The loose doorknob effect
Every public service touchpoint is a handshake that subconsciously defines our relationship with government.
Gracen Johnson introduced me to the concept of the “loose doorknob effect” many moons ago on her Instagram story and it stuck with me.
She writes:
Doorknobs are a part of your home that you interact with every day. It’s disturbing in a subtle way when a doorknob doesn’t feel sturdy and functional.
Every damn time you turn a wiggly doorknob with a loose screw, or feel a dented hollow one, or WORST, try to turn one that doesn’t even turn, it cheapens the feel of the building
The doorknob is your handshake with a house and jiggly doorknobs have a subconscious impact on our confidence in the building. It’s unsettling in ways that we don’t necessarily register and are difficult to articulate but feel in our bodies and minds nonetheless.
This same effect can be observed in government services too.
Every public service touchpoint (every letter, e-mail, trip to SNB, ballot cast, form completed) is a handshake with government. It subconsciously defines our relationship with government.
People might not be able to articulate the cumulative effect of all those ‘wiggly door handle’ interactions with government, but the felt effect is weaved into their opinions of government and carried to the ballot box.
Meanwhile, governments are only measuring transactional stuff. How many customers came through? How long did it take? How many projects did we do? How long did they take? We aren’t tracking or addressing wiggly doorknobs and their effects on our experience as citizens. We need to start capturing those insights and not simply capturing quantitative data and asking survey questions — because people often cannot articulate the latent effects of wiggly doorknobs!
We need to start accounting for these things and measuring things that matter to our end users. We need to make the case for measuring citizen experience and using qualitative research in our design decisions.
So here is a start on some metrics being used in the private sector that we could adapt and adopt:
What to capture
- Visitor Intent tracks the reason someone came to a website or service centre;
- Task Completion measures if people are able to successfully accomplish what they sought to. This helps us divide successful visits from unsuccessful visits and is measured with a simple yes/no survey question;
- First Contact Resolution tracks how many people have their issues resolved or questions answered on their first contact as a percentage of the total contacts. Are people able to get the help they need and do employees have the tools to solve issues on their own;
- Customer Effort Score measures how much work people have to do through an interaction with the organization. It is usually measured by asking customers “How much effort did you have to put in to resolve the issue?” on a scale from Very Low Effort to Very High Effort. This helps us surface friction points and find ways to improve people’s experiences;
- Customer Satisfaction is used for specific interactions and is measured on a scale from Very Satisfied to Not at All Satisfied at the point of service;
- Net Promoter Score shows the percentage of people who would recommend a service to friends and family. “How likely are you to recommend this service to a friend or colleague?” on a scale of 1 to 10. Now you might think, as Jules Maitland and I did: “actual word of mouth promotion arguably has such minimal impact on/relevance to public sector services — I don’t visit the Emergency Department because my friend recommended it to me, I use it because I need to stay alive”, and you would be right. However, my colleague Leah Fitzgerald had this hot take: it may be the choice to recommend a friend access the service at all. Maybe a service is so unpleasant and difficult to get through that you’d recommend your friend or colleague suffer the consequences of not accessing it than to go through the trouble. That framing changes the value of something like a NPS considerably;
- (BONUS) Employee Satisfaction/NPS/Experience. Christian Bason made a comment at GovMaker V that nurturing ‘engaged citizens requires engaged employees’. At GNB my colleagues track employee experience in a variety of ways including Net Promoter Score. Linking these data points with the above will help us better understand the connection between employee experience and customer service.
Changing up what we measure is key to unlocking a more human-centred government, and sliding these metrics into your projects and evaluation plans could be the beginning.
