Local Government - Service Design
How might we deliver a better experience for small business owners who need council permits so that they can start trading?
WHAT & WHY
Small businesses across the state face a huge challenge when it comes to starting, growing or modifying their businesses. On average, it can take up to 200 days from the moment they start the council permits until they are ready to open.
The reason? A combination of lack of understanding of the processes involved by the business owners and, a siloed view of the process from the council staff members themselves.
It is key to say, that this is not caused by people, it’s a process problem that can be easily solved.
HOW WE HELPED
We used User Experience Design to improve the experience
We designed a four-week approach to take a multidisciplinary team from discovery to delivery. We worked as a team with the council staff members and state government representatives. We combined their government knowledge, with the customers’ experiences and our design expertise to achieve results that were:
Impactful for the business owners and employees, making it easier for both
Easy to implement in a short period of time (2 weeks) but had a vision for continuous improvement
We re-designed the program when Covid-19 started
We understood what was preventing state government and councils from doing programs online and designed a proposal that worked for both parties. Other consultancies that were delivering the program adjusted their delivery mode into our proposal that allowed for Better Approvals to reach their objective of doing 99% of Victorian councils by end of 2020.
Human-Centred Approach
Bringing a project from state government into local government can be challenging. We took a human centred design approach to ensure that we were bringing citizens and council employees on the journey.
Service Design Mindset
By mapping the end to end customer experience in a blueprint with processes, we managed to remove duplication and create smoother internal processes.
Co-design Approach
Facilitating co-design sessions with employees and users to design both sides of the experience and enable better end results.
Change Management
We asked the team to create what they thought the customer journey was. After interviewing customers, we come back and modified it based on new learnings.
THE OUTCOMES
Engaged cross-function team
The teams that worked with us during 4 weeks to design and implement the changes learned Human Centred Design and rapid prototyping, but the main change was changing their mindset to a Customer Centred and Change Agile Mindset.
Prototypes and wireframes
This included email templates, infographics and other artefacts that are used in the new experience. In most cases we also designed and built their interactive forms and webpages.
Service Blueprint
With the future customer experience, processes and tech support. It also included KPI’s and how to test, learn and iterate for each instance before investing.
Detailed report
Including insights, key opportunities outside the scope, implementation and communication plan, processes and technology requirements for the future.