‘PROCESS’ ONLY HAS A SINGLE PURPOSE: TO BETTER SERVE THE CUSTOMER

An aspiration for any public service organisation is to continually seek ways to improve the service it offers to the public it serves. Building capability to achieve this is an essential component of JOURNEY’s Service Improvement offer.

Our aim is to help you create a ‘culture of continuous improvement’ which ensures that the design, development and delivery offrontline services is fully shaped by customer-focused thinking.

JOURNEY delivers its services directly alongside your teams to ensure that the transfer of core capabilities and key skills can be embedded across the whole organisation without our continuing support – so you start to understand how you can improve the service your organisation offers into the future.

Our approach differs from most other providers in that we focus first on what improvement actually means for service users. Process reviews will help your teams to see the world ‘through the customer’s eyes’ and allow you to understand what ‘better’ looks like within the service user experience.

In a service business success is heavily dependent on your people and their interaction with the public. Processes must support the smooth running of those relationships to ensure the efficient and consistent delivery of a positive service experience. And, because improvements in service delivery can only properly be realised through your people, we passionately believe that change can only happen through action and learning.

Thus individuals and teams must be fully engaged in service improvement from the outset, in order that they can effectively ‘own’ emerging improvement ideas and their translation into successful delivery. Experiencing the positive response of customers to ‘a job well done' is hugely motivating, which is why we often encourage client commitment to High Impact Customer Service Events in the first instance.

Undertaking these sorts of action learning events can be invaluable. Change is difficult for any organisation and often leaders need to see a new approach in action, delivering positive results.

With confidence gained we then set out a plan for larger scale initiatives - Integrated Innovation Projects. These require wider team involvement and incorporate a broader development canvas including end-to-end customer pathways and identifying improvement areas through understanding ‘Customer Touchpoints’.

Embarking on a strategic Continuous Improvement Programme requires organisational impacts to be assessed (in terms of benefits, cultural development and any associated ‘stresspoints’) alongside a more holistic and systematic approach to customer alignment.