Our approach to service design

Using a customer-centric approach to service design, organisations can create services that improve the user experience, de-risk investment decisions and breakdown silos to share understanding between teams of their role and challenges, and collaborate to find solutions. Download our approach to service design to learn where we’ve done it before, from designing virtual care for a major tertiary hospital provider in Australia, to transforming the HR services of a global service provider.

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Where user needs and organisational services misalign

As organisations, we tend to categorise the things we do in a way that works for us. They provide a neat filing system to organise all our people, systems, policies and processes into groups that make sense for us to deliver. The problem is, for our users, a service is one continuous set of actions towards an end goal, regardless of who is providing it. That is radically different from how most organisations see services. When we think about services in this way, they tend to be much longer and involve other teams and sometimes other organisations.

The challenges of this disconnect can be seen across a number of sectors, such as healthcare, support services, and retail, and leads to a poor user experience. Services that aren’t designed to align with the user can mean there is a lack of accountability for the outcome and important parts of the user journey can fall between the cracks, leading to users becoming frustrating navigating a system that doesn’t make sense to them.

For organisations, this fragmented service can make it difficult to manage costs as handoffs during the customer journey create inefficiencies and waste. It can also lead to poor investment decisions as soloed internal teams can create conflicted processes and priorities.

Putting users at the heart of service design

Instead, by starting with the user first, organisations can create services that improve the user experience, de-risk investment decisions and breakdown silos to share understanding between teams of their role and challenges, and collaborate to find solutions. This means the user is kept at the forefront of design through a rigorous understanding of their needs and wants.

Transforming your services for user centricity, value and resilience

As experts in organisational health, we are well placed to design services that are practical and can be implemented with minimal disruption. We understand how the components of a system, including its governance, policy, culture and infrastructure function and interact to deliver impactful services.

At Q5 we use a 4-stage approach to service design which allows us to examine challenges holistically, placing individual issues with a broader context:

1. Understand – Listen to the experiences of people and analyse service-usage data to discover how services are interacted with today
2. Align on ambition – Articulate a common desired-future for the service, based on what we have discovered, and tie it to the strategy
3. Design and pilot the future – Ideate on how might we get there, map our future service and pilot subsections of the service to learn and iterate through feedback
4. Realign – Define, prioritise and plan the activities required to establish the new service including leadership, ways of working, operating model and capability requirements

Download our approach to service design here, to learn where we’ve done it before, from designing virtual care for a major tertiary hospital provider in Australia to transforming the HR services of a global service provider.