Investing in Service Design – Real World Metrics

Services are everywhere, a part of modern daily life that we interact with daily. Inefficient service processes across all industries cost businesses hidden time and money. It also negatively impacts people’s satisfaction with a service, including customers and employees in service roles. By upgrading to an optimum service design, a company or organization can maximize its investment. The first step is to understand how people use a service and where they struggle.

Using outdated systems and manual processes negatively impacts productivity, communication, and hinders the speed that tasks can be accomplished. When a service is not efficient, too much effort is spent by departments to resolve support tickets, answer phone calls, and manage emails. Generally, service users at a job don’t have a choice in the technology they must use for work. When a system is difficult to use, users are left feeling frustrated. Long term, this affects job satisfaction, workplace reputation, and loyalty rates.

At the beginning of a human-centered design process, designers evaluate existing systems and learn how services and tasks are performed. Service design incorporates real people into the process and is influential in decision making. By talking to stakeholders and actual end users, designers learn about their existing processes and workflows to design for how they accomplish tasks. We uncover themes, pain points, and areas of breakdown that prevent people from accomplishing goals and being most productive.

During both the discovery and requirements phases of the design process, designers work to help businesses and organizations prioritize metrics that are important to success. As part of an iterative process, parts of a service can then be measured for improvement. Using this information, the potential value of an improved service can be calculated.

There are different types of metrics a designer can use to measure the performance of a service or software system. In modern digital touch points, powerful capabilities exist for analyzing metrics and leveraging reporting to empower business stakeholders to make informed decisions. These types of analytics are critical for measuring system performance, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business success metrics. How can we measure a design to understand its effectiveness?

For example, after learning about user pain points and observing them working with existing systems, we can establish a baseline of how long it takes users to perform certain tasks. By creating an interactive prototype that addresses design problems, we can perform usability tests with real users to capture a predictive return on investment with estimated time and money savings. This can help envision gains to be seen through an improved service design. How does this look in the real world? Let’s review some scenarios that might be familiar.

Badly Designed Technology Service Touch Points Waste Time

Kelly accesses a software system once a day as part of her job. The design is confusing and it’s hard for people to figure out how to use it—especially new hires.

• It takes her 5 minutes to concentrate and perform one daily task. This baseline measurement estimates she spends 25 minutes per week on the task.
• After addressing pain points and redesigning the application, usability testing shows on average that users can perform the same task in 2 minutes.
• This reduces time spent by 85% and saves 13 hours each year per user. If there are 150 employees like Kelly, this works out to a potential annual savings of 1,950 hours.
• If the average employee salary is $70 per hour, the value of this time equates to $136,500.

Outdated Systems Slow People Down

John uses a software system critical to his work as a service provider and spends a lot of his day using the interface. The software is outdated and pages load extremely slow.

• While going about his day and performing his top tasks, it’s estimated he spends an average of 16 seconds waiting for pages to refresh.
• If he experiences this on 30 pages per day, he spends about 8 minutes of his workday waiting for the screen.
• This equals 40 minutes per week or 2,080 minutes (roughly 35 hours) per year.
• If the average hourly rate for John’s position is $50 per hour, the value of this time equals $1,750 annually.
• If his company upgrades to a new system and reduces page load from 16 seconds to 3, that’s an improvement of 137%!

In a large organization—if there’s hundreds of employees experiencing the same as John—the value of this time is exponential! By improving page performance, John is not only more productive and engaged but he’s a lot happier, too.

Inefficient Searching Costs Time and Money

Marion works in a busy and stressful IT department as a support representative providing service to users working in a stressful environment.

• Each day, the department receives about 100 tickets.
• On average, 10 of them ask questions about getting email to work on a smartphone. There is a tutorial on the company intranet, but its poor interface design and search experience means employees aren’t finding it and go straight to IT instead.
• If IT representatives spend an average of 5 minutes each time to answer this question, that equals 50 minutes per day or 216 hours per year.
• If the average support person’s hourly rate is $35 per hour, that equals a value of $7,560 spent annually on answering one common question.
• If there’s common questions the support team answers regularly, you can imagine the costs adding up!

By implementing a new self-service software design and optimizing its search function, the IT department can decrease the frequency of common inquiries like this one. The overall quantity of tickets goes down and the speed in which other critical issues can be resolved is improved.

Measuring Technology Service Design Touch Points

Making calculations for a design’s predictive return on investment is beneficial to understand the impact of a well-designed service experience. There are different kinds of metrics that can be used for calculating hidden opportunity costs.

Time

What is the average amount of time it takes for users to perform tasks as part of providing or using a service? How easy is it for them to operate a technology system to find what they are looking for?

Money

Using estimates from the amount of time spent on tasks, what is the predictive dollar value of cost savings annually?

Work Volume

What is the number of department support tickets, emails, and phone calls received about common topics? What are the associated costs with responding to them?

User Satisfaction

Do people enjoy using the technology in a service to accomplish their tasks? Overall, does staff feel empowered in their work or held back?

Investing in Design Pays Off

Investing in service design and technology touch points can save a business or organization significant amounts of time and money long term, resulting in positive gains for your business. The design process focuses on how a service system works and all the processes in place that contribute to people getting work done. Addressing business goals and user needs, while maximizing efficiency, is captured in the beauty of a modern workflow management system and service design.

Quality designers and high-functioning teams can work together to realize maximum return on investment with effective, impactful, and high quality service and user experience design.

Image Credits: Featured photos in this post are from Her Creative Studio.

Categories: Business, Service Design, User Experience