Service design panel: How employee experience shapes customer outcomes

Here at Clearleft we talk a lot about ‘internal service design’. We find it’s a really useful shorthand for a vital facet of the employee experience - the tools and processes that staff are required to use in their working day. Recently we explored this often overlooked area, and its impact on the customer’s experience, with four leading service designers:

• Amy Blackwell (JPMorgan Chase & Co.)
• Clive Grinyer (Royal College of Art, Barclays)
• Jesse Lewis (Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC, Disney Online)
• Seb Chung (Kainos, Genomics England, EDF)

In a thoroughly enjoyable discussion, we explored how empowering and engaging employees can lead to better outcomes for customers. We heard about how a ‘golden pineapple’ invigorated staff training, and how the freedom to surprise led to remarkable outcomes. Above all, we learned how to ‘keep the spirit alive amongst employees’ for the benefit of everyone involved.

The symbiotic relationship between employee experience and customer experience:

It’s clear that the employee experience directly impacts the customer experience, and vice versa. Addressing one is crucial for improving the other. Poorly designed internal experiences can hamper the customer experience. Conversely, when employees are empowered with the right tools and processes, it can lead to much better customer experiences.

When employees have a positive experience and feel empowered to serve customers, they are better able to empathise with customer needs and deliver great service. Negative employee experiences can lead to a disconnect or even disdain for customers, leading to poor customer service and a bad customer experience.

Clive: “I've been in environments where employees had a strong dislike for customers, largely due to the inadequate and poorly designed tools they were given. In this case, we shared with the company the research and insights that we'd found out about those customers. We found out how poor the customer experience was for them, because the employees in the call centre found them difficult. Ironically, these customers were among the most valuable. Sharing things like personas and insight research made the customers come to life. Staff actually began to be more empathetic and compassionate to the reasons why customers might be stressed, and that connection made a huge difference."

The importance of empowering and engaging employees:

Employees not having the autonomy or the ability to change circumstances can really have a negative impact. Conversely giving employees permission and opportunities for exploration and creativity are key drivers of better customer outcomes. When employees feel invested in the customer experience, they are better able to deliver great service.

Amy: “I did some work with a luxury hotel group, and they had a really interesting policy that I loved. They called it ‘the freedom to surprise’. Anyone who was employed at the hotel had the freedom to surprise a customer. So if a housekeeper sees that you've taken an orange back from breakfast, then you might come back to your room to a bowl of oranges. Or the concierge knows you're going to see a particular show, then they might organise for the soundtrack to be on your pillow at turn down. Having that flexibility and that freedom to just do a nice thing resulted directly in a delightful and unexpected experience for the customer.”

Seb: “A few years ago I was working with a well known hotel brand who wanted to bring design thinking into the hotel. We were coaching staff in identifying opportunities to improve the guest experience and creating prototypes. They loved it. They were able to deviate from stringent brand guidelines. And they were able to solve problems and come up with ideas that previously they wouldn't have been able to do."

Using immersive experiences and real-world testing to build empathy:

Listening to employee insights and frustrations can uncover critical customer experience problems that may not be visible otherwise. Having employees use products in real-world conditions or take on the perspective of vulnerable customers can foster deeper empathy and understanding. This approach helps employees recognise how the work of different teams affects one another, enhancing the entire end-to-end experience.

Amy: "It comes back to the point about building empathy and being able to comprehend the entire end-to-end experience in order to understand what your piece of the puzzle means for teams downstream or upstream of where you are.”

Using anecdotes, quotes, and personas keeps the employee experience top of mind throughout the design process.

Amy: “Collect anecdotes throughout research. If you get an amazing quote, try to keep that alive in people's minds. Keep reiterating this terrible thing that you've found to make sure that we don't do that again. You can also use personas to bring people to life as you're going through the design process."

There is a power in grounding design decisions in the real experiences of employees.

Amy: “You can tie a negative experience [and a design decision] back to a real person, and what they have to deal with every day, and say can we make that stop?"

There is gold dust in unsolicited customer feedback, especially community driven message boards and forums. There you will find first-hand reports of the frustrations, also perhaps some solutions that you didn't know existed. All for free (to the organisation in question) - setting that up purposefully would be hugely costly given how much time and effort it would be to commission that kind of research.

Clive: “I remember Orange (Telecom) customers formed their own website designed to solve problems they had connecting to broadband, and Orange tried to close it down. When Orange realised that's where all of the problems were being aired (and they overcame their fear of that) orangeproblems.com became the first thing that executives looked at in the morning, and then got people to go and fix the problems as quickly as they could. That feedback loop is usually prevented.”

Jesse: “I think we’re looking at a more enlightened view nowadays. I remember BT Openworld launching its broadband channels and someone set up a 'BT Open Woe' website to talk about issues with the service. Eventually BT took that on themselves. It's a similar story for Dunkin’ Donuts. Whereas now, from those stories which have become almost mythical, it’s a part of contemporary practice.”

Breaking down organisational silos and promoting collaboration:

Just collecting employee feedback is not enough. Organisations need to invest resources to address the deeper, more systemic organisational challenges.

Seb: “You need to have the resources to fix the really gnarly problems. Sometimes there’s a lot of lip service, or effort into solving smaller problems, to maybe ignore some of the bigger ones. Perhaps because these are at a higher pay grade, or they're more deeply rooted in the organisational challenges. But they're the ones that need to be fixed, and we need to invest to do that."

One of the keys to facilitating great customer experience through internal service design is breaking down internal silos: facilitating communication, and promoting shared ownership across different teams. Addressing the root causes of potential problems benefits both sides of the coin.

Seb: “I find that the reasons for a poor customer experience often relate to the things that cause poor employee experiences. Lack of organisational strategy or problems with the culture, like silos. These create problems within the customer experience, because there's inherent issues in the organisation, and the employees get disgruntled and dissatisfied because, ultimately, they want to do a good job, and they want to do good work."

It can be easier said than done, but engaging with people outside of one's immediate team and promoting awareness through good conversation can go some way to breaking out of silos.

Jesse: “It’s those water cooler moments, those coffee opportunities, exchange sessions. Invite people you wouldn't normally invite to meetings. Have a chat and they’ll tell you what they think works and doesn't work. The way to forestall executives parachuting in and making decisions you're not aware of, is to promote and raise awareness through good conversation. Because all good design starts with a chat, basically."

Internal communication and alignment is vital, especially in global organisations. It’s important to remind people what the market imperatives are in another location, and how these impact you if you're producing something remotely for that market, or sharing work from one time zone to another.

Jesse: "I think it comes down to internal ceremonies, the equalisation of roles in a team. HSBC was so widely distributed across so many territories, they took the decision that designers, product owners and engineers within cross functional teams would be able to represent each other, and therefore had equal control. But you had to take options and choices to each other so you could make informed decisions. The accountability was at every level, and that made such a huge difference to the success. It meant you had highly functional, highly motivated teams delivering into a shared kind of ambition, and that came to all areas."

Investing in the team, not just the project:

Investing in teams and allowing them to explore and discover would help resolve issues and create broader alignment across large, complex organisations.

Clive: "We gave people who took part in customer experience training a plastic golden pineapple. And everybody wanted one, so we accidentally created a behavioural nudge for people to come and do the training. It really worked."

Jesse: “As teams have become larger and more complex, I’ve found the financial support for those teams being associated directly with product. Therefore, the teams are providing a service in the traditional sense. They're there to design a facet or a feature or a product, and all of that time has to be accounted for. And an unlimited budget would not necessarily be used to expand that team, but to invest in the team itself, so that they have the time to explore avenues of interest, and undertake discovery for themselves. It's building in that capacity to pull in collaborators from across the business to work with new ideas and improve understanding.”

What you can do:

As service designers we often focus more on the direct customer experience, and don’t pay enough attention to monitoring and sustaining the employee experience throughout the process.

Clive: "It's a really difficult part of the problem. We're so much at the front-end of creating change that we often don’t pay enough attention to monitoring and keeping the spirit alive amongst employees.”

• Identify and address the root causes of employee frustrations, rather than just symptoms. This could involve fixing broken tools, processes, or organisational silos.
• Empower employees with more autonomy and the "freedom to surprise" customers, giving them the ability to be creative and go above and beyond.
• Use immersive experiences and real-world testing to help employees and leadership empathise with the challenges customers face.
• Collect and amplify employee anecdotes, stories, and feedback to keep the "colleague experience" top of mind throughout the design process.
• Continuously monitor and iterate on the employee experience, just as they would the customer experience.

The key is to treat the employee experience with the same rigour and user-centred design approach as the customer experience, recognising its critical impact on overall service delivery.

For more on service design, have a listen to our podcast or pop along to our Service Design Breakfast Club.