Service by design
Why good design is at the heart of good engagement
“Designing is not an option,” insists Clive Grinyer, head of service design at the Royal College of Art. “People are always making decisions about how they service their customers or how they want to change things. They are designing it – they’re just usually doing it unconsciously.”
Grinyer believes that making organisations more conscious of the role of design in developing their services can have a transformative impact on the quality of those services. And he doesn’t just talk the talk: along with groups of Masters students, Grinyer has worked with several housing providers on real world projects to change the design of their services and improve their customers’ experiences.
Securing resident buy-in
At north-east association Believe Housing, Grinyer and his team were brought in not specifically to improve customer engagement, but rather to help bring down the organisation’s carbon footprint. However, to do this effectively, the most important part was to get residents to buy in to a transformative and hugely disruptive retrofit programme.
Having previously installed heat pumps which later had to be removed and which had actually resulted in higher energy bills for many residents, Believe was looking for a different way to achieve its aims. For Grinyer, this is a demonstration of how engagement with people is at the heart of all service delivery, and how big changes can only be successful if the process is collaborative.
Speaking about the impact of major retrofit projects, which many housing associations are at various stages of implementing to meet their net zero-carbon obligations, Grinyer explains: “The organisation [might] see it as beneficial and helpful, but for the people and the residents it can be incredibly disruptive, and disorientating. What we do is help them understand the real people they are designing for, help them see it from their perspective. And people are actually really good at that: once you give them permission and once you give them some of the basic tools.
Clive Grinyer
Head of Service Design, Royal College of Art
“Trying stuff out and learning why it doesn’t work [is] incredibly powerful. If something fails, that’s an immense learning most people are so scared about. But to prototype and experiment with people is a really important part of the design process and one you have to go through.”
Realise how to do things differently
“Let’s understand the customer, let’s live through a day in their life, let’s live through the kind of process you want them to go through and then you’ll see and you’ll realise yourself how you have to do it differently. And then we can work together to have lots of ideas and construct a new process that will hopefully be a lot more successful. That’s the essence of service design: we’re using design methods that we might use to design a product, but we’re using it to design these kinds of experiences.”
In essence, it boils down to the difference between a customer or resident feeling they are having something done to them or by them. From an organisation’s point of view, this is about realising that the engagement piece is not just an add-on.
“If you don’t understand that it’s a piece of customer engagement – that there is something you have to do and it’s not just sending them an email or sending them a flyer or a brochure or something; that it’s about really truly engaging with them and seeing it from their point of view – you waste a lot of money, you waste a lot of time and you’re often unsuccessful at the end of your change process,” says Grinyer.
Learn from failure
The other key ingredients to using a design approach to change how you implement services, according to Grinyer, are joined-up thinking within an organisation and the ability to accept failure and learn from what doesn’t work.
On the first of these, he believes that people have tended to view engagement as “an IT problem” or “a new piece of software”. He explains: “We need to do more than that and see it differently, as a journey that the organisation and individuals go on. And if nothing else, it helps them be more collaborative and work together, rather than have different departments within an organisation just say ‘well, it's my responsibility’.”
Part of the process
On accepting failure, Grinyer says that design is a necessarily iterative process: “Trying stuff out and learning why it doesn’t work [is] incredibly powerful. If something fails, that’s an immense learning most people are so scared about. But to prototype and experiment with people is a really important part of the design process and one you have to go through.”
At Believe, Grinyer’s team designed four energy-saving journeys for four different types of customer groups to go on. The association supported residents to launch community groups focused on improving energy efficiency, as well as a network of ‘Be Green’ volunteers to help their peers along on their journeys towards better sustainability.
The end product is a group of customers who feel they have a genuine role to play in a transformation journey, and – hopefully – an organisation that is moving closer to its net zero-carbon aims.
People have tended to view engagement as “an IT problem” or “a new piece of software”.
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