Services
I work with founders, leaders and organisations navigating complex problems across customer strategy, policy, services and organisational change.
I bring together strategic thinking, research, service design and organisational insight to understand what's really happening, including the commercial and operational realities, and work out what to do next.
I work with clients in different ways, from focused projects and individual workshops to longer-term fractional engagements, training and coaching. I tailor my level of involvement to what each client needs. My core areas of expertise are:
When a service isn't working well, the problem is often bigger than the service itself. Different teams may be working to different priorities, decisions may be made in isolation, and the people delivering the service may have little influence over how it's designed. I help organisations understand these connections and work across them to make services work better.
Customer research
I conduct research to understand how your customers or employees actually use your products and services — identifying barriers, pain points, hand-off friction and unmet needs. This can include:
- Uncovering user needs and pain points through interviews, workshops and moderated sessions with service users or frontline staff (customers, patients, employees)
- Identifying customer segments and validating demand to inform proposition and service development
- Modelling customer value and lifecycles to understand what drives value for customers and the business
- Mapping end-to-end customer journeys to understand experiences, identify friction points and prioritise opportunities for improvement
- Evaluating service processes to identify barriers, failure points and opportunities to improve delivery
Over the years, I’ve worked on a wide range of research projects, from helping Hargreaves Lansdown understand how clients make financial and investment decisions to improving customer support and contact-centre staff experience. Here’s what some clients have said about that work.
“You have delivered rich client insight data that puts us way above our peers and made it really easy for us to align future changes to client needs.”
— Programme Manager, Hargreaves Lansdown, UK
Service design
Design problems are rarely interface problems. When users struggle, the interface is often where the problem becomes visible—not where it began. The real causes are usually deeper: misaligned incentives, policies developed without frontline insight, fragmented journeys, commercial pressures, or decisions disconnected from how the service actually works — and from how customers find it, understand it and use it.
From streaming content to renewing a passport, we all rely on dozens of services every day. The best feel effortless to use, even though behind the scenes many are enormously complex, spanning multiple departments, business owners, policies, regulatory checks and third-party providers that all have to work together.
I work across the service design lifecycle, with particular interest in discovery and end-to-end evaluation. I help with:
- Service discovery to understand user needs and shape services that are viable, accessible and easy to use.
- Designing and evaluating new service concepts before costly build
- Mapping end-to-end services and journeys across people, processes, systems, data and channels to uncover pain points, dependencies and handoffs, and identify where improvements will have the greatest impact
- Evaluating and improving existing services
- Working to the GDS Service Standard across Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live
Presenting a service map at a service design meet-up in London
CX strategy
Without a clear CX strategy, even good intentions get fragmented across channels and departments. A strategy is the operating plan that aligns everyone around what we’re aiming for, what matters most, who owns what, and how we’ll measure success.
I help translate research insights into a clear CX strategy that aligns your organisation around what matters most. I help with:
- Defining your CX strategy, what customers should feel, think, and be able to do at every interaction
- Prioritising critical moments, what are the most important interactions to get right
- Setting KPIs and success measures to help us track progress and adapt to changing needs and market conditions
- Clarifying ownership & decision points across the different customer journeys
Capability & organisational change
For good work to become routine, both the organisation and the team need to change. Redesigning how work flows, not just how people behave.
Organisational change doesn't happen through good intentions or top-down decrees. It happens when senior leaders commit to change and teams adopt new ways of working together. I work alongside your leaders and teams to help embed user-centred practices and ways of working that become repeatable and resilient. This requires senior sponsorship; without it, even strong team-level work is unlikely to lead to lasting change.
I typically help with:
- Facilitating workshops and team sessions — I've facilitated over 250 workshops on a variety of topics, online and in person, including 40 design thinking workshops designed and delivered for the Office for National Statistics.
- Mentoring teams and individuals.
- Embedding user-centred practices
- Organisational development and design
The work is grounded in understanding systems, organisational structures, incentives and how to achieve lasting change. It’s informed by a Certificate in Group Facilitation and Masterclass in Organisational Development from the Gestalt Centre London, ICF-accredited coach training from Solutions Academy, Germany, and regular professional supervision.
“Mia's contribution to the creation of our service and product designs was consistently of high quality. She helped transform the approach and ways of working within a complex organisational context and took a facilitator leadership role that brought teams across different business areas together to problem-solve and agree on direction. Her proactive way of identifying what needed doing, and highlighting risks and issues, was invaluable to successful delivery.”
— Callum Foster, Senior Business Owner, Office for National Statistics, UK
Facilitating a workshop at the Government Digital Service (GDS) in London
Looking for project examples?
Most of the projects I work on are sensitive and regulated, so detailed case studies aren't published here. I'm happy to talk through relevant examples on a call, or send a curated portfolio.
Contact me to schedule a call