Читать книгу Good Services - Lou Downe - Страница 26

The first step in providing a good service is making sure that your user can find your service. This might sound simple, but it’s a lot harder to do than it sounds.

Staff at a small rural UK county council discovered this to their horror in late 2016 when, after opening their information desk at 9am on a Tuesday, they were approached by a man carrying a dead badger. The man slammed the badger down on the desk, much to the shock of the customer services manager, proclaiming that he had found it outside of his house, and didn’t know what to do with it. ‘I tried looking on the website,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t find “dead badger” on the list, so I came here.’

Not every situation is as hard to figure out as what you need to do when disposing of a dead animal. After all, it’s not something that happens every day. However, just as the man with the badger did, your users will come to your service with a preformed goal that they want to achieve. This can be very simple, like ‘dispose of a dead animal’ or ‘learn to drive’ or ‘buy a house’.

Where your user starts will depend on how much they’re already aware of what services might be available to meet their needs. Your job is to make sure that they can get from this goal to the service you provide, without having to resort to support. Or dropping off a dead badger at reception.

To a user, a service is simple. It’s something that helps them to do something – like learn to drive, buy a house or become a childminder. This means that, to a user, a service is very often an activity that needs to be done. A verb that comes naturally from a given situation, which will more than likely cut across websites, call centre menus and around carefully placed advice towards its end goal. The problem is, this isn’t how most organisations see their services. For most organisations, services are individual discrete actions that need to be completed in a specified order – things like ‘account registration’, ‘booking an appointment’ or ‘filling a claim’.

Because these isolated activities need to be identifiable for the people operating them, we’ve given them names, nouns, to help us keep track of them and refer to them internally. Over time these names become exposed to users, even if we don’t mean them to be initially.

In government, these are things like ‘Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995 (RIDDOR)’ or ‘Statutory Off Road Vehicle Notification (SORN)’ – but the names private organisations give these things are no less obtuse. Names like ‘eportal’ or ‘claims reimbursement certificate’ are commonplace in the private sector.