The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) faced a challenge that is common for government agencies: an overload of information and resources that made it difficult to know which services were being used by its customers, and which were not. ARENA asked us to design a service delivery model that would increase the volume and quality of submissions to the agency.

ARENA needed to understand the full breadth of their capability in order to identify the areas that could be improved and should be prioritised.

The need for a transformation to their services came with the desire to successfully adopt a digital-by-default delivery. To be digital-by-default the services and system must be so convenient and straightforward to use that they become the natural and first place a user will go.

To gain a full understanding of ARENA’s customer base we assessed the value and depth of the previous user research before conducting our own. We then worked with ARENA’s customers, staff and stakeholders through interviews and surveys to fill in the gaps. We aimed to understand what was important to them; these findings would form the crux of our service delivery model blueprint.

Our service design blueprint focussed on the user experience, detailing the user’s journey and needs in each stage of the service.

A better understanding of customer behaviour is helping ARENA to achieve its goals. 

The blueprint helped ARENA staff understand customers’ interactions with the agency. It demonstrated how addressing customers’ frustrations and opportunities could help ARENA achieve its goal of receiving more submissions of higher quality.

Following support by ARENA’s executive, our service design blueprint has informed the initiation of successful pilot projects.