Solving complex problems

I’m a firm believer that you can’t solve customer problems without solving business ones, and vice versa. The two are not mutually exclusive. I have extensive experience putting my HCD hat on and using Service Design in order to help unpack business problems, whether they be people, role, process, tech and service.

Below are some examples 👇

Where is
my order?

As a business, we had a significant business cost whereby 75% of complaints coming into our customer service teams where relating to ‘where is my order?’; costing the business up to ~$XXXk a year in wages. Not to mention the immeasurable cost of poor UX/CX.

Understanding the operating model

Mapping our service design blueprints and understanding all the customer interactions, business processes, data points we could leverage & working w. our parcel providers to understand what data they need and can pass back to us allowed us to paint a very clear picture of what was taking place. This then allowed us to work with the business not just on design, but people, process and workflow .

  • Identify all the logistics, people and process that take place in the warehouse from the time a user makes an online purchase; through to the picking and packing right the eay through to a courier coming to collect the goods. All the things that impact a CX:

    • How long after an order is placed does it get taken off the shelf?

    • How long does it take to pick and box a product?

    • When does a label get printed?

    • What are the stages in which we notify customers about the status of their order?

    • What activities within the warehouse actually trigger those customer notifications?

  • Understanding the timeframes and frequency that our warehouse accepts parcel collection. There are various factors that need to be taken in:

    • How many trucks a day come for collection?

    • Where does the truck go?

    • How long does it take from parcel collection to ship a customers product?

    • What data does the parcel carrier have that we can access or visa-versa so we can communicate delivery status with a customer?

  • Now that we’re understanding all the people, process and data; working with our Marketing & IT teams to understand how we can start to design (UX, UI or process / systems) to improve lines of communication so that customers are crystal clear every step of the way so they’re not left wondering where their order is.

  • A great example of a learning which we remediated:

    On this occasion we learned that a legacy way of working meant that we were treating fragile items as bulky - which triggered a different process, slowing the warehouse down massively. This in turn was causing huge shipping delay and paired with missing data points, we weren’t actually communicating these slows to our customers.

    Ordinarily it would take 30seconds to pick and pack a product; this change in process meant it was taking 4 minutes - and when you sell a few thousand of an item the whole warehouse can back up fairly quickly.

Shifting customer sentiment

How do you go about shifting years of negative customer sentiment? We built out a program layered in trust and transparency, as-well as putting the processes in place to handle, triage and act upon customer feedback; changing hearts and minds both in the business as-well as for new and existing shoppers.

Identifying the opportunity…

We had been leveraging and paying a 3rd party vendor to access feedback that users where sporadically leaving - so that we could own and respond to it. However, it was just ‘there, and existed’ without much thought or strategy behind it. Not only was there an operational cost, but it was counterproductive for the business given it was actually showing the online shopping community that we didn’t place value on customer feedback.

  • Identify the accounts and capability from 3rd party vendors that we were already paying to access; as-well as understand all the integration points that had been (and hadn't been) set-up.

  • We needed to understand how, when and why customers were leaving feedback so that we could map out all the touch-points and marry that back to our internal business processes.

  • We needed to show both existing as-well as potential new customers that we placed genuine value on their feedback, and that it was welcomed by making it prominent and part of key customer journeys, whether they be discovery or transactional journeys.

  • We set up a cadence of testing our engagement model, centred around the ways in which we communicated and the timings of when we communicated and requested customer feedback.

  • Working with the business, we stood up a Service Design Blueprint to understand all the various touch-points and data as mentioned above 👆so that we could adjust our own internal processes to not only respond to customers feedback, but turn it into improved customer service processes as-well as being able to successfully triage feedback and turn it into tangible delivery focussed outcomes.

  • Continuous iteration and monitoring of the program was critical to ensure it could scale across our multiple businesses - resulting in significant uplift in customer sentiment.

Identification in a multi jurisdictional environment.

How do you not only create a product that allows a consumer to visually authenticate themselves; but how do you map out the service and gain buy-in from stakeholders that operate in different countries, with different data / privacy laws?

Stakeholder management

Managing a program of work relating to data and identity means needing to have very strong communication skills as-well as exceptional stakeholder management abilities.

  • Leveraging a 3rd party vendor for real-time visual identification and authentication meant mapping out a functional spec and workign with the business (a bank) and taking all the service design blue prints through procurement and aligning with internal engineering teams.

  • Leading the program also meant aligning Service Design & UX Design upfront, running proper discovery sessions with the business, 3rd party that was very much ‘product / design lead’ to ensure a great customer outcome. Caveat: with very heavy stakeholder management of risk and legal representatives (in multiple countries).

  • Along with a robust Service Design blueprint documenting both the front-end and back-end parts of this authentication process; we were able to successfully delivery a fully digitised, self-serve authentication UI that has been implemented and is being used by certain cohorts of users.