Lesson 3: Design customer experience from the outside in. If the goal of DT is to improve customer satisfaction and intimacy, then any effort must be preceded by a diagnostic phase with in-depth input from customers. The staff of Santa Clara County’s Department of Planning and Development conducted more than ninety individual interviews with customers in which they asked each customer to describe the department’s strengths and weaknesses. In addition, the department held focus groups during which they asked various stakeholders – including agents, developers, builders, agriculturalists and crucial local institutions like Stanford University – to identify their needs, establish their priorities, and grade the department’s performance. The department then built the input into their transformation. To respond to customer requests for greater transparency about the permit approval process, the department broke down the process into phases and altered the customer portal; customers can now track the progress of their applications as they move from one phase to the next. To shorten processing time, the department configured staff software so that it would automatically identify stalled applications
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