Frontline Service Design

Involving those that do the work can solve many Customer Experience Problems

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.” Jimi Hendrix

What is Frontline Service Design?

LimeBridge has have been diagnosing, redesigning and implementing operating models for many large organisations for over 20 years. We often use the human assets in an organisation to identify customer experience issues and redesign service.  It started some time ago, in customer facing operations, where a manager was exasperated that half her team members coped well with certain processes and rarely sought help or support. However, the other half did not and needed a lot of support and produced poor customer outcomes.  No data in the organisation explained these very different ways of working. 

Further research on process handling produced divergent answers for even the simplest transactions. Some hysterical conversations followed.  “Someone from Risk told us not to do that”, “When?”, “Oh a few years ago”, “Oh that was just during the merger, it’s ok now”.  It also became evident that in the confusion of these conversations, some gold nuggets began to shine through.  The best frontline operators had figured out how to do things quickly and resolve problems effectively for customers. The manager tackled one problem transaction in a workshop: the right order to do things, some suggested words, the right systems to use, the right steps to avoid compliance or policy breaches and so on.  The result was a complete, efficient, effective way that worked for everyone.  The penny dropped that the right service design was there in the collective knowledge of the operators.

In this paper we’ll explore the benefits of this process, some tricks to make it work and some examples of the results produced.

 The Benefits of this process

Customer immediacy

Many companies go to great lengths to interrogate customers though surveys, NPS ratings and focus groups. All these are great, however they are often focused on specific groups, those who respond and those with recent targeted transactions, such as a sale.  They can measure symptoms without clarifying solutions.  Meanwhile frontline staff can be interacting with up to 1000 customers a month per staff member. Frontline staff understand what’s really going on with customers and may also know the solutions to the underlying issues. Most operational centres don’t have any mechanism to understand or gather this customer data or the front-line insights to solve the problems. Tapping into this “indirect” customer insight can lead to fast, effective change.

Practice consistency

Variable and ineffective customer practices have a multitude of causes. These include high turnover of staff, lack of process definition, limited training, out of date knowledge systems, conflicting measures, risk averse design, complex systems and process management “by email”.  Service design using a handpicked selection of staff can address current issues and create designs that deliver better experiences.  Designs that staff create are easier to implement and manage because they are credible and practical and rarely involve complex system change. They also help create consistency of outcome.

Connecting Staff to digital solutions

The pace of change in digital offerings is getting faster and faster, and, in many cases has left the contact teams behind. Often the front-line teams don’t use the digital solutions and have no access to them and yet they are expected to support and promote digital.  Working with the front line to design their role and work with digital offerings connects the front line to the organisation’s channel strategy. Staff can then connect customers to the features and benefits of digital offerings.

Managing Change

Perhaps the most underappreciated benefit of front-line design is engagement. Often, prior implementations or disliked policies or complex risk controls have left the frontline feeling disempowered and frustrated by the processes they have to use with customers.  Involving frontline in some aspects of designing the interactions, with effective resolution can lift engagement.  Involved team members are seen as representatives for the change and can act as communicators and feedback points in the business. This creates an inbuilt change management strategy.

Methods in Frontline Led Design

Getting the band together

The right mix of people to undertake a design of customer interactions often means embracing diversity. Chose subject matter experts (SMEs) that are proficient, care about the role, and have a range of tenure and backgrounds. This can be hard because the best team members are often in demand, but the payback is worth it.  The design needs to be led by those proficient in effective techniques and methods.  It is not easy to challenge current thinking, apply structured design techniques and to design to the right level of detail.  Another trick is in deciding who not to involve.  Counterintuitively, leaving out quality assurance, training experts, or team leaders can help challenge current thinking and speed the process because often these groups are those most anchored in current thinking.  Those roles are often vital reviewers of the output but expect them to defend current thinking and processes. 

Reprogramming

The design team need to understand the current state and the problems they have to solve.  Some form of process that helps them observe and understand what is actually happening for customers and the implications makes the challenge clear.  This allows frontline staff to see their own operation through a new customer centric lens. It also helps to use design thinking concepts through stories and exercises. We use a range of examples that illustrate challenges in other organisations and have some famous stories like the infamous Red dot, and one we call the leg of lamb story.  These are used to illustrate how bad designs can become embedded in an organisation. This helps change the thinking of the design team and prepares them to challenge the current design.

 Design Principles and Techniques

Better service designs emerge when the knowledge of front-line staff is supplemented with proven design principles and techniques.  For example, a simple principle we apply we call “leaky funneling”.  This is the idea of starting with the most likely of a range of options but using questioning technique to narrow down the problem in the most efficient way.  This is a great technique to help a group sequence work and create the most logical and efficient flow in a process.  It helps if the design facilitators have a range of techniques and principles to apply that have been agreed prior to the workshops.  We find it best if each technique has a memorable name that helps the group understand and apply it.  (Contact us if you want more examples of these techniques).  The best designs emerge when around 15-20 of these techniques are applied consistently.

Example Front Line Led Design Outcomes

Process elimination

At a major health insurer, SMEs were investigating the process of “suspension” where a person travelling overseas can save money by suspending their policy and premiums.  The customer had to ‘prove’ the travel by providing an itinerary that was emailed to a 10-person processing team in another state to log and store.  One frontliner said “I cannot understand why we even do this. As soon as the policy is suspended, they cannot claim anyway, and we never access those itineraries! There is no risk if we just believe the customer”. 

This insight led to elimination of the whole process.  It resulted in a huge saving of customer effort, fewer delays, less frustration and a faster, cheaper process.

Targeted digital

An organisation had low traffic to their digital offering and the problem became clear - frontline did not use their digital product, were not trained well in it and feared it would take their jobs.  SMEs suggested that IT provide an emulator for staff.  After a quick trial, staff understood the value of the app for customers. The design team created a process that embraced the app with language like “the quickest way to get your X changes is to go to the app, I can send you a text to logon now and I’ll show you how to…”.  The change was trained out by the frontline design team and digital usage soared. Any short-term handle time increase was more than off-set by the drop in call volume. 

Supercharging sales

One insurance firm had sales conversion and results flagging extended call times and low conversion rates. Cue the frontline design.  The existing process was to laboriously gather detailed information needed by underwriting (and marketing) for a quote and send it to the customer.  The design team chose to turn the process on its head.  The core idea was to spend as little time as possible to give an estimate and only invest further time to close the sale when a customer liked the price and was likely to close the sale.  A better, quicker quote process tripled the conversion rate, lowered AHT dramatically and customers felt their time was respected so satisfaction also improved.

Omni Channel Troubleshooting

A broadband support team was experiencing long, ineffective, router problem calls – a poor experience for both customer and company - high-cost and high frustration.  The design workshop wanted to cut through all the technobabble.  One frontline team member had been creating his own GIFs (low bandwidth moving images that are ideal for mobile phones to view) to show the best way to solve problems for each device.  Other suggestions followed such as, “Put the device instructions on a fridge magnet”, “and one lady asked me why there wasn’t a crucial information sticker on the device”.  All these suggestions were implemented.  Call volumes and complaints fell dramatically as customers were empowered to self-help. Texting the GIFS to customers during the call reduced call backs and reduced handle time dramatically.  The frontline designers won an internal innovation award.

Summary

Programmes like these can be hard to get off the ground because they seem like they are occupying valuable resources, or that other areas are “looking at it”.  However, these techniques embed powerful change management techniques such as involvement and change “credibility”. They also help increase staff engagement with the business. When executives realise what they need is a refresh or stepped change in the way they provide service, this process of working with your frontline to redesign how you interact with your customer can reap major returns. Benefits have included lowering the cost to serve, improving customer satisfaction and increasing staff engagement. 

If you’re interested in this effective customer improvement method, please get in contact with Peter or David  at info@limebridge.com.au or call 03 9499 3550 or 0438 652 396.