Omnichannel sales support

Challenge

Test the feasibility of unifying the customer-facing self-care website and the various sales-support systems.

Results

Two new end-to-end digital transactions implemented to test the unified customer care concept.

Process

As the business challenge was cross-channel in nature, and it was digital-heavy at the same time, we designed a process merging Service Design and UX Design approaches:

1. Scoping: For the first phase of the project we limited the scope to two transactions and one sales channel - the stores. We chose one average and one edge-case: one of the transactions was the most frequent, the other a highly complex one.
2. Involving the stakeholders: We had set up a project team with representatives from the 10+ affected client departments and all sales channels including sales representatives.
3. Developing a shared understanding: We immersed the team in the context sales reps currently work and which customers face day-to-day. Participants visited stores and after a short observation, they themselves started to serve real customers using the current sales support tools. Returning from the field, we facilitated short workshops to record their fresh insights on the feasibility of the proposed unified sales support tool.
4. Testing prototypes in context: Team members visited stores, and served customers with the current online self-service tool. Returning from the field, we recorded their insights on how fit the current self-service tool is for the task, and the opportunities for improvement they see.
5. Synthesizing research findings: On workshops we mapped the opportunities and barriers from the company’s, the sales representatives’ and the customers’ perspective. The challenges revolved around sales channel tensions, IT feasibility issues and on how to support agents with sensitive customer data like churn status in a consultative sales situation.
6. Concepting workshops: To demonstrate the feasibility of online self-care as a unified sales support tool we developed service concepts for the two transactions scope.
7. Prototyping and testing: The project team split into two and designed customer journeys for the transactions in scope. We iterated on the journeys a few times based on feedback from acting it out for peers and from subject experts.
8. Preparing pilot runs: We developed the journeys into service blueprints. Meanwhile our User Experience team created wireframes to illustrate how the self-care website needs to develop to support the concepts.

Personal takeaway

For one month we had a participative field day or a workshop every other day. This project proved to me, that with the right scope negotiated and a carefully designed process in place, service design can ship fast.