Across government and public services, there’s growing emphasis on involving people earlier and giving them more say in the services, programmes and decisions that affect them. We’re seeing more co-design and community engagement, and more digital tools and channels for people to self-service and feed back.
And yet desired outcomes don’t always follow. Take-up or participation may be lower than hoped. People delay, drop out partway, or misinterpret information. They fall back on manned channels, even when information is available through digital ones, or only engage once an issue has escalated. Trust, confidence and satisfaction suffer as a result.
So what’s happening in between?
People don’t always experience services and communications as intended. They bring different expectations and mental models, juggle competing priorities, fall back on habits, react emotionally and make decisions under pressure.
At Verian, we’ve been applying behavioural insights for more than a decade to help shape services, programmes and communications, drawing on our wider expertise in research, evaluation, customer experience (CX) & service design and strategic communications.
Our Behavioural Design practice brings together behavioural science, human-centred design and evidence-based methods to better understand and respond to how people actually think and act, not just how we hope they will.
We bring that behavioural lens to existing CX, service and engagement work, helping teams get clearer about what people need to do for the outcomes they want to improve, and what may be shaping that behaviour.
Take three common challenges:
Goals like ‘increase uptake’, ‘build trust’ or ‘strengthen engagement’ become much easier to design for once you get specific about who needs to do what differently, at which point in their experience.
Existing journey maps, service blueprints and comms plans can help identify these moments. Where are people delaying, disengaging, seeking reassurance, taking an unintended route or not taking the next step you hoped they would?
Once you’ve identified the behavioural moment, it can be tempting to move straight to a familiar fix – simplify the journey, rewrite the message, send another reminder, add a touchpoint.
Sometimes that really is what’s needed. But the same behaviour can have very different drivers. That’s where an established behavioural model like COM-B is useful. It systematically considers whether people:
Getting the diagnosis right can lead to quite different responses.
If people avoid seeking support because the language feels stigmatising or “not for people like me”, the response might be to frame support around staying in control, rather than being in crisis.
If a new or unfamiliar experience is likely to take people by surprise, the opportunity may sit before the moment itself – helping people know what to expect and making an abstract process easier to visualise or understand.
If stakeholders doubt their input will make a difference, creating more opportunities to engage may achieve little. Being clearer about what they can genuinely influence, and showing where their feedback went, may matter more.
And while we often try to remove friction, there are times where a little deliberate friction helps people pause, reflect or engage more deeply rather than just breezing past.
This is where behavioural science and human-centred design work well together. Design keeps the wider view of people’s needs and journeys, while behavioural science zooms in on the decisions and actions that shape whether the outcome is achieved.
We recently ran a behavioural design clinic with experienced CX, communications and engagement teams from utility and public sector organisations across Western Australia.
Teams brought real challenges and existing work, including journey maps, engagement strategies and emerging concepts. Rather than trying to tackle the entire problem or end-to-end experience, each team focused on one behavioural moment: defining the behaviour they wanted to influence, diagnosing what might be getting in the way and using behavioural principles to improve the response.
Getting specific about behaviour helped teams sharpen the problem they were trying to solve, rather than staying at the level of broad goals such as ‘trust’ or ‘engagement’. That sharper diagnosis opened up different opportunities – rethinking timing, sequencing and framing, and where a bit of friction might help, rather than adding another touchpoint or communication.
As Emma Hollins, Customer Experience and Insights Lead at Synergy, put it:
“Verian's Behavioural Design clinic was an excellent opportunity for our team to examine a known problem in a new way. Through Verian's approach we were able to uncover the real problem we were solving and unpack barriers and solutions at a level of detail that we had not explored before. Their frameworks around intervention types were particularly useful for assessing whether the planned intervention was the right way to solve the problem. I'd recommend this clinic for all CX Professionals and any business with a customer problem to solve.”
If you'd like to strengthen your team's capability to understand behaviour, diagnose barriers to action and design more effective interventions, register your interest in an upcoming Behavioural Design Sprint. Participants learn practical behavioural design tools and frameworks while applying them to a real organisational challenge. Register your interest for an upcoming training programme.
Alternatively, if you're looking for support on a specific service, programme, communications or engagement challenge, we can help with research, behavioural diagnosis, intervention design, testing and evaluation. Contact us for a no-obligation conversation.