REDEFINING BOUNDARIES
Project Lead, Service Designer
Mar-Aug 2018
Deriving more than 1/3rd of the revenue from this service stream, the client wanted to understand how they could be more efficient.
What does efficiency even mean, for a global healthcare and innovation leader?
Key Constraint (or not): Being the only Service Designer on this team!
The Process:
CO-CREATE
UNDERSTANDing People and Situation
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.
08 Stakeholders Interviewed
05 Stakeholders Shadowed
Key Challenge: High attrition rate + Overburdened Team = restricted primary research
ARTICULATE
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.
Potential Questions that came up for the team:
1.Why was there acceptance of operational challenges (time versus tasks?)
2. Was Gender a concern while hiring Remote Service Engineers (RSEs)?
3. Average weekly time-off per RSE was below zero - how and why?
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.
This was a call for help.
We obviously needed to transform the brief.
“Happy employees, happier customers."
TRANSFORM
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 to attend the workshop and help solve the challenges identified.
Key Insight:
The difference between Users and Customers
BUILD - TEST - DELIVER
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.
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Tools: Dot voting, Value Webs, Pain-Chains, Service Blueprint
12+ Technical Challenges
5+ Operational Challenges
200+ team members, poorly connected, repetitive tasks
The project ended with a Service Blueprint which identified how teams across the Customer Service segment worked, the tools they used and overused, the challenges each team faced, and the potential solutions that could be mapped.
Similar findings were identified in other regions for the client as well, validating the research and the solutions identified.
Key Learnings
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Organizational Research and prioritization
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Refining a Service Blueprint while collaborating with the actors involved