Overview

Good service design is critical to shaping meaningful customer experiences and building trust between service providers and the people they serve. Service design can be used to develop new services or to improve existing services by making them more useful, efficient, equitable and effective. 

In this course, your team will gain a foundation for improving customer experience by understanding, shaping, and evaluating both the “frontstage” customer interactions and the “backstage” service delivery.

Service design concepts are introduced through both lecture and practice activities. Teams will work with a coach to apply learning to their own service and have opportunities to discuss their work with peers from other participating teams.

Course topics include:

• An introduction to service design
• Understanding customers’ goals and experience
• Mapping your service – frontstage and backstage
• Evaluating your service
• Gathering stakeholder feedback
• Developing an action plan with next steps

How You Will Benefit

Your team will learn service design methods and mindsets that:

• Foster empathy and understanding of your customer and service delivery team
• Identify opportunities to proactively improve in your service
• Help teams innovate by working more collaboratively and iteratively

While your team will not be able to fully understand, evaluate and shape your service in the confines of this course, you will leave with new tools you can use to iteratively refine how your service responds to meet the needs of customers and delivery teams.

Who Should Attend

Teams should be comprised of 3-5 individuals who are involved in different aspects of your service, such as:

• Working directly with customers (front-line staff)
• Providing administrative support
• Building or maintaining technology
• Guiding strategies or policies
• Working in a partner organization
• Being customers of the service
  

Before registering for the course, teams should identify a team lead who will be the main point of contact for email communication with the Lab (before, during, and after the course) and help align the team on key decision points. It is helpful for team lead to be the one who registers for the course (See “How to Register” below). Ideally, the team lead already collaborates across the different aspects of the service.

All participants on the team must be able to commit 10 hours/week to coursework and have support to continue the work that may be initiated in the course after the course is completed.

Additional Information

Online courses use Zoom for Government for audio and screen sharing. You do not need to create an account or download any programs. More information and instructions will be shared prior to the course.

How to register:
Only one member of each team will need to enroll as the primary team member. Once your payment has been processed, a member of the Lab team will get in touch to register your teammates. Please contact us at lab@opm.gov if you have any questions.

Participant Testimonial:
“Given that customer service is the basis for the type of work my team does, I was not expecting a lot of new insights/perspectives. However, I was consistently surprised with new ways of approaching our routine work that will carry into the future.” - Course pilot participant