Transforming self-centred organisations into human-centred ones
Organisations can’t improve their services because they don’t see and understand them the way their customers do.
Self-centred organisations
According to Statista, the estimated number of companies is approximately 333.34 million worldwide in 2023. Their goal is to deliver the right products and services to the right users/clients at the right time. Simultaneously, they aim to improve efficiency, set the right priorities, and not duplicate efforts. To achieve this, they measure, monitor, compare, and prioritise. But… are they focusing on the right things?
I recently bought a sim card from a new internet provider. This experience made me think about how organisations operate and how customers are often confronted with internal processes and structures they shouldn’t even be aware of.
How many times have we experienced how organisations focus on themselves — on how they operate, what team delivers what and how to achieve a high Net Promoter Score (NPS). Because they work in silos, their teams and processes are disconnected. Therefore, it becomes our (the customers’) responsibility to find the best way to do what we want to do, despite the obstacles and gaps we encounter along the way.
Why aren’t companies bridging these gaps, fixing the lack of connections between systems, and saving the history of our interactions with them in one place?
Why is this still not working?
Well, it seems like they do not know (or think they know) how the user sees them. They don’t have an external reference point. They can’t become customer-centric, because they don’t see the customer. They only see themselves.
Organisations can’t improve their services because they don’t see and understand them the way their customers do. They simply don’t know how (or they don’t think is beneficial).
I think we are ready to change that and move from Self-Centred to Human-Centred Organisations.
What is a service?
According to the UK Government Digital Service, service is everything the user needs to do to achieve a goal. Lou Downe, author of Good Services, a book about how to design services that work, proposes a more broad approach: service is something that helps someone to do something (similar to the Oxford Languages definition: service is the action of helping or doing work for someone).
To get service buy-in from stakeholders in a large organisation, we need to add a business perspective to this definition and align the language of talking about service design and the user perspective with the requirements that key stakeholders have.
In this context, the definition of service proposed by Kate Tarling seems to be better absorbed by leaders in organisation, while at the same time not compromising the general and broad concept proposed above.
A service helps someone to do or to achieve something, while delivering an outcome for the organisation providing that service.
Services are intangible, so defining and talking about them can be a challenge. Companies provide hundreds of services and most of the time are not even aware of all of them. Therefore, the first challenge they should set themselves is to create a list of the services they provide (as their customer sees them!). And if you thought for a moment that this would be a simple task, you would be very wrong.
List of company services
Why do we need a list of our company services?
Creating a list of services helps organisations:
- Discuss their size and delivery cost
- Evaluate their performance and outcomes
- Determine if they should exist in their current form
- Identify duplicated patterns
- Assign ownership and management
As we can read on the gov.uk blog: Since organisations have many ways of understanding their internal workings and capabilities, this list provides an important external reference that much of the internal work should align to, and work together over time to help achieve desired outcomes.
How to define a company’s services?
It is a good idea to start with what people need, what is important to them, what their goals are in the areas in which our organisation operates.
To dive into this topic, we first need to do a solid investigation and understand what people really do with our products.
Start simple — find out the questions people ask when they’re getting referrals from friends, family and colleagues, or even what they type into Google to search for what services they need.
The next step will be to compare what users are looking for with what we offer. This is when the details will be important — whether we use the same words, whether we formulate the same questions, or are in the same places.
Let’s see some examples. In the first sentence below (1) you can see the things the user wants to do. In the second you will find the ‘keywords they type into google’ — the service they think will help them achieve what they want to do. In the third point you will find how organisations respond to the user’s needs and what they call their products and services.
Example 1:
1) The thing I need to do: My mum wants to have an internet on her iPad
2) The service I think exist: Internet for iPad
3) The thing organisation offers: Connect iPad to the internet (apple support) eSim card 10 GB — prepaid
Example 2:
1) The thing I need to do: I want to go to the UK to spend more time with my family.
2) The service I think exists: Visit the UK to see family.
3) The thing organisation offers: Apply for a standard visitor visa (gov.uk).
Users use the language of the service — they say what they want to do. They don’t name products or features, they just try to get things done. This highlights the gap between user expectations and company offerings (another example — Nicholas Zeisler article “Are we speaking our Customers’ language?” )
What do we do once we have the list?
Once you have a list of what your services are, define why each of them exists and what good looks like. This helps you be clear about how your teams and divisions should organise the internal work more effectively, rectify errors more quickly, improve the quality of services and monitor their effectiveness.
Creating a list of services is the first step, but at the same time a continuous, ongoing practice. This is where you should start. But it is only the beginning of this adventure.
