The Art of the Client Journey: Finding pathways to support for clients within the Charity Sector

Introduction: Running along riverbeds

Since time immemorial, charities have been dedicated to serving their clients and benefactors with empathy, care, and a commitment to making a positive impact. At the heart of this endeavour is the concept of the client journey – the path that individuals take from their initial point of contact with a charity to the fulfilment of their needs or goals. Traditionally, the client is assessed through triage, which is the preliminary assessment to determine the urgency and nature of support required. The person delivering this service may go by a number of role titles but in this article I will call them Pathfinders – a title that I think best summarises the spirit with which the challenge must be approached.

Yet it is often the case that client journeys can be like that of a well-worn riverbed: in which the water flows naturally through familiar channels, and tides rise and fall freely as capacity builds and shrinks. New distributaries are opened by forces that shape and impact the landscape over time – both intentionally and, sometimes, unintentionally. Where the journey develops unintentionally, it is often through custom and practice to suit the demands of the clients and needs of the business according to the pressures the service is experiencing or because boundaries are not being enforced. Much like leaving rivers to be shaped by forces of nature can lead to flooding and damage to infrastructure, so too lies a risk that service-based organisations who allow client journeys to become inconsistent can experience unwanted strain and confusion. In the worst-case scenarios, a poor client journey can be damaging for reputation and undermine trust with service-users.

On the other hand, the client journey - when done well - can sometimes be just as important or even more important than the client receiving the outcome they desired. We’ve all seen a five-star Trustpilot review where a customer says they disliked and returned the product but that the service was first-class and how great the company was! Much the same, I’ve seen Citizens Advice team members rightly and correctly inform clients of bad news but then watched the client skip out of the office with a smile on their face because they had an excellent client journey, received a professional service and felt closure to their issue. Being listened to, supported in a timely manner, and given options to move forward with their query are foundations of a good client journey.

But it is not easy to get the delicate balance of understanding, responsiveness, and resourcefulness right. We work in the real world, with real pressures. Citizens Advice services have never been more in demand, and with cost-of-living challenges being varied and complex it has never been more difficult to navigate the issues presented. Therefore, finding pathways to support for clients requires a Pathfinder to collate a wide range of knowledge and think creatively about pathways to support for clients to follow. In this article, I outline three ways in which to guarantee an excellent client journey within the advice sector and, in that, where services need to invest time and resource to laying the riverbeds of the client journey in a planned and coordinated way.

1. Knowing advice options and service capacity

The starting point of a good client journey is helping the client to understand whether they’re in the right place. Advice services, such as those provided by a local Citizens Advice, offer a wide range of advice support and so Pathfinders need to have a strong understanding of what advice their service does or doesn’t provide. One of the most agonising missteps that can occur on a client journey is that the client is placed into the system for services that you don’t provide or that your service hasn’t the capacity to deliver. It’s like a customer making an enquiry about buying a washing machine to be put on hold to speak to a dishwasher salesperson. It will not end with a happy customer!

At Citizens Advice Kensington and Chelsea, around 65% of the advice we give relates to welfare benefits, money and debt (and, increasingly, access to charitable grant support and food banks), 25% relates to housing issues and the other 10% relates to everything else (employment, family, immigration, etc.). It follows, therefore, that anyone involved with the triage or assessment of the client must understand whether the issues the client is presenting with are issues that the service will provide advice for.

While Pathfinders do not necessarily need to know the exact advice solutions available to the client, they do need to know the categories of support, broadly what they entail, and the service’s capacity to take on those issues. In our case, it is therefore necessary to have a working knowledge of the welfare benefits system, debt solutions, ways to manage money, options available for charitable support, how the private and social rented housing sectors operate, housing rights, as well as the basics of our other common areas of support.

Consequently, the organisation should take time to develop the mechanisms through which services are clearly defined and the capacity to take on the issues is monitored and fed back to team members through constant communication between all team members and at all levels. Doing so ensures that clients start their journey off on the right foot and don’t waste their time.

2. Knowing what pathways to support exist outside of your service

Since Citizens Advice takes a holistic approach to information, advice and guidance, it is important that Pathfinders know what options may be available to clients where our own advice solutions are not suitable or where the service does not have capacity to support the client in a timely manner. Doing this has become increasingly difficult in recent years where we’ve seen clients attend our outreaches or contact our phonelines with ‘non-advice’ queries. Often these non-advice queries relate to a mental health issue or loneliness, as the client finds themselves presenting at our services looking for ‘help’ that does not fall within the normal remit of our services. The complexities of modern life, exacerbated by the cost-of-living crisis, have made these client engagements more common and so it is increasingly important that advice agencies like Citizens Advice see themselves as part of the life of the local community (but also regionally and nationally) and not simply isolated advice services.

However, this can be an exceptionally challenging task because the landscape of alternative support outside of your own organisation can be unfamiliar and ever-changing. The conversations we have internally every day allow for the free-flow of new information about new emerging advice areas, methods for tackling challenging advice issues, and the smooth transition of clients from one part of their journey to another. This is not the case when trying to monitor options available to our clients provided by our partners and other third-party services.

Excellent organisations and excellent Pathfinders need to take a proactive approach to understanding the solutions available to their clients outside of their own services. This too is no simple task. It requires monitoring the success and failure of referral pathways so that the most effective routes to issue resolution are utilised over the ineffective ones. This requires building trust between organisations to have honest and frank conversations about whether client needs have been met, and to develop the matrix of information at community level required to leverage the collective resources available. It requires a curiosity about the organisations that compose community life - what services the council offers and the local NHS service provision – as well as the support available through community organisations such as colleges, places of worship, theatres, and leisure and sports facilities that can offer pathways to greater mental and physical wellbeing.

Being able to identify where a client’s needs may be better met outside of our own organisation can ensure the client has a positive experience interacting with our service, and help with managing the pressure on the capacity of our service.

3. Aligning the client journey within the service

In a service where operating a variety of access points is desirable, for example to accommodate for both client preference or necessitated by client needs arising from disabilities or language barriers, it is inherent that the client journey will vary. By its nature, the client who first accesses the service at an outreach will have a different experience to the client who first accesses the service over the phone.

While a variety of access points is desirable, and can contribute to a good client experience owing to the additional choice through which support is accessed, it can also lead to issues arising further along the client journey if there is no alignment. Let’s use our riverbed analogy from earlier. Imagine, if you will, three streams all running side-by-side (telephone, outreach, and email access points). If all three streams are running towards the same end point (advice on a particular issue) then there may be two options for the organisation to pursue. Either, (i) the three streams are allowed to run separately to the end point, or (ii) the three streams are merged at a sensible and convenient point on the journey leading towards the end point.

In the first case, it may seem sensible to keep the streams self-contained to ensure that there is no deviation or if the channel is being handled by one person or team who can take the issue from start to finish. However, in a service with multiple channels and with multiple operators, the client experience becomes inconsistent, has been solely determined by the point of entry, and places pressure on the one person or one team delivering on that entire client journey. Allowing a whole service and client experience to be determined by the way in which the client accesses the service can lead to inefficiencies (e.g. communicating in writing via email rather than orally in an email-only service), create hurdles to support later on in the client journey (e.g. having to re-triage their issues because the point of access did not lend itself to a full exploration), and potentially lead to difficulties in managing client expectations should they return to the service through a different channel in future (e.g. if it was easier or smoother when the service was accessed in person or they want to be seen by the same member of staff who helped them originally).

The alternative is to choose a sensible and convenient point at which client journeys align. This has a number of benefits. Firstly, it means that the organisation can determine the touchpoints at which resources can be allocated to make the greatest positive impact on the whole client journey. For example, if access points are used as simply that – points at which a client is brought into the system – then it allows for the determination of the client journey to be done in a way that is most efficient, least resource-intensive, and in a more controlled, predictable environment. Secondly, it can allow the organisation to guarantee a uniform experience for the client not limited by the pressures of having to determine or predict the most appropriate client journey at the first instance. This relieves pressure on team members working at points of access with especially high footfall or on busy referral pathways. Thirdly, and following the previous point, by aligning the client journey the client will have the same experience as all other clients (or themselves if they return to use the service again in future). This makes it far easier to manage client expectations, identify exceptions to usual protocols to accommodate client needs, and ensures that team member have a clear understanding of touchpoints on the client journey that enable the quick identification of next steps.

Summary: The Art of the client journey

Pathfinding is one of the most challenging aspects of service delivery. It is affected by demand on the services, capacity to deliver support and requires creative thinking to adapt the client journey according to emerging and disappearing solutions. In this sense, mastering a pathfinding role is something of an art, which at it's heart is the ability to communicate, build rapport and be tenacious in hunting down solutions.

Pathfinding roles can be some of the most rewarding work in the charity sector. Playing a central role in determining and facilitating the smooth running of the client journey is very satisfying and can have a huge impact on the client’s wellbeing – giving them peace of mind that their issues are being addressed. It is also a role that should appeal to self-starters, who love getting into community spaces to hunt down the new and emerging solutions for the clients, and who enjoy building a rapport with community stakeholders to expand their understanding of client needs and partnership solutions.

If this type of role appeals to you, we’re recruiting! You can find the full details for our Pathfinder role at www.citizensadvicekc.org.uk/work-with-us (deadline 20th February 2024 at 17:00pm).