Customer-centered service intervention
Integrated Care for Retirement Living
Craig Walker Design and Research
The Project
A Customer Experience project for a long-time retirement living and respite care client. The project was undertaken for their retirement living residents and involved active first-hand research with residents across their various retirement villages, and their families. The objective was to uncover their current service experience, aspirations, and desires for the future. These were converted into key ‘Moments that matter’ which would inform the design of service packages.
Design Challenge
To scope the current resident experience focusing on ‘living in’ and promoting ‘ageing in place’. Introducing a new way of packaging services based on human-centred design research findings for a new business model that adopts technology as an access way for enabling these services.
Process & methods
Design and research process I was involved in
Facilitating workshop breakout rooms with client management groups, customer service groups, and retirement living residents. These workshops were focused on discovering the current state of services by taking participants through a journey map that framed the experience into four parts: Pre-moving, moving-in, living-in, and moving into respite care.
Interpersonal interviews with current and potential residents and their family members, to form a deeper understanding of the day-to-day experiences that really matter to them. These ranged from, getting the right financial advice to valued relationships with their gardner! Creation: Customer profiles for each capturing quotes and blurbs that bring their retirement living journey to life, things they liked and things they did not.
Trend analysis and field research to get a good picture of similar service providers and their style of bundling services.
Creation of easy-to-understand service bundles that tied multiple services together and offered them at a rate the residents were happy with. Eg: Vitality bundle, Financial bundle, Fall bundle, etc. These service bundles were formulated around key ‘moments that matter’: An emergency such as a fall, Downsizing from your previous residence, A change in circumstances (health deterioration), etc.
Setting the flow, structure, and writing content for a set of storyboards that brought to life the various moments that matter and creatively embedded the service bundles into these storyboards for residents to easily understand the value of the new service experience.
Embedded the service bundles into resident profiles that could be easily accessed via existing technology that was preferred by users (iPad).
Supported the design and wireframing of digital and physical prototypes that enabled accessibility of service bundles into existing platforms and systems.
Conducted user testing with residents taking them through the storyboards and prototypes, allowing space to express their inclination to pick a certain bundle and what they may want changed.
Voluntarily explored Notion-AI as a documentation tool for this project, implementing documentation and data analysis techniques provided by Notion to enhance its functionality. Aspects explored: documentation of interview recordings and generation of transcripts. Creating tags and using Notions AI functionality to collate information from a large number of interviews using tags. Extract a summary of insights from a page.
The company then incorporated Notion as its new Kanban tool.
Learnings
Retirement village service models need to have a range of inclusive services. A one size fits all model is not the best way to unpack services for an elderly population with varying circumstances and needs.
Consistency is essential in ensuring trust and a sense of reliability. Make services available via a range of channels from one on one interpersonal conversations to tech enabled, digitally delivered services.
The most important moments that matter are those of transition such as; understanding finances, making the decision of moving into retirement living and dealing with an accident or fall.
It gives you peace of mind knowing that no matter what you will be safe, especially if you are worried about the future or about moving into RC
I think a financial consult with an Aged Care specialist is the most important part for me