Introduction
You know the feeling when a service isn’t working. It’s the collective groan when the flight gate gets changed for the umpteenth time. The slam on the table when the website crashes just as you’re about book concert tickets. And the slump into your chair as your professor grapples with the arcane art of Zoom screen-sharing. But when your house has been ravaged by a hurricane and you’re desperately trying to apply for government aid, the stakes are a lot higher; a clunky website failing to load might make the difference between having a home or not.
Customer experience (CX) is a key principle in the world of service-design. The idea is that services should be designed around customers–the people who interact with the service–and how they experience them. Critically, CX factors in qualitative measures like frustration, ease, and satisfaction alongside traditional quantitative measures. Understanding these qualitative measures tells a story that raw usage statistics might hide and goes a long way toward helping government create services that build rather than break people’s trust.
During the Biden administration, the United States’ federal government launched a Federal CX initiative via Executive Order 14058 to better integrate CX practices into the design of government services. It achieved significant success as civil servants explored how people experienced federal agencies and acted on the insights they gathered. For instance, interviews with families recovering from natural disasters revealed redundancies in information-gathering while listening to first time mothers sparked the creation of newborn supply kits. Alongside creating tangible improvements in people’s lives, Federal CX enjoys bipartisan support and has been one of the few Biden-era programs to survive into the second Trump administration. These qualities have made Federal CX stand out in public sector innovation and attracted the attention of my lab. For my summer research project, I worked at the Good Services Lab (GSL) based out of Harvard’s Bloomberg Center for Cities. Our goal was to adapt Federal CX practices into a program for municipal leaders: CX for Cities.
What We Built and How We Built It
To build CX for Cities, our lab worked alongside Amira Boland and Maya Mechenbier, fellows at GSL with extensive service-design work at the federal and state levels. We also conducted stakeholder interviews with former and current public servants at the federal (e.g. Office of Management and Budget, Domestic Policy Council, General Services Administration) and municipal level (e.g. Boston City Law Department).
The fruit of our summer’s labor was a city design sprint, an eight-month engagement that takes cities through a seven-step process we developed. At a high level, the sprint begins with cities defining the specific service they want to improve. This entails understanding the need the service is trying to address (e.g. compliance with the law, income stability, and healthcare access) and what it offers to address it (e.g. certification of compliance, financial assistance, and information). Cities then move to understand who uses the service and how they use it, conducting interviews and sourcing administrative data to create qualitative and quantitative measures, respectively. These data are analyzed to identify pain points in service use and administration which, in turn, inform the creation of a solution. The latter portion of the design sprint supports cities in developing and piloting solution prototypes.
CX for Cities is offered as a free program for alumni of the Bloomberg Center for Cities’ City Leadership Initiative. The City Leadership Initiative invites new mayors and their leadership teams to undergo intensive training on effective city leadership. After completing this training, cities gain access to various programs offered in the Bloomberg Center’s ecosystem, among which is CX for Cities.
Setting Expectations with Technical Assistance
An integral component of CX-informed design is building around who exactly your customer is. As we set about trying to educate municipal leadership teams on CX, we ourselves had to apply the very same principles to our work. This is evident in the design of the program itself. Knowing our “customers” were city government leaders familiar with service-design, we opted to develop CX for Cities as a technical assistance program. Transparently, my first impression of “technical assistance” was empty marketing fluff. However, I came to appreciate the two-fold intentionality of the terminology with respect to signaling and design.
From a signaling standpoint, I learned that branding our work as a “course” or “training” might have patronizing connotations; a city leader would roll their eyes at the prospect of getting “talked at” for concepts that were bread and butter for them. On the other hand, technical assistance suggests targeted support for services they are already working on. I would have scoffed at the necessity of such wordsmithing before coming onto the lab. But I know now how pivotal precise diction is. To create our inaugural cohort, our team emailed specific alumni from the Bloomberg Center’s City Leadership Initiative. The hook into our fledgling program was an email floating in the sea of an ever-piling inbox. Thus, every word in the subject line and one-pager mattered.
From a design standpoint, the terminology informed our team’s approach to building the program. We chose to empower cities to steer the design sprint according to their pre-existing expertise and experience. Consequently, the centerpiece of CX for Cities is a workbook that takes cities through a “think-and-do” approach. Each module of the workbook introduces key technical concepts and assists cities in recollecting what they already know and applying it toward something novel. For example, our module on customer segmentation first introduces different segmentation models for cities to employ (e.g. demographic, geographic, psychographic). Then, it has them use their own administrative data to home in on a customer group of their choice. The customer group they choose then becomes the anchor for the rest of the sprint; the module on pain points focuses on the pain points experienced by that particular customer group and the module on prototyping a solution targets the same.
At a micro-level, one of the things this summer experience taught me was the importance of word choice. But the broader takeaway for me is that setting clear expectations with stakeholders is crucial for collaboration; the cities who have joined the inaugural cohort clearly understand that they will be driving the progress. This alignment has made our initial engagements particularly fruitful.
Empowering People to Do What They Know
One especially gratifying part of the summer was getting to meet with the cities who will pilot CX for Cities this upcoming fall. In our initial engagements, I had the opportunity to listen in as our program leads brainstormed with city leaders on what the service-of-focus would be. Among our meetings, the most memorable one for me concerned a city whose focus was on their home visiting program. The city wanted to improve its maternal health and pre-K educational outcomes by better informing residents on its program offerings for each. However, they were struggling to convert these home visits into meaningful engagement.
After our first kickoff meeting, we followed up with the leaders of the city’s office for children and families to learn more about their approach to home visiting. Not even ten minutes into the call, I was surprised to see them already pitching ideas for improvements to their service. They demonstrated a lucid view of the current state of the program, calling out specific resource deficits in terms of federal funding and municipal manpower. They then walked us through the key stakeholders in the program, emphasizing their desire to develop better public-private partnerships to supplement the aforementioned resource deficits. To be completely honest, I had fully expected that the call would center on us helping them figure out where to start in understanding their challenges. But they blew my expectations out of the water by presenting specific customer pain points they had already identified, backed up by a landscape analysis study that had been conducted by local firms. They were familiar with the nature of technical assistance programs and our branding as such enabled them to come ready-for-action.
Given their robust clarity on the issue, our team was eager to understand why they had yet to act on their ideas. Their answer was simple yet heartbreaking: they didn’t have the authority. They explained that their office had been established to act in an advisory role. So, while they had gathered insights and analyzed the problem, they needed buy-in from the human affairs departments who held the authority to act on them. And that buy-in was absent because mayors of the past hadn’t prioritized home visiting on their agenda. That is to say, their initiative lacked executive sponsorship. The importance of executive sponsorship in governmental changemaking was corroborated by our interview with the head of Boston’s Law Department. He explained that municipal governments prioritize resources and manpower for things on the mayor’s agenda because mayors need to deliver on their campaign promises. A ramification of this political necessity is that promising initiatives lacking explicit executive sponsorship are also bound to lack critical support.
This revelation completely transformed my view of what it takes to improve government services. Coming into my summer research, I had fully believed that CX for Cities’ biggest value proposition was its innovative approach to service design. But the call with the city revealed it was actually the program’s ability to take key stakeholders through a shared experience. Since CX for Cities is offered directly to city mayors, the sprint and its outcomes are more likely to secure executive sponsorship. Furthermore, mayors are invited to field teams comprising diverse perspectives and decision-making authority. Put together, CX for Cities acts as a platform for those with know-how to ideate with and solicit buy-in from members across the “org chart.” Indeed, part of the reason the people we spoke with were excited for CX for Cities stemmed from previous experience with the Bloomberg Center for Cities. In an earlier engagement, the city had gone through an alumni program that helped them create a solution for school attendance. One of the members on the call had been a part of that team and seen how a shared experience drove alignment and momentum. As they looked forward to the fall with CX for Cities, they hoped it would empower them to do what they knew needed to be done.
Learnings on Leadership
This past summer with GSL taught me a great deal about service-design and the bureaucratic intricacies of federal and municipal government. I’ve emerged with a greater appreciation for the excellence of our civil servants and their heart to serve; as one federal employee at the Office of Management and Budget we interviewed put it: “We just care about making government work well.” Alongside technical competency and societal awareness, I’ve also been grateful to learn a great deal about leadership.
To begin with, I learned that leaders are responsible for setting clear expectations. My faculty mentor demonstrated how important this is through her intentionality surrounding technical assistance. Leaders need to realize that what they want to do and what others perceive they are doing aren’t necessarily the same thing. Consequently, leaders must proactively understand who they are serving and ensure that all parties are aligned. This cohesion generates momentum and also enables others to collaborate more effectively. I experienced this latter effect firsthand during the call with the office of children and families; they knew we were seeking to empower their efforts and so came ready to present and build upon the work they had already done.
This leads into my second major takeaway from the summer: leaders must empower their teams to do what they know. Oftentimes, being designated as a leader–whether spokesperson of a group project or mayor of a city–affords you some level of authority. The best way to use this authority is to activate the potential of those you are leading. Leaders don’t always have to be the ones with the best ideas on how to do things. Instead, they can and should capitalize on the expertise and experience of their team. Positionality is inherent to any changemaking initiative and can impair people’s ability to advocate for their vision and ideas. A leader should acknowledge their positionality and leverage it to catalyze rather than stifle the capacities of their team.
The Work That Lies Ahead
As the summer draws to a close, I’m energized by what lies ahead! I will be continuing the work I began this summer in the fall as a part-time member of GSL. Right now, we are transitioning from preparing to launching CX for Cities. We have two cities already in the inaugural cohort with an additional one to two to join later in the year. I’m eager to put what we’ve built into practice and hopeful that we can empower city leaders to do what they know. Alongside my GSL work, I’m excited to continue building relationship as I learn with and from my Laidlaw cohort peers. I’m also thrilled to be meeting members across the Laidlaw network at the fall conference in New York!
The summer has gifted me with a wealth of knowledge on how to build things that work for people. As I look to my Leadership in Action project, I’m confident these skills will serve me well.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Kimberlyn Leary, my faculty mentor, and Allison Baroni, my project manager, for their tireless investment in mentoring my fellow RAs and me in what it means to work with and build for leaders. I would like to thank Amira Boland and Maya Mechenbier for their earnest drive to make government work and their patience as I dove into the world of service-design. Finally, I would like to thank Matt DelSesto, my Laidlaw advisor, and my Laidlaw cohort for a summer full of lots and lots of laughs and learnings.