Belfast City Council
The project
Belfast City Council commissioned a discovery project centred around customer focus and website discovery.
Working with Deloitte as a lead UX consultant we carried out a detailed research project uncovering current customer journeys across a variety of services.
The Process
Mobilisation — Sprint planning — Customer insight — Delivery
The Issue
Before this project began Belfast City Council had identified that they have poor customer engagement. This, in turn, affected both the services users engaged with, the website and other digital services
Intial understanding
Before core delivery could begin my team and I needed to define key areas to be addressed within Belfast City Council. This was achieved through key stakeholder workshops and call centre data. Working in an agile environment, each area would pan across a two-week sprint.
Sprint framework
Each sprint took a similar framework in order to heighten efficiency. Each key area covered over two services within Belfast City Council, for example, weeks 1-2 covered both domestic cleansing and waste.
Sprint 1
Sprint 1 focused on domestic cleansing and waste within Belfast City Council. During early stakeholder workshops, we identified customers of Belfast City Council as people who live, work, visit and study within the council area. Each weekly sprint started by myself leading workshops with internal staff. These workshops helped break down and understand issues faced by both customers and insight into internal processes. I also had the ability to get internal staffs perspective on what an ideal solution would be for their service, giving myself an idea of realistic solutions.
With an understanding of the service and the problems faced internally, I began to speak to customers. As sprint 1 was focusing on commercial waste and cleansing we needed to get a wide variety of customers. Through various drop-in session and focus groups at local community centres and on-street surveys began to build up profiles of various issues people are facing.
Combing all the research across this sprint I put together 3 personas. Firstly there was an over 65 pensioner who struggles with their bin, a family household with a lot of domestic waste and a young professional who has just moved to council district.
Using these personas we created customer journey maps to highlight experiences that our personas go through and the issues they face. The journey maps covered issues on dealing with medical waste, older people getting advise on recycling, missed bin collections and ordering new bins. Working with my business development team at Deloitte we were able to add an extra layer of opportunities, advising Belfast City Council how they could improve their service
Sprint 2
Sprint 2 followed a similar pattern regarding structure but the focus on this sprint was on commercial waste and environmental planning. I conducted workshops in a similar manner as before, drawing out key internal problems. I conducted telephone interviews with companies who purchase a commercial waste collection from Belfast City Councils for commercial waste, residents who have experienced noise complaints and small businesses who had to adhere to health and food safety for environmental health.
Internal research and customer findings gave me insight into three personas; an over 65 resident living in a student area of Belfast and a small business owner. The personas give us the opportunity to show the council their pains, behaviours and what they need from the service.
In a similar fashion as sprint 1, each persona was paired with a customer journey map. The over 65 resident focused on how out of hour noise complaints and reported and handled and the small business owner showed the journey of adhering to food safety standards. These customer journey maps pointed out the process the personas have to go through, the touchpoint they have with Belfast City Council, the issues they are having and their thoughts. I was also able to highlight what the user needs are at each stage of the process and draw out key opportunities for the future.
Sprint 3
Sprint 3 focused on Building Control and Planning and followed the same pattern as the previous sprints. Customer engagement for building control and Planning was focused around telephone interviews with builders, solicitors, homeowners with previous experience of the service, architects and quantity surveyors.
Key personas for building control included Artictects, solicitors, licences, builders and a homeowner. These personas went through two journeys, changing a building usage and applying for a regularisation certificate for previously completed construction work.
For planning the personas were a planning agent and neighbourhood objector. The journeys linked to these personas focused around a neighbour making an objection to a local planning permission application and a local planning agent making an application for a large-scale development.
Sprint 4
The final two-week sprint in this project focused on bereavement services and pitch bookings. Being two very unrelated services this sprint was broken into two one week sprints. Week one focused on bereavement services and in a similar fashion as the previous sprint we conducted internal stakeholder workshops followed my customer engagement. As this service is a sensitive area we had to focus on speaking to funeral directors and medical referees to gain an understanding of their pains, wants, behaviours and experiences.
Week two focused on sport pitch bookings and was focused around one persona, a club secretary booking a football pitch. As done with all previous personas we were able to detail out the journey this persona goes through booking sports pitches with the Belfast city council, the issues they have and opportunities that can improve this service.
Outcome
This project gave me the opportunity to be the sole UX lead on a project that incorporated a much wider team. I had the opportunity to present my findings and output to key stakeholders within Belfast City Council during bi-weekly sprint reviews.