Reflect: What do people have to say about your service?
Last but not least, once people have finished interacting with your service (hopefully after getting the support they need, and not disengaging early!) they’’ll naturally reflect on how it went.
So this stage is about considering the lasting impression your service will have on people who use it, how you can harness their feedback to improve, and how what they share with friends and family ripples out to influence other people’s choices.
So how do your service users reflect on their experience?
The key questions I like to ask at this stage are:
How do we know what people think about our service?
How do we use that in developing or improving what we offer?
Who else do people tell about their experience?
a) How do we know what people think about our service?
Everyone will agree that knowing what people’s experience has been like is the key to improving and developing our services. But how we get that feedback is a bit more easily said than done, and it’s easy to slip down the list of priorities when resources are stretched.
So my question here isn’t what do you know about people’s experiences, but how you know it. Sometimes those stretched priorities can end up meaning the feedback we gather is limited in ways that aren’t easy to spot at first glance.
For example, in my experience it’s not uncommon for a small service to have only two ways of gathering feedback - a feedback survey, and a complaints process.
They can tell us what’s not working when people are really dissatisfied, and maybe some general themes of what people value or what could be better, and that might seem like enough to give us a general picture. But is it enough to inform the decisions you make about how the service works?
An illustration of the Ladder of Coproduction from Think Local Act Personal
Some of the best teams I’ve worked with have supplemented those two options with meaningful service user engagement work or user research, to make sure we really understand what people’s experience is like and how we can improve it. If that’s the case for your service, you might be familiar wtih the Ladder of Coproduction and already making good progress up the steps.
The ideal scenario we’re climbing towards at the top of the ladder is that people who use the service are involved as equal partners in all aspects of the service’s design, development and delivery. That’s why the important question is how do you know, not what you know - We can never measure how complete our knowledge is, but if you can say the way you know what people think about the service is because you’re listening and engaging with them day-to-day, you can be confident you’re on the right lines.
What’s wrong with feedback surveys?
Diagram plotting the location of bullet holes (red dots) found in returning aircraft
Image by Martin Grandjean (vector), McGeddon (picture), Cameron Moll (concept) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
If your service only has those two ways of gathering feedback, and you’re wondering how that might be limited, you might find it helpful to read up on Survivorship Bias. It’s commonly illustrated using the example of Abraham Wald who looked at the patterns of damage on aircraft returning from their missions in WW2. At first glance, it’d be easy to assume these are the areas most commonly damaged and reinforce them. But Wald recognised these were the areas a plane could be damaged and still fly back to base. They didn't see damage in other areas because those planes didn't make it back.
Similarly when we look at the common themes in a feedback survey, where we’ve asked “How could your experience have been improved?” are they going to be the areas most frustrating for your service users, or are they the issues people can experience and still remain engaged long enough to reach the point where you send out the survey? And have enough goodwill and trust in your service to feel it’s worth filling it in?
If I’m aiming to grow the service, and help as many people as possible, that feedback is definitely valuable. But I also want to hear from the people who dropped out earlier on, or who were too disillusioned with the service to even fill in the feedback survey.
But how do we reach them?
Well, unfortunately the best options involve the kind of time and money we tend not to have in community services. So I’m going to share what I do in organisations that don’t have the resources for user engagement (or sometimes the inclination!)
Basically, it’s just listening.
3 ways to listen out for a wider range of feedback:
Who knows better what customers find difficult than the admin team who help with their enquiries?
Frontline colleagues: People give us feedback constantly whilst using our services - the questions they ask are feedback on what’s confusing or what’s important to know, their reactions to aspects of our service are real-time feedback, and people often mention little sticking points in conversations with staff or volunteers. Whenever I want to know about people’s experience with a certain part of a service, I’ll go and chat to my colleagues there and ask what they notice. What do people tend to ask when they first get in touch? Is there anything people seem to find awkward or confusing? Do people follow this process ok, or do you have to explain it?
People don’t often mention minor frustrations in feedback forms, or complaints - but those minor issues can sometimes be the reason people disengage with a service, even if only accidentally. When you’re in a stressful situation, it’s easy to misunderstand what you’re supposed to do next, or hide from an unfamiliar number because you were worried who might be calling, or put off filling in paperwork until you’ve got a bit more headspace (which is never), so making it simple and easy to use your service can make a big difference and I often find my colleagues who interact with people early in their journey notice where there’s room for improvement.Social media: If your service has social media accounts, you’ve probably been directly tagged or contacted by people - but do you ever just search for your service name and see what people are saying? Most of the services I’ve worked in have been too small to have a lot of people talking about them online so can’t do ‘social listening’ in the way big brands do, but they’ve usually had similar or equivalent services all over the country. It’s not direct feedback of course, but looking out for mentions of similar services, or the kinds of problems our service helps with, and seeing what people say has often given me clues about things to consider in our own service.
Promotional events: If you ever go out to community events with a little promotional stand, they can be the perfect opportunity to ask passersby if they’ve used your service, or know anyone who has, and hear how it went. I’ve spoken to so many people this way who have had all sorts of experiences from brilliant to terrible, but won’t have always given feedback at the time. It also gives us a much broader range of insights into our service, and access to perspectives we might not hear otherwise - from people who considered using our service but decided not to, or tried to use our service but encountered barriers.
There’s a caveat with this one - you do need to be prepared for people to tell you anything, so it’s not something to task the intern with. In one team, we actually ended up putting a new process in place to respond to complaints arising through promotional events - which really proved the theory of survivorship bias around our complaints process!
b) How do we use feedback in developing what we offer?
How do you use feedback in developing and improving your services?
User research and feedback is a key part of this model
Most of the community services I've worked in have done good work with “Plan, Do, Review” and similar, but I have to recommend the Double Diamond if it’s not already in your toolkit. I love that it takes a few steps back to explore the problem before trying to solve it. Instead of jumping straight into planning, which can sometimes mean we're rushing into ideas and solutions before we've had a chance to think it through, there are two earlier stages to make sure we really understand what we're trying to achieve.
The “Discover” phase is all about exploring the problem or opportunity with fresh eyes, and service users’ experiences will be key to that.
From there, you can define the problem from your users’ perspective and make sure you’re tackling the right thing.
It can help to reframe things, too - from implementing a solution to solving a problem.
I've found quite often with “Plan, Do, Review” type projects, the focus has been achieving a specific Thing. We've got a solution in mind, and we plan out how to make it work. That means when we're involving service users, it's about what they want from The Thing, and how they'd prefer The Thing to work.
When I learned about the Double Diamond I found it really helped refocus our attention onto the problem were trying to solve. We could talk to service users about how they experienced the problem, and what's important to them in a solution. We can develop ideas together, and might come up with a completely different Thing. One that's a better fit for what people need.
I think this is the key to reaching higher up the Ladder of Co-Production, because you if you've already decided what you're going to do there’s only ever room in your planning, doing and reviewing for a ‘consult’ approach. If you’re taking a design approach you can at least co-design!
c) Who else do people tell about their experience?
If you're aiming to grow your service, or reach a broader audience, word-of-mouth is invaluable free advertising.
We naturally pass on handy information to friends and family if they're experiencing a similar issue, and a friend’s experience of a service can be a powerful recommendation or a deterrent.
It’s prized in commercial marketing, but it can be even more important in community services that are helping with real issues in our lives. More is at stake, so we need extra reassurance before we can trust someone to help us with it.
But if we're lucky we and our loved ones won't need those services very often, so we might not know many people who've used the service we're considering. It's not like comparing makes of car where everyone's got an opinion (even if they don't drive!) - If anyone's heard anything about the service, we might be glad to hear it just because we don't have much to go on.
So the more people who can share positive experiences of your service, the more people you could reach. It can be worth considering how to make sure everyone who interacts with your service has a good experience, even if they don't end up using the service.
We ignore ads that don’t seem relevant - but we listen to friends
Have you ever found the key to solving a problem in just an ordinary chat with a friend?
The other valuable part of word-of-mouth is that it can reach people who aren't even looking for your service. We have a natural tendency to ignore advertising that doesn't seem relevant and we certainly don’t look for services that we don't expect to exist or be available to us, but word-of-mouth can sneak through.
A friend shared a perfect example of this recently, because we were talking about how helpful it is to share this sort of information. She told me how since becoming a carer and learning about Attendance Allowance she had helped several friends to recognise they qualified and access this funding. She said each time, her friends had been surprised - they’d heard of Attendance Allowance but either not paid attention to information about it because they didn't consider themselves a carer, or assumed it was means-tested and that they probably wouldn't be eligible.
I think this can be a factor in why social isolation has such an impact on wellbeing, can’t it? Because friends and relatives look out for you, suggest ideas, help to solve problems, and give you the confidence to take action.
So it’s worth considering not only how to encourage word-of-mouth, but also how to replicate it in your promotion.
Here are a few free and easy options:
It’s easy for service users to share their experience by recording a video on zoom or on their phone
Invite people to share their experiences with you, in blog posts, videos or testimonials on your website, social media or leaflets. Being able to hear about other people's real experiences is just as valuable even if it's a stranger. It’s called ‘social proof’ and when used well it can help people feel confident they’re making the right choice.
Encourage people to share reviews online. If you've got a Google My Business profile, people can leave reviews that will show up when people search for your service. You can also print off posters with quotes from your reviews to display in your service or use in advertising.
Consider how you could help people to spread the word in their communities. When people have had a good experience they often want to ‘pay it forward’ and help others get that support too - so find out how you can help with that. I've seen great examples of organisations training people to become champions who can guide people to the right services. But there could be more low-budget options - maybe just making it easy for people to pick up a supply of leaflets to share with their congregation, invite you to be a guest speaker at their club meeting, or hold an awareness raising event at their workplace?
