The client
Actiris, the Brussels regional agency for employment counselling, faces the arduous challenge to counsel the unemployed of one of the most diverse cities in the world. They are confronted with more than 180 different nationalities, as well as a plethora of languages, cultural habits, educational backgrounds, institutions and administrative complexities. Over the last years they’ve steadily been able to make unemployment recede in the capital of Belgium while continuously facing new challenges with regard to migration, government reform and job market transitions. They have local antennas in 18 of the 19 Brussels municipalities.
The challenge
In order to improve their services Actiris already gathers a substantial amount of quantitative data, yet it remains a challenge to tell the stories behind those numbers. To achieve this, Actiris asked us to perform a qualitative study of their major touch points through the creation of personas and user journeys to facilitate the co-creation of new concepts to improve their services. This involved getting in touch with partner organisations which would allow us to reach out to some of the most difficult to reach targets populations in Brussels, namely those with a large distrust of government institutions. The challenge was to rapidly understand the organisational and societal complexities and evolutions, as well as creating a context to allow new ideas to become more easily implemented in a highly structured organisation by introducing the organisation to the concept of service design.
Our approach
We started out by getting to know the scope of the project, which involved job seekers under 25 and long duration job seekers. Subsequently we mapped out the different profiles within the defined scope and selected those profiles in need of further elaboration. Additionally we extracted several dimensions of importance for job seekers and mapped the selected profiles onto those dimensions to verify that the different profiles covered different dimensions of importance. These profiles were then elaborated through interviews with clients of Actiris as well as partner organisations working on the topic of migration an integration. The attained information allowed us to get a good perception on both the process through which job seekers move as well as the affective experience at different stages, which translated into three user journeys.
The result
By providing the employees of Actiris with concrete experiences from their clients through personas designed as CV’s and user journeys, we were able to co-create solutions to help job seekers in Brussels and determine crucial topics to further explore. These solutions involved a set of icons to allow easy understanding of the priorities of letters, a one stop shop for migrants who don’t know the administrative system of Belgium well, a frequent meet-up with the partner organisations, and a leaflet on which the job seeker could indicate important topics to discuss with the counsellor during their short meetings. But most importantly, we were able to make the voices of the clients heard through the organisation and give the employees of Actiris a richer understanding of who their clients are.
