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Eileen Olson, Division Manager, Contra Costa County Employment and Human Services Department
Mindset, Innovation, Empathy and Excellent Customer Service Delivery
San Francisco Human Services Agency’s Innovation Office
Eileen Olson EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Service Design is an approach to programmatic improvements that integrates the use of various methodologies to raise the performance of an organization through an end-to-end design of the human experience. The City and County of San Francisco’s Human Services Agency (HSA) recently used the Service Design approach to design and facilitate successful changes to its organization that has resulted in performance and experience improvements for agency customers and staff. The Service Design approach aligns with the strategic direction of Contra Costa County’s Employment and Human Services Department (EHSD) due to the shared focus on customer satisfaction and process improvement and performance. The implementation of a Service Design approach at EHSD would likely lead to similar performance improvements as those realized at HSA.
Mindset, Innovation, Empathy and Excellent Customer Service Delivery
San Francisco Human Services Agency’s Innovation Office
Eileen Olson
Introduction
Change is inevitable in every organization and customers, staff, and processes are impacted by these changes. On one side, organizations are subjected to budget fluctuations, staff turnover, legislative mandates, and other factors. At the same time, they are also faced with higher service delivery expectations from customers who are now more comfortable than ever with technology and are exposed every day to services that provide immediate response such as online banking and DMV self-service. Whether customers are accessing services through the Internet or while visiting an office, customers expect fast, convenient, accessible, and streamlined services.
To meet these challenges, organizations are developing strategies and launching performance improvement initiatives. Contra Costa County’s Employment and Human Services Department (EHSD) has identified customer service, staff retention, improved processes, and the deployment of new technology as strategic priorities to fulfill its mission.
The City and County of San Francisco’s Human Services Agency (HSA) has similar strategic objectives and has gone on to address them by establishing an Innovation Office. Within the Innovation Office, HSA adopted Service Design to transform customer and staff experience and process interactions and improve organizational performance. The Innovation Office utilizes a set of tools and methodologies, among them, Lean Process Improvement and Human Centered
customer facing and back office internal process), and touchpoints (e.g., customer lobbies, websites, email, postal mail, etc.) are integrated to deliver efficient and effective service. Touchpoints are made easier and more accessible by focusing on the needs of clients as well as employees. Having deep empathy for clients’ daily pain points and enabling front line staff to experiment with improvements, lead to measurable change. These changes may include eliminating unnecessary activities.
When comparing the objectives of Service Design with EHSD’s mission, vision, and values, the alignment of the two are readily apparent. EHSD’s mission is to deliver quality services to ensure access to resources that support and empower individuals to achieve self-sufficiency. Its core values are to provide exceptional customer experience, be responsive, respectful and appreciative of staff and their efforts, readily embrace change, to be strategic thinkers and to look towards innovation and technology.
EHSD has continually looked for ways to improve its business model. Through the years, EHSD has implemented a range of service delivery projects and business process improvement initiatives. Examples include video conferencing, call centers, texting, websites, lobby management, kiosks and other customer centric and process improvement projects that have been put in place.
Additionally, various strategic initiatives and work plans have been developed to support EHSD goals and are still being used to foster process improvement. One strategic initiative is the pursuit of the highest level of customer service in all programs and offices. Another important strategy is the leveraging of technology to support business process improvement with an emphasis on customer-facing, automated solutions that improve service delivery and increase efficiencies
with the needs of customers in mind. Recently, EHSD’s Workforce Development Board began using Human Centered Design to implement changes that could extend to other EHSD Bureaus.
HSA’s Innovation Office Experience
The HSA Innovation Office was established in 2014 following the completion of a project where the non-profit Code for America was engaged. Marc Hébert, one of the Code for America team members, joined HSA and went on to initiate the use of Service Design to improve performance as well as clients’ and employees’ experiences with service delivery. The HSA Innovation Office serves as an internal consultant to HSA with a charter to improve customer and staff experience with service delivery through innovation. For HSA, Innovation = empathy + experimentation + evaluation. A combination of methodologies and toolkits are in use at HSA including Visual Facilitation, Human Centered Design (Stanford d. school), Lean Process Improvement (Denver Peak Academy), social and behavioral science, results based accountability, and qualitative and quantitative metrics.
Success and Challenges
Initially, HSA used an educational approach to facilitate organizational change. However, this approach was not as successful as a later approach where knowledge was transferred by having the Innovation Office work directly with the staff on their improvement projects.
As part of this approach, staff were given permission to make changes and try out ideas to improve customer and employee experiences. However, staff assigned to the process improvement projects found it challenging to manage the time and mental commitment to the work and stay engaged when faced with urgent agency work.
Overview of Methodologies Used
Lean Management supports continuous improvement and implements small, incremental changes to improve efficiency and quality. It looks at business processes iteratively from the end customer’s perspective and eliminates steps that do not provide value until all waste is eliminated. This leads to cost savings and efficient service delivery.
Denver Peak Academy, in its implementation of Lean Management, believes that staff who are the experts in their own areas can be positive agents of change to innovate their own jobs. Lean Management relies on staff to own the processes, take responsibility, and continually improve the processes. Staff feels empowered, heard, energized, and valued. It is important that staff recognize and accept that there may be areas beyond their power of influence or control, which may be due to constraints or boundaries that require the agreement of impacted stakeholders.
Human Centered Design is a design and management framework that develops solutions to problems by involving the perspective of the people who experience challenges to fill a need in all steps of the problem-solving process. HSA used this approach to fully understand people’s experiences through empathy, observation, and interaction. The agency used Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time Bound (SMART) plans in defining and implementing objectives. Existing processes and decision points were mapped, obstacles and values were identified. Unnecessary steps that are not legally required or do not provide value to the customers were eliminated. The solutions were prototyped and incrementally implemented. Some of these solutions are low cost or no cost solutions.
Each success is measured by how many people were helped (effectiveness) and how much anyone is better off (efficiency) by measuring Time, Errors, Amount and Money (TEAM) as
well as overall satisfaction. It measures how long the process takes, how many mistakes are committed, how many customers are served and how much is the cost of labor and other expenses incurred.
HSA also used the following techniques to facilitate the design of process improvements:
- Eliminating Obstacles – Clear and simple forms, instructions, checklists and ‘5S’ are some of the tools that can be used for eliminating obstacles. The term ‘5S’ stands for Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain. It is a simple, structured, repeatable method for keeping workspaces clean, organized, and safe to keep morale up and reduce cost.
- Shrink the Change – This tool involves defining the problem and repeatedly asking the question “why” to drive to the root cause of an action or problem.
- Objective vs Strategy – This tool aims to clearly differentiate and identify the objective versus the strategy to achieve it.
- WRAP- This methodology stands for Widen options, Reality, test Assumptions and assume distance, Prepare to be wrong. It explores possibilities by using ‘YES AND’ instead of ‘EITHER/OR’. It involves assumption testing by asking is anything missing. It projects into the future, corrects and improves the solution.
Recommendation
EHSD should consider Service Design as approach to strategically deliver great service and better support its staff. Service Design can be used to improve processes and promote a culture of innovative, solution-based thinking resulting in an agile, efficient, effective, and motivated work force delivering high quality services to satisfied customers.
Training on the Service Design concepts, its toolkits, and methodologies, as well as Human- Centered Design at the Stanford School, is essential. For example, it is recommended that key staff attend Lean Management and Denver Peak Academy training. These Service Design “champions” will gain techniques and skills that can be applied towards designing for performance and in doing so, spread their knowledge through the organization.
Quick successes over a short period of time are less risky and encourage engagement, momentum, and continuity. This approach also provides a positive perception of the changes. The use of Lean Management’s phased or incremental approach should be considered as organizations sometimes absorb change more rapidly in small portions than when the undertaking is a big organizational change project.
Over time, staff can initiate the improvements and need not rely on the top-down driven changes. This change in mindset will ensure sustainability and continuity.
It is likely that EHSD would see immediate results through a Service Design initiative using incremental and continuous process improvement. EHSD staff’s commitment, inherent desire to help customers, and desire to do an excellent job bodes well for the success of this endeavor.
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my thanks and appreciation to Marc Hébert of HSA’s Innovation Office who has been generous with his time and his wealth of knowledge. His enthusiasm and vision is inspiring. Special thanks also to Jason Adamek, Director of HSA's County Adult Assistance Program, and David Libunao of the HSA’s CalWORKs Service Center who both graciously shared their experiences, lessons learned, and successes in using Service Design.
References
- San Francisco’s HSA Innovation Office Website https://sfhsainnovationoffice.tumblr.com
- City and County of San Francisco Controller Office’s Lean 101 Training Power Point
- HSA HR Improvement - Service Design Workshop Website: http://hsaodteam.wixsite.com/hrimprovement/service-design-workshop
- Human Center Design Stanford D Bootcamp/Bootleg Website https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources-collections/a-virtual-crash-course-in-design- thinking
- Westword Website – “How Peak Performance is Taking Over Denver Employees”; by Laura Shunk, November 22, 2016 http://www.westword.com/news/how-peak-performance-is-taking-denver-employees-to- new-heights-
- Human Centered Design vs Design Thinking vs Service Design vs UX …. What do they all mean? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/human-centred-design-vs-thinking-service-ux-what-do- all-simonds
