Capturing and Validating Aged Care Customer Journeys

PG and ACQSC collaborated to visualise the customer journey to improve their service.

PG consulted with ACQSC staff, aged care providers, and customers. PG delivered several artifacts, including Personas, a Current State Service Blueprint, a Current State Consumer Journey map, a Future State Service Blueprint, and Principles, along with a communication strategy.

Mapping customer journeys for the ACQSC was an extremely complex process involving four key parties: aged-care customers, the families and networks of aged-care customers, aged-care providers and the Commission itself.

The needs of older Australians were at the centre of this project.

PG researchers spoke to 23 executives at the ACQSC, 27 aged-care providers, 7 internal ACQSC teams (including education and compliance teams), and 21 older Australians (consumers of aged-care services.)

We developed prototypes of the Customer Service Journey Map and interventions that would improve the customer experience, allowing us to build and test ideas.

In our Current State Service Blueprint, we showed the back-end commission process when dealing with providers. Consumer journeys highlighted the interactions between consumers, providers and the ACQSC. We developed detailed personas to help the Commission understand the customers, their needs and the networks of people surrounding them as they interact with the aged-care system.

We developed prototypes and interventions for our Future State Blueprint to enhance efficiency and communication between providers, consumers and consumers’ networks. Those prototypes included everything from communications strategies to internal systems and protocols when dealing with complaints. We recommended (amongst other things): end-user advisory panels, upgrades to the existing case-management portal and new ways to help providers learn from each other and work towards best practice.

We developed an organisation-level view of the systems that produce the current customer experience. The attached artefacts showcase the depth and detail of our work. We have presented our research findings in a way that is as simple and digestible as possible.

Prototyping and testing were extremely important elements of this project. Our team displayed design excellence here.

As part of our Future State Mapping process, for example, we held a series of four workshops, consisting of two sessions dedicated to providers and two sessions focused on aged-care consumers.

During these workshops, we introduced participants to the ideas we’d come up with following the previous research phase and guided them through the envisioned changes to the customer experience.

Our participants were candid with their feedback, pointing out anticipated flaws, floating solutions, and fresh ideas. Based on this feedback, we refined and reworked our design. The end product is the result of this collaboration.

Public confidence in the aged care sector is low. Following the Royal Commission into Aged Care, the ACQSC has new powers and standards to uphold, which means that internal teams must adjust to new circumstances. Providers spoke of shifting goalposts.

In this context, there’s an urgent need for thoughtful service design throughout the whole aged-care sector – not just with the ACQSC. We hope our work can represent a benchmark here. Human-centred service design is the starting point for providing better care services and enhancing public confidence in the sector.

Considering the complexity of this task and the gravity of the problems in the sector, we are proud of this work. It was a privilege to invest our time and design skills to clarify the quagmire of customer experience in aged care.

Our workshops were held remotely. In our sessions with aged-care customers, we were conscious of some participants’ limited digital literacy. We used a really simple storyboard process on Miro during the workshops (see attached). Our facilitators used characters and storyboards to map out scenarios, with participants calling out instructions. We used this method to describe past experiences and explore ways difficult scenarios could have been managed differently. Basically, the participants were art-directing our facilitators during the workshops. They seemed to enjoy this process and shared some very frank insights.

During the course of our project, it became clear that the Commission needed help developing a communication strategy and materials that would help aged-care consumers and their relatives understand the Commission’s role right from the beginning of the journey into aged care. We helped the Commission design brochures and other resources for consumers. These were developed with the specific communication needs of older Australians in mind, as well as the diversity that exists within the ageing population.

One complication in this project was that a necessary tension exists between the ACQSC and aged-care providers. The Commission has to uphold compliance standards. Historically, relationships between the regulator and providers have been adversarial.

In the course of this research, we developed ways to try to improve those relationships so that providers could see the ACQSC as firm and fair – a good resource for helping them understand their obligations.

The ACQSC has begun to see providers in a more positive, favourable light—not just as actors to be regulated. There are some bad actors, certainly, but not all providers deserve to be tarred with the same brush.

The ACQSC team is really serious about improving the quality of care for older Australians. This design project has helped the Commission see that building constructive relationships with providers is their best chance to make a strong impact.

Through our systems-thinking approach to this project, we have developed a strong understanding of the aged-care system and the many players that interact within it, from executives at the industry regulator to care workers at residential homes to the parents and friends of older Australians accessing care. The aged-care sector is a large and growing sector that urgently needs to improve. The insights from this kind of service design work have the potential to inform the work of – for example – software companies, new providers and health services wishing to do good work in the aged-care space.