Transforming Customer Experience

Abu Dhabi

The vision

Abu Dhabi Government strives to provide world-class Customer Experience by developing their frontliners, with 3 steps:

1. Build a Competency Framework

2. Identify gaps in competencies

3. Train the competencies

Organisations differ in how they develop competency frameworks and train people. Yet the components are similar.

This roughly involves:

Speaking to relevant stakeholders (HR, managers, employees)
Job and KSA analysis
Competency framework develped
Managers identify who needs development
Training vendors (or internal training) identified
Trianing provided
Feedback about training satisfaction & usefulness (and occasionally application)

The problem:

Most of this process is based on opinions
Opinions about what competencies are important for performance
Opinions about whether the training improves capability
There is no credible evidence that those opinions are correct.

1. Competency framework: Get credible evidence about what competencies are important for performance.

We started with the standard steps but added science:

1. Stakeholder discussions and job/KSA analysis (opinions about what's important)

2. Develop initial competency framework

3. To confirm whether these opinions were correct we developed psychometric assessments for each competency

4. We correlated individual competency with individual performance (6k+ employees)

5. We calculated the competency level of each government department (50 departments)

6. We correlated department competency level with department Customer Satisfaction

Now we had far more credible evidence on what competencies are important for individual performance and department level customer satisfaction.

Training: 2.5k employees go through 4 training programmes. Get credible evidence on what training works

We did not simply ask people whether they liked the training, learned the content, or improved their competencies. We measured whether they did.

We implemented a Randomise Control Trial:

1. Develop objective measures (MCQ type) of knowledge about each competency

2. Randomly allocate people to 4 training groups and a control (no training) group

3. Measure knowledge before and after training. Analyse if true improvement occured relative to control group.

4. Measure competency and performance before and 3, 6, and 12 months after training. Analyse if true improvement occured relative to control group.

Now we had credible evidence about which of the 4 training programmes were most effective.

Dramatic improvement in decision making, performance and efficiency in government spending.

Evidence changed the decisions that would have been made by opinons.

1. Some competencies that were thought to be vital, did not relate to individual performance or customer satisfaction; Some that were vital, were initially not considered important

2. The government likely saved huge financial and human resources that would have been allocated to training competencies that were unrelated to customer satisfaction

3. A pilot showed that all 4 competencies improved significantly

4. The RCT will confirm whether such improvements were caused by the training and which training in particular