Background: In a survey among the members who have been calling the Swedish trade union Unionen for advisory support, 60% of them had first tried to find help at the union website. The reason why they decided to call the support was that they could not find the right help online or that they did not trust the general information given on the platform to be relevant for them as individuals. This is the reason for why Unionen wanted to develop their online platform in order to meet the needs of their members to more easily access relevant individual information, instead of calling the advisory support.

Purpose:
The objective with the project was to decrease the number of cases at the member advisory support with 20% in order to liberate time and efforts for more value adding tasks. Also, the objective was to make it easier for members of Unionen to get direct help with their issues via the already existing Unionen platform.

The result:
A number of central insights were compiled, on how the members of Unionen experience them, their website and the advisory support. A customer journey, called the "The case journey", showed where and why the members experienced challenges in the journey of getting help from Unionen. Based on this, our project team together with Unionen prioritized areas for development, design principles for future development and a few concrete action proposals. The results illustrated clearly why and what direction Unionen should take in ordet to reach the goal of a decreased number of phone calls to the support as well as better online services for their members.

How did we perform the project?
The project was actuated with a start up meeting together with Unionen, where we discussed the objective of the project and what Unionen wanted to achieve with it. A start up workshop was planned to gather all the knowledge about the topic already existing within the organisation. For the interviews, we decided on meeting with both employees at the advisory support and members using it today, in order to to fully understand the challenges and experiences. Based on our learning from the start up workshop we began the interviews, where project team members from Unionen were monitoring and listening in to build empathy and understanding for the member and employee experience.

After each day of interviews we had a joint mini-analysis with the team and after each round of interviews we met in workshops to analyze the bigger picture from the many interviews. The workshops gave us the platform for deepening the understanding and compile the insights and result. For the relevance and accuracy of the result, it was important for the project team to continuously be updated on the initiatives already existing in the organisation on similar topics and the important learnings from them. This helped us to better develop solutions that truly would benefit the members as well as understanding in what way it would be possible to implement such changes within the organisation and their digital channels.

What was the project outcome?
A number of illustrated member insights were defined, visually communicating the experience of the members in a way that is easy to spread within the organisation. A customer journey, "The case journey", was developed based on the insights of the challenges that members experience in relation to the advisory support. By also providing Unionen with prioritized areas of development with related design principles and suggestions for solutions, the team was able to clearly show what needs to be done in order to reach the project objective. Some suggestions concerned the digital channels while others were relating to organisational factors such as roles and responsibilities. All suggestions were compiled and presented in a prioritized road map.

How did our client experience our work?