Here at Leap Forward, we take a 5-step approach to service research.
- We work together to define important research objectives: It is important to set clear goals for your service research. Your research objectives will vary significantly based on your organisation's needs, such as improving service delivery, understanding customer behaviour, or identifying areas for innovation.
- We collect rich data-driven insights from your audience: We combine qualitative and quantitative methods to get a complete picture of your service context. For example, by conducting desk research, participant and non-participant observation, interviews, focus groups, and co-creative workshops.
- We make sense of what we’ve learned: Having collected your audience data, we then analyse and visualise it. This process, also known as "sensemaking," involves creating personas, mapping journeys and systems, developing key insights, generating jobs-to-be-done insights, writing user stories, and compiling research reports.
- We define key priorities and establish a strategy: Then, we use these insights to develop tailor-made strategies and action plans that address the issues we’ve identified and opportunities that we’ve uncovered. This might involve improving existing services, developing new ones, or changing internal processes to meet customers' needs more effectively.
We assess the impact over time and iterate when necessary: Having implemented the strategies defined in step 4, we evaluate the outcomes on a continual basis to assess whether they’re having the desired impact. This might require us to conduct further rounds of data collection and analysis, and to potentially adjust the strategies based on the results.
