Using Service Design to identify break points and foster cross functional collaboration and conversations
Integrated Payables
Skills
Workshop Creation, Workshop Facilitation, Getting Partner and Leadership Buy-In, Service Journey Blueprinting
Role
Lead Service Designer
Tools
Virtual Whiteboard, Zoom, Service Blueprints, Post-It’s
Setting the Context
Where: A “startup” within the Commercial Bank
When: Cross functional partners have the funding and go ahead to start building, but they are at a standstill for identifying and solving break points in the process and getting buy in for solutions
What: Integrated Payables, a B2B payments product integrated with QuickBooks that automates payments from Small Businesses to their vendors helping them to maximize their credit card rewards
Team: Lead Service Designer, Design Director, Product, Tech, Servicing, and Onboarding teams
Step 1: Where are the break points?
Early Process Flow
Through ongoing meetings with our partners, we were able to co-create a high level flow to get buy in from those teams and demonstrate the break points in the process. Our product, tech and servicing teams were not talking to each other and each expected one of the other teams to create a solution for the break points (indicated by the stop signs in the flow), even though the resolutions were interdependent.
Step 2: How do we create the best user experience and who is responsible?
Prioritization Framework
I worked with partners to determine which break points were going to have the biggest impact on our customers. We then held a workshop with our product, tech, and servicing partners to get the teams on the same page and help them to understand their part in the interdependent solutions.
““Fantastic work on the Servicing Venture Hot House!!! Great job getting experts together along with the structure and prep work to make this a successful session! You raised the bar on teamwork and solving complex problems. Thank you!””
““Thank you all for doing such a great job leading the conversation yesterday. Honestly, it was one of the best run meetings that I’ve been a part of in quite some time. I feel that everyone got something valuable out of the time.””
““The work you did leading up to our hot house was outstanding. The frameworks, the clear communication, the gathering of materials, the hosting of meetings and pressing to keep the ball rolling. Thank you for driving us forward as a team and making us all better.””
Step 3: How does it all come together?
Service Blueprinting
With partner teams, we co-created an End-to-End Journey through Service Blueprints, starting at the beginning of the customer journey where they learn about and get onboarded to the product, all the way through making their first payment. The End-to-End Blueprint helped teams and senior leadership to see the complexity and interdependency of the product we were building, it helped everyone to understand their area of responsibility and how that impacted what other teams would experience and be responsible for, and helped to define a cohesive vision for our upcoming launch.
Become a Customer showed the process of a customer learning about the product, deciding to sign up, and then onboarding to the product
The Make Payments Blueprint showed the customer experience and the backstage processes that would accomplish the task
Unhappy Path Solutions
The End-to-End journey demonstrates the “Happy Path” flow, but we also needed to understand the solutions to the break points we had identified in the original process flow. For each of the break points, we built out a servicing flow, showing the interactions between our Servicing team and the other partners. These maps clearly showed who was responsible for what, and exactly what the customer experience would look like if they ran into a problem.
