Making the case for service design

Last month I wrote a post about the effect of austerity in service design where we talked about the impact of macroeconomic trends on services and the way they’re designed.

The impact of austerity in service design is often straightforward - making the case for radical, transformative service design often becomes harder. There is limited time, money and people and an ever-shortening horizon in which to make change.

So how do you make the case for service design when there might be a million other competing priorities or term decisions needed to invest in improving something? The answer is often making a financial case for the work we’re doing. Meeting budget constraint with business case.

But finance and money are often things that either we’re not taught about, kept at arm's length from or if we are, we’re often faced with methods and models that were built for nice neat products of the industrial era, not the messy, multichannel services of the 21st century.

This is the reason why I decided to study economics many years ago. Why we created our Writing Business Cases for Service Design course. 

Money is a means of communication. We use it to say what we value, what we want, and what we don't. Just as words or binary code have an exchange of meaning everytime we use them, so too does money. What our organisation spends money on tells us a lot about what we value and what’s important to us

Ultimately though, money is a constraint - most organisations have a finite amount of it and these limits have a fundamental effect on our work. To work effectively we need to think about money and spend.

Most of the time a cheaper service is a better service for users

We waste vast amounts of money answering unnecessary phone calls, emails and other queries. Lost sales or complaints that are caused because our services are not finable, usable or accessible for our users. 

We often don't spot this either because we have gotten so used to our (badly designed services) generating that amount of cost / lost revenue, or we feel the effects of these problems further up or downstream from the place where they’re caused (for example, we’ll often only see the effects a bad new customer sign up experience when we issue them a bill later on and don't have all of the correct details for them)

Bad service design is a bad way of managing demand

If you read the above sentence and thought, “but if we make our service better then everyone will use it and it’ll be more expensive!” then you are not alone.

In public service and in commercial customer support one of the greatest myths out there is that hiding a service by making it unfindable, unclear or unusable is an effective way of managing demand. It will not. What will happen instead is that our services will not be used less, but will be used by less of the people who need it most as only the most determined of users will seek out and use a service that is hard to use, or pay someone else to do it for them. Far better to use a more honest triage so that you end up with the right people in your service in the first place.

There are a lot of things we can do to build a compelling business case for change, regardless of what our role is in an organisation. But writing business cases for service design is slightly different to writing business for products or other things. Check out our writing business cases for service design course coming up in November if you’re interested in learning how to do this.

Here are 5 simple things to get you started:

1. Look for evidence of unnecessary costs or lost revenue because of bad service design

One of the greatest catch-22s in service design is that it is extremely difficult to make the case for investigating a problem if you don't already have evidence of that problem. It's the reason why many organisations will create various ‘pre-discovery’ stages, but finding problems and building evidence of change doesn’t have to be expensive. Most of the time, the evidence is all around us and freely available if we know where to look.

What to look for: drop out’s from user journeys, abandoned shopping carts, ‘how do I?’ or status chasing customer contact. Lack of representation from certain demographics in your user-base. Be sure to look for services that have low user volumes but high customer contact, or stages in services that meet this description and services that are more expensive to run than others. Treat this evidence like clues, it won't tell you what the problem is exactly, but it’s a good indication something is wrong. Once you've found a problem, go and speak to anyone you can find that can explain why this might be happening. Sit in your customer contact centre, go to your front line office or shop and watch what people do. 

Where to find it: Where you’ll find this evidence will depend on your service, but generally useful sources will be: customer contact centre volumes and reasons for contact, caseworker notes, ‘failure’ records, complaint numbers and web analytics. Don't ignore financial records too, usually someone will be able to give you a cost breakdown for different parts of your organisation. Even if this information is not organised by ‘services’ as you might understand them (it will most likely be arranged by team or business area somehow), it will no doubt tell you something about where the organisation spends its money helping you to narrow down your search for the cause of this cost.

2. Understand your current business model

To make a compelling case, we have to understand what and who our organisation cares about the most. Whoever pays for our service is the person we’ll care about most, and where we’ll put most of our effort as an organisation. Whether we think this is the right thing for our organisation to focus or not, this is where our business case is going to need to focus too.

If we make our money from funders, you can be sure that these people will be top of our list when it comes to making decisions, 

Sometimes our business model will actively harm our service (for example, being so heavily advertiser-led that our content is difficult to engage with) 

Look for evidence where this is the case, do the harms outweigh the benefits? Are there other business models that could be explored?

Make a list of who gives you money and how. Whatever case you make will need to show how you’re benefiting these customers, investors or funders. Or, if you're not (because your business model is harmful for example) how else might you make the service cheaper / more profitable?

3. Understand your funding cycle and investment patterns

Most organistions will have key budget holders who will decide what gets spent on what. These people will have limited windows in which to get access to funding for change and investment. These can be yearly, quarterly, monthly and sometimes happen as sporadic reviews of finance at any time. 

Take a look at who the budget holder for the problem is that you've identified. What do they care about? What are they worried about? What might make them feel at ease and what evidence do they need to hear from you to be convinced? 

Whilst these cycles are important to know about so that you can make your case with them, it’s important to be prepared at any time. So as part of all of your work, collect evidence of issues as you go.

And remember, Services don't obey organisational or team boundaries, neither do costs or benefits. Your investigations might lead you to realise that there are multiple teams that are affected by a problem and could benefit from a solution. 

4. Start by building a small case, if you have a small amount of evidence

The more money you ask for, the more evidence you will need. If you don't have much evidence for the problem you've spotted, ask for only a small amount of time or budget to do the thing you need to do to make your case. Slowly over time you can build your case to bigger budgets and longer periods of time. 

5. Remember that you probably don't need permission (or forgiveness!) to look for problems other people haven't found

‘Seeking forgiveness rather than asking for permission” is a privilege we can't all get access to, and a risk we can't all afford. As much as this sentence is irritating, its enduring popularity is possibly due to the fact that what we think we have express permission to do is often far smaller than what we might need ‘forgiveness’ for having done. 

It’s important to recognise what is and isn’t something that needs ‘forgiveness’ and often when we think about it, something that genuinely requires forgiveness is often far more extreme than the thing we’re contemplating doing.

Simply investigating a problem, looking for areas a service can be improved, is unlikely to be outside of anyone’s job description, whatever role they’re doing.

Or to put it another way, even if it isn’t in your job description, and this isn’t something we feel we have permission to do, taking the initiative to improve something outside of your role - so long as it doesn't have any major impacts on your work or anyone else's - is also unlikely to need ‘forgiveness’ for.  

If you’re concerned though, why not ask? 

Ask “Can I spend a couple of hours in the contact centre listening to some calls sometime this month?” 

“Could we spend some time at the end of the next sprint looking at the major reasons why customers drop off across all of the services in our org?”

Sometimes we need a ‘business case’ but don’t let the grandiose name put you off. Sometimes a business case is a short conversation, a small pitch in a meeting, or an email. Sometimes it’s a bigger strategic case made up of multiple pages and numbers and roadmaps put in front of a board or panel. Making the case for Service Design happens small and large. 

Writing business cases for Service Design is a day of learning we’ve put together to build skills and tools to make ‘that pitch’ whilst giving you some time to reflect on what you need to do to move forward. 

Our next public course runs on November 5th, tickets on sale now.