Customer Obsession
My Role
Serving on the customer obsession project track, I led and designed our interview process, facilitated team brainstorming sessions, and was responsible for creating the team and senior decision maker communication materials. Once solutions were generated, I managed the sub-track which focused on the requirements generation and design of a customer cockpit portal.
About the Project
Sometimes enterprises need take a fresh look at the foundation of how their organization serves its customers. Project “Bedrock” had two focuses: streamline the customer billing process and enable customer obsession by strengthening the way the business engages with customers.
Approach
The team employed the use of design thinking tools and mindsets to structure our fact finding and solution development. We conducted comprehensive interviews with dozens of colleagues across various parts of the business to truly empathize with where they struggled to understand and meet customer needs. Process maps were generated, identifying where problems and opportunities existed. The project team wanted to balance quantitative and qualitative data inputs, so we sought to quantify the impact of the issues we found in the user interviews from a data perspective. Once we had synthesized our findings, we went on to ideating solutions and mapping them back to the thematic issues uncovered in our interviews. We validated our ideas with key stakeholders and subject matter experts before formulating our recommendations into a business case to request funding.
Pain Points and Root Causes
Teams employed empathy maps to capture and organize the tasks, feelings, influences, pain points, and goals expressed during initial interviews. By focusing on what we heard from team members in the field, we were able to pull out thematic insights and reframe how we understand user needs.
Showing the Problem with Data
It was important to our team that we looked at the problems from all sides so that we had a solid foundation upon which to ideate solutions. An elegant solution to the wrong problem helps no one. We took what we heard from our experts and dug into the background data to support our findings and make sure we prioritized the right issues in our solution phase. One of the largest issues we heard in our interviews was that the foundational data that our teams worked from was severely lacking. They often did not have the basic contact information needed to get in touch with the right customer. We broke the data down a few ways to show how this bad data was affecting our ability to be a customer obsessed organization.
Solution Development
We got the whole team together for a solutions brainstorming session. To keep everyone grounded in the actual problems we identified, we generated a “how might we...” opportunities statement tied to each one of the issues we wanted to solve. We then went wild with our ideas for potential solutions. We covered a wall with sticky-notes, pitched the ideas to experts, and eventually voted on the best ideas to move forward with in our recommendations.
Output
In the end, we generated four thematic areas that required solutions, 33 individual solutions, and four sub-tracks. The business case successfully acquired the project funding and implementation proceeded. I led the customer cockpit portal design of a new tool the service teams could use to see an integrated 360-degree view of customers.