A Service Re-design, for the Customer Service Vertical, focussed on employee satisfaction.
With over 9,000 employees at the Innovation Center, and over 250 working with the said vertical,
I was the sole service designer and project lead, working with a UX/UI designer. My role included chalking out the research plan, mapping the service and identifying opportunities to scale.
Deriving more than 1/3rd of the revenue from Customer Service vertical, the client wanted to understand how they could be more efficient.
What does efficiency even mean, for a global healthcare and innovation leader?
Service Designer
May 2019 - Aug 2019
Bengaluru
Redefining Boundaries
service vertical redesign
Key Challenge: High attrition rate + Overburdened Team = restricted primary research
Understanding people and situations
10 stakeholders interviewed
08 stakeholders shadowed
This was a call for help.
We obviously needed to transform the brief.
EFFICIENCY, according to the brief provided meant increasing profits. On the contrary, Efficiency for the team meant reducing burden on teams. With multiple legacy tools and overburdened teams, the client's team was burning out in every sense.
Key questions that came up
Why was there acceptance of operational challenges (time versus tasks?)
Was Gender a concern or criteria while hiring Remote Service Engineers (RSEs)?
How and why was the average weekly time-off per RSE was below zero?
These challenges brought forward concerns beyond technology that the vertical needed to address.
“Happy employees, happier customers."
So HOW MIGHT WE reduce the burden on the employees?!
Understanding people and situations
Phase Focus:
To understand what efficiency meant, it was needed to understand what the service means for the organization. This required diving deep into identifying people who could explain the service, the role they played and the impact on the organization as a whole.
My Role:
- Identification of stakeholders to conduct interviews
- Designing the Interview Guideline
- Training the team to conduct open-ended interviews and shadow interviewees
- Run-through of all documents prepared by the Customer Service Architects at the client organization.
Synthesis
12+ technical challenges
5+ operational challenges
200+ employees, managing systems for over 80k+ employees, addressing the Indian Subcontinent.
The workshop began with an empty canvas in the form of a Service Blueprint, open for the team to understand, reflect and map out how the CS team functioned, the gaps they were unaware of, the tools they used and overused, the challenges they faced at different stages and the journey each team operated through.
Once the blueprint was redesigned, the teams was then asked to cocreate on potential solutions.
Project Service Redesign
The project findings and potential solutions were shared with the Chief Design Officer & Business Leader Healthcare Transformation Services at Philips, in a Campus-wide Design Studio Showcase. Findings were validated by Service Designers working with different business units, along with discussion on the next 18 month implementation plan for the said solutions.
In retrospect, the project helped me with:
1. Organizational Research and prioritization
2. Collaborative Refinement of the Service Blueprint
Articulation
After waiting, tracking and finally interviewing some stakeholders, the key challenges were identified, technical and operational in nature:
-Multiple Technical Platforms
-Technical Syncing Problems in both Urban and Rural areas
-Repetitive tasks for teams across the flow
-Poorly connected teams service means for the organization.
Tranformation
To validate the brief and to ideate on potential solutions, I proposed a two- day Co-create workshop - a collaborative approach focusing on discovery, framing, ideation and building as a cross-functional method to solving challenges.
The idea was to give an opportunity to the entire Customer Service Team of over 200 employees, to attend the workshop and help solve the challenges identified. In two days, around 20 employees came in, representing different teams.
The Workshop was the first non-training workshop for the Customer Service Team, enabling them to give their suggestions. Insights and potential service restructure were then presented before the global Design and Innovation leaders for the Client, along with the country heads.
Tools: Dot voting, Value Webs, Pain-Chains, Service Blueprint
