of colour-coded warnings to express the danger in local areas. “We’d never have structured it that way without engaging with the citizen,” he claimed.
The attendees discussed social media as a potential channel for user involvement. Langley said it’s useful for engaging directly with critical customers and turning them into advocates for a service. Shieh suggested that users now want to have a relationship with government through social media in the same way as they do with commercial brands.
The NAO’s Rob Prideaux commented that after initially finding it difficult to engage customers in service design, HMRC is now making progress in this area: “We have seen a change towards openness and desire for engagement. There are now stakeholder events and good use of customer user groups in developing new solutions. They also have a very ambitious digital agenda,” he commented.
There are drawbacks to user participation, however. “One of the dangers of engaging in social networks and small groups of very engaged citizens is that you end up with a self-selecting sample, which skews the data,” said one participant, briefly going off the record.
Alison Smith from HMRC was worried about raising citizens’ hopes too high: “Private industry can react literally overnight if customers don’t like something. Government is big and you can’t be as responsive as you would like to be, so you have to be careful about handling customer expectations,” she said.
Providing citizen-centred services
Coughlan argued for services to be designed around the needs of citizens and not for the convenience of separate government departments and agencies. She praised the Tell Us Once programme, which co-ordinates different parts of government so that citizens only have to report a birth or death once, instead of telling several organisations. “It would be great if we could do more of that together, looking at knotty problems from a citizen’s perspective across all agencies,” she said.
Prideaux said that the NAO is working with DWP and HMRC to explore the potential for co-operation on service delivery: “Citizens are not very interested in whether they are engaging with HMRC or DWP. It is government that they are engaging with, so there is no good reason why there should be a difference in approach,” he argued.
Langley cited another example of providing services across departments: collaboration between the Met Office and Environment Agency on the system of national flood warnings: “Before the 1990s there was a frankly ridiculous situation where the rain falling out of the sky was the responsibility of the Met Office, and then the minute it hit the ground it was the responsibility of the Environment Agency,” he said, eliciting laughter around the table.
John Golding from the Cabinet Office’s Public Services Network team suggested that the co-operation agenda should be driven by senior leaders: “There is so much to do, there are cutbacks, we become inward looking, so when we have a problem we don’t immediately think: ‘Who should I go and talk to?’ But when you do, you get some wins out of it,” he said.
Saving money
All departments are under sustained pressure to achieve efficiency savings, and the MoJ’s Scott believes one of the obstacles to greater collaboration is the issue of where savings should accrue: the fact that the savings created by one department are often harvested by another “creates a barrier,” he said, arguing that “it needs something above the departments to broker that.”
Nonetheless, making savings is a necessity, and that means delivering services in a new way: “If things have got to change, you need evidence to make those changes, whether it is evidence about stopping doing something or doing it in a different way. That might be through digital in order to cut your costs or to better manage demand,” said Coughlan.
She offered examples of how it is possible to cut costs through customer-centred service design. Some councils, she pointed out, are meeting with the families of children with special educational needs to find out which services are absolutely necessary to them. Meanwhile, in Southampton an outreach programme aimed at groups which weren’t recycling efficiently saved £1m from the local authority’s waste budget.
Other attendees suggested that making service delivery points more intuitive could reduce the number of queries and errors. “If we design things the way people want, our customers will feel less need to keep asking us for reassurance,” said HMRC’s Smith.
“The key is the behavioural change,” said Joy Bramfitt-Wanless from DWP – and that’s fostered by services that users find helpful as well as accessible: she cited the concepts behind Universal Credit, designed to ensure that people are never worse off after taking a job.
Stuart Tickner from the Department for Transport turned the question of whether service design can save money on its head, and suggested that poor design will squander cash: “We are developing a smart card scheme, and if we don’t address passengers’ needs and make it more attractive than what exists, it simply will not be used – which would be very embarrassing and a waste of public money,” he said.
Turning customer insight into better services
Gathering more data by involving more users will not improve service design unless departments embed that knowledge into policymaking: “We are talking about institutional behaviour change. Chucking data at people doesn’t change their behaviour,” said Parnell. “Do insights just stay in a report, or do you try to present them in a way that is engaging and that can be socialised throughout the organisation?”
Lucy Lowton from DWP’s ‘Insight’ team suggested that there is more than one way to get policymakers to act on customer insight information: “It is a horses for courses approach. It ranges from cost-benefit calculations for the people who want to see how it is going to stack up in big numbers terms, to the experience of the individual – seeing a screen shot of somebody having a horrific experience with something you have designed. We have done live streaming of user testing so you can watch it in real time.”
Taking services out of the old paper-based world and simply putting them into a digital format will not by itself effect the kind of transformational change that government is seeking. Lowton argued that only by putting citizens’ needs and interests at the heart of service design can that objective be attained: “Often what we are trying to achieve is behaviour change, so we don’t want to simply replicate old models with new, digital content,” she said. “We want to do something that is more fundamentally transformative. That is a powerful reason for us to get some really new, fresh insight."
Chair: Matt Ross, editor, Civil Service World