Enhancing Operating Model Efficiency and User Experience Using Service Design
The Outcome and Benefits
The service design exercise highlighted high-friction areas, providing insights on how to remove bottlenecks in the operating model. In addition to streamlining the processes, there were areas of unclear roles and responsibilities, contributing to friction. The readout discussions were an opportunity for the leaders to share their thoughts in a facilitated dialogue, avoiding fiction.
As a result, in the words of our stakeholders, “we left them in a better place.”
The Background
A Federal ACIO’s Infrastructure team was transitioning to a managed services organization model to improve the efficiency of meeting the changing demands of their internal and external customers. Pivoting to the new operating model while continuing to deliver on existing commitments caused friction and fatigue among leadership. Leading the change management initiative, Agilious was tasked with evaluating the effectiveness of the operating model.
The goal of this intervention was to explore opportunities to streamline the new operating model to ultimately improve customer and employee experience resulting in improved team dynamics.
The Capabilities
Service Design
1:1 Interviews
The Approach
To help understand Agilious’ approach to this effort, consider the following scenario.
Over the past few decades, the exponential increase of digital products and services have resulted in complex ecosystems and experiences. For example, personally purchasing a book from a store is a physical shopping experience with a physical product (book). Alternatively purchasing a book from Amazon is a combination of digital (purchasing) and physical experiences (the delivery and a physical book). Thirdly, a Kindle book can be purchased from a website or an app, which is a digital experience with a digital product.
Each scenario is an integration of several components:
- Each component (whether physical or digital) needs to be designed
correctly. - All components should be integrated to have an effective and efficient experience that creates a lasting impact on the user.
Given the complexity of the ecosystem, user experiences often collapse if even one component is designed ineffectively.
Service design is a human-centered approach to creating seamless, efficient, and user-friendly services by optimizing three main components:
- Interactions
- Processes
- Experiences
In service design, the front stage represents direct user interactions, such as customer service, interfaces, and touchpoints, all of which shape the user experience. The backstage consists of internal processes, systems, and teams supporting the front stage, ensuring seamless service delivery. Aligning both stages enhances efficiency, consistency, and customer satisfaction.
The Solution
Agilious leveraged a service design approach to understand the complex ecosystem of the agency’s managed services experience. Using the front stage concept, we first drafted interview questions to understand individual perspectives on the experience when serving the customer. We then pivoted to the backstage experience to understand the interviewee’s experience when working to provide the service.
Using the data collected through 1:1 interviews with the leadership team and secondary customer data, we mapped the pain points through the different phases of the operating model.
After synthesizing the data collected through interviews and mapping exercises, we identified top themes that were impacting the employee and, therefore, the customer experience.
The findings were shared with the ACIO and the leadership team through several readout sessions, spawning detailed discussions and actions. The data-based objective exercise improved team dynamics by bringing much needed clarity and a path toward enhancing the operating model.
The Results
Identified areas of friction
Align priorities for efficiency
Improved team dynamics
