Digital customer experience transformation

How you begin to think about transformation for a business or experience. Maybe, more importantly, how do you know that something even needs transforming?

How do you know that transformation is needed?

It's rarely a roadmap, and usually dissonance.

After spending a good amount of time getting to know the business, the people, capabilities and the way work was delivered, it became clear that it was structured around functional teams within organisational boundaries. Contrary to that, the customer journeys were intricate, crossing multiple teams, products, technologies, and decision-makers.

While the organisation was delivering within functions, customers experienced it as a whole. The disconnect between how the business operated and how customers experienced it speaks to the need to transform and make change.

Surprisingly, there was no lack of research — just a way to put it together. Four years' worth of customer insight, a collaboration with an external partner, a customer portal mid build, and a series of feedback sessions spanning 18 different customers.

Every piece had been done in isolation to solve a problem, tick a box, but not to reach a common goal. None took a human-centric or design-thinking approach to look at the experience for our customers and employees.

Shaping a programme to bring this together

The key distinction, and something I found myself and my team repeating — it's not like the last time. Having done this work before, been sold a dream and dedicated hours, only to have nothing come of it and the work put on a shelf, doesn't make for enthusiastic stakeholders. Shaping a clear programme of work, with scope, purpose and clear output, was key to demonstrating the value of bringing this together.

Covering key journeys, connected to commercial growth, created a lean, repeatable instrument that could be built and extended on.

Being uncomfortable

Discovery into a manual process is never a simple or kind journey. When you ask a team to walk you through how they actually do something — including the workaround, the save-to-desktop, the spreadsheet, the email trail that isn't technically part of the process but we still do it — you're basically asking them to document their own shortcomings and inefficiency. The word transformation often travels alongside restructure, and gets paired with automation just as often. So the most significant challenge with engagement was how to get the information I needed in the right way — creating a safe environment where people would talk openly about their operations.

Two clear things came out of that:

Firstly, frame the work around the employee experience with the same weight as the customer's. The service blueprints, as part of the final artefacts, capture both in parallel at every stage of the journey.

Secondly, findings and critiques were only ever framed at a systems view — the four key themes that were reiterated throughout were absence of a centralised view, manual processes, inconsistent data capture, and inadequate user experience. These are all statements about architecture and systems, not people.

The outputs

The output was three current-state service design blueprints, one per segment, each mapping the end-to-end for key commercial journeys with an outside-in view: what the customer does, what forms they see, what people they speak to, and how they feel about that, based on the feedback we had. We also looked at what our business staff members were doing, which teams truly owned each process, and where they needed support.

Numbers over noise

Almost every qualitative finding was paired and weighted with real numbers where they existed — to force out the loudest voices and inherent bias, and stop the findings from being dismissed as something ephemeral.

Taking our stakeholders on the journey

A meaningful portion of time and effort was spent talking about why this time was different, and what design actually is. What is service design, how does it relate to product design and process mapping, how to read a service blueprint — and why it helps us build the right thing. So much of our material around this came to life because our audience needed it. Design maturity in the organisation was disparate and uneven, and the work could only carry weight with people who understood how and why.

The ultimate output

The work moved through joint ideation sessions with key stakeholders, alongside a roadmap of short- and long-term solutions, ultimately informing the digital strategy moving forward.

The blueprints are constantly referenced throughout our product strategy.