OVERVIEW

2024 is my year for upskilling! I’ve long been wanting to transition my professional career into customer service design. This year, I did the IDEO U online course Human-Centred Service Design. Here are the results.

DESIGN PROJECT

I designed a service that tracks the progress of patients as they work with a physical therapist to recover from an injury, during their rehabilitation process.

Currently, patients don’t count with tools to visualise progress, keep a record of improvement or know if a patient is making a good recovery following a rehabilitation programme, other than anecdotally. Often, patients feel that it’s hard to maintain consistency between physiotherapy sessions and there's no ‘finish line’.

Creating a progress tracking service/tool will enable patients and physiotherapists to:

Measure the recovery progress and establish new goals
Record what's working and what's not and how the patient feels during the process
Improve communication patient-physiotherapist (have a common starting point for each session)
Patient's adherence to the process

HYPOTHESIS

Patients that rely on a tool to track their rehabilitation progress and communicate with their physiotherapist have a faster and better recovery experience and report feeling supported, especially during the tough days of the healing process.

THE PROBLEM

How might we improve the healing journey for patients recovering from an injury to enable sustained progress?

IDEAL CUSTOMER

Young professionals who look after their health, exercise regularly and are committed to improving physically and mentally. They have recently experienced a roadblock in their athletic progress - an injury they are working to heal.

Persona profile outlining the ideal customer for the service.

What do they value?

Good health, an active lifestyle, nurturing their body and mind, time and progress.

Why do they love this service? Why do they keep coming back?

They can see that the efforts they are putting into their recovery are progressing in the right direction. They feel committed and inspired to get back to their normal activity levels, even when some days in the process don’t go well.

What primary need does the service meet? Are there other needs being met as well?

Primary: Visualising and tracking progress. Counting with a plan of action for their recovery. Secondary: Support from their Physiotherapist.

INTERVIEWS

As part of the insight generation process for this project, I interviewed a physiotherapist and a patient.

Service provider: The physiotherapist delivering the service and his experience with patients and observations in general. I’d like to learn about his approach to rehabilitation and the systems used to measure progress.

Key insights | physiotherapist

Customer: A patient who has fully recovered from injury using the services. I’d like to learn about her experiences, how hard it was and how she felt throughout the process. Also, how long it took to recover, how she heard about it. What would she improve and what was great? Would she comeback if needed?

Key insights | Patient

STAKEHOLDERS MAP

The stakeholders map identifies the people who can influence the design project and the relationships between them. Mapping the relevant people allows to improve the stakeholder engagement and focus on relationship-building with important partners within the organisation during the design process.

For whom is this service design?

Customers: Young professionals experiencing an injury.

Physiotherapist: Health professional delivering the service.

Business owner: Decision-maker. Owns the physiotherapy practice.

Staff: Look after front-of-house customer interactions, run back-of-house processes and overall business maintenance.

THE MOMENTS OF THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

The following customer journey map outlines the different moments the patient goes through as they experience the service.

MOMENTS THAT MATTER

The most meaningful moments have been highlighted in the map above and further detailed below. Each of these moments represents an opportunity to deliver a unique experience and solve a problem the patient has encountered in a way that makes them feel special, supported and empowered.

PROTOTYPING A MOMENT

The moment l prototyped is called "Journal my progress". It's when the patient logs the rehabilitation exercises, any changes in pain levels and discomfort, his or her thoughts, emotions and questions for the physiotherapist.

This moment is an all-digital user experience that records aspects of the ‘at-home’ rehabilitation process using a simple, yet practical app to visualise the progress the patient is making.

The data captured in this moment will later be discussed in-person with the therapist in the following session, where questions will also be answered.

STORYBOARD | UX CONCEPT FOR APP

I hope to learn from prototyping this moment:

The type of interactions I need to include in the service.
The most essential app functions to cover performance and emotional aspects.
The right number of prompts and information and to discover the process flow behind the service.

The storyboard below showcases how the service moment would ideally look, end-to-end.

This service takes place between physiotherapy sessions. It provides patient support when the therapist can't be there and helps the patient track his/her progress, questions and feelings. It helps visualise the rehabilitation process.

CUSTOMER SERVICE BLUEPRINT

The service blueprint helps to consider all the elements visible to the customer and those that happen ‘behind the scenes’. These include people, space, technology and internal processes that work together to perform a task or evoke an emotion for the customer.

The blueprint below provides:

A better understanding of the entirety of the service.
The interactions between the patient and those who deliver and maintain the service.
The transfer of information and responsibilities.
An outline based on which the experience can further improve.

THE IDEAL REVIEW

Crafting an ideal review for the service is a powerful exercise to identify what I hope to achieve with the improved service and the emotional value that the human-centric approach can create.

CONCLUSIONS

Through this design process I learned that my professional and academic backgrounds served me well as foundational knowledge to further develop my design skills and apply them to other areas of design thinking.

Customer service design is about identifying and predicting the customer’s needs. It’s solving a problem before the customer knows he/she will encounter it. It’s a human-centric design process grounded in a deep understanding of the people who use a service.

Considering the experiences before and after the customer encounters our service is essential, as both ends of the journey (pre-experience and post-experience) influence the customer perception of the service experience.

A customer service design can be viewed as staging a movie, one where the customer is the protagonist and all the aspects of the experience have been designed accordingly to provide memorable ‘moments that matter’. These moments become an extension of the brand essence and further increase the mental associations in the customer’s mind between the organisation and the brand.

Staging a customer experience includes stimulating all five senses. There are opportunities for creativity and competitive differentiation in doing so.

Gaining deep insights into the customer is essential for the process of designing a customer service that is relevant, unique and appropriate. The insights collection can be done through observation, interviews with both customers and staff and benchmarking within similar or different industry providers.

Prototyping ideas can be done using multiple methods, some include storyboarding, role playing, body storming, brainstorming, floor planning/diaorama, physical objects, mockups and wireframes. These processes should represent a quick, unpolished execution of the service idea, but should provide enough information for testing with the target audience and collecting valuable feedback.

Validating the design outcomes is important for the successful execution and continuous improvement of the service.

NEXT STEPS

In the next few months, I’m going to continue upskilling in user experience service design, building on the foundations I already have and will design the brand identity, UI and UX for the tracking progress app outlined in this project.