Improving technical support for the NZ National Transcription Service
Service Design | User Research | Systems Design
The National Transcription Service provides contemporaneous transcription for court and tribunal events in New Zealand. The service relies on several interacting applications and data management platforms to support a robust and time-sensitive process of receiving, allocating, and transcribing court events with accuracy and speed. I was tasked with identifying the cause of persistent service breakdown, resulting in delivery delays and court stoppages. It became clear that although broken tools were causing the issue, there were many contributing factors.
Role: Service Designer/Researcher
Team: Business Analyst, Product Manager, Business Partner
Methods: Interviews, Observation, Persona Development, Service Blueprinting, Secondary Research
Objective:
In November of 2023, the National Transcription Service (NTS) faced a catastrophic failure in their tools and data storage which resulted in the temporary shutdown of 57 courtrooms across New Zealand. This was ultimately the final straw in an ever-building frustration with the quality of applications and support for NTS — I was asked to investigate the extent of these issues and provide recommendations for how support could be improved.
Primary research questions: What does the current process look like when an incident occurs? What are the stakeholders involved in this process, and what are their relationships like? Are there workarounds being used, and how do they impact the problem?
The overall goal was to achieve a deep understanding of the situation and identify pain points so that I could hand off the work to embedded Service Designers to build the future state.
Work:
My role as a strategic service designer means that I engage in Discovery-phase work for any new initiatives. In this case, that meant establishing a baseline understanding of the current state and building a robust Service Blueprint.
Some highlights:
Conducted interviews with 10 stakeholders including technical SMEs and Court Reporters
Visited the Wellington NTS office to observe Court Reporters in action
Observed and interacted with tools on the front-end and back-end to understand multiple perspectives of the support process
“This kind of Warehouse failure has become a regular and sometimes daily occurrence. It is rare that a week passes without a failure taking place. ”
The first pass at a blueprint — I drew it on a central whiteboard so I could get quick feedback from my colleagues (in red). It’s not pretty, but it worked!
The main output of this work was a current-state Service Blueprint that shows major stakeholders as well as pain points and themed focus areas. This was validated with business stakeholders and user groups.
Outcome:
The pain points uncovered through my research indicated multiple epicenters of experience breakdown, summarized below, which will serve as a jumping-off point for the next phase of the project:
Unfixed bugs and unsupported tools:
Multiple issues with data warehouse storage as well as broken fields and flows in the Transcription Service Manager (TSM) application cause regular stoppages in work for Court Reporters. Additionally, poor contract management has resulted in the application no longer being officially supported by the vendor. However, with the move to Tuhi (refreshed TSM application) as well as dedicated troubleshooting in the data warehouse, most of these repeat issues have been (tentatively) solved.
Strained support system:
A limited number of support staff means that it may take days to rectify non-catastrophic incidents, even if they have completely halted a person’s work. Additionally, supporting NTS requires in-depth knowledge of all tools used by the team, both back- and front-end. This is further complicated by the fact that the back- and front-end of TSM have mismatched language, so it can be difficult to pinpoint the actual issue faced by the Court Reporter.
Broken trust:
The high number of incidents and critical infrastructure issues that went unsolved resulted in a near-complete breakdown of trust between NTS and the incident support system. Despite updates that solve major glitches and a concerted effort to fix data warehouse corruption, these issues remain a sticking point in conversation and have left a lasting impact on NTS’ perception of the support they receive. This results in low usage of support services, low rates of incident reporting, and general unease towards collaboration.
Last Thoughts:
This work was tried-and-true service design, and it was fun to really sink my teeth into a blueprint to map out all the complexities. I was consistently surprised at just how many different tools, processes, and stakeholders were at play. If given the chance to redo this work, I would allocate more time for research to make sure I captured all of these elements, rather than having to circle back so many times to pick up bits I had missed.
The biggest skill I used in this work was empathy — I learned so much more once I looked past the error messages and just took time to listen.