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Tobias Borris
How redesigning the front-end experience of its customer service portal improved user adoption, usage, and operational efficiency for a leading manufacturer
Summary
A leading manufacturer faced the challenge of improving user adoption, usage, and operational efficiency within its customer service portal, as customers across regions preferred phone support over the online system. The 9-week project involved an interdisciplinary team conducting two rounds of qualitative research, including heuristic reviews, stakeholder interviews, data analysis, journey mapping, and user interviews. The solution involved developing future-state journey maps, refining hero moment prototypes, and creating a technical roadmap. The team also facilitated ideation workshops and testing sessions with customers and account managers. The outcome was a clickable, high-level prototype of the enhanced digital customer experience, supported by a to-be journey map and technical recommendations. This allowed the company to move forward with MVP development and led to further engagements.
Challenge
An industry-leading manufacturing company operates a customer service portal that enables its business customers to manage consignments, returns, and complaints online. However, the portal's usage across regions was low, with many customers preferring to contact their sales representatives by phone. Initial feedback indicated that issues with the customer experience might be hindering wider adoption and usage of the portal, but the business lacked deep customer insights in this area. With that in mind, the company sought to engage a design partner to lead this process, from customer research through to experience design, prototyping and technical assessment – enabling the business to move into MVP development.
Approach
Over 9 weeks, an intra-disciplinary team of four uncovered the key issues with the user experience, refined the information architecture and prototyped how the digital customer experience should come to life in the future.
High-Level Project Plan
Investigating today's user experience
During the research phase, the team aimed to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current customer experience. We needed to identify where the experience performs well, where it falls short, and the key barriers to portal adoption and usage, along with potential solutions. Additionally, we sought to explore how leading companies in and outside the category excel at online services and what insights we could leverage from them. To investigate these research questions, we conducted a variety of activities, including:
Research Activities
Stakeholder Interviews
The team conducted stakeholder interviews to gain a holistic view of the firm’s ambitions, priorities, and constraints, particularly around its online offering and how it engages with customers.
Data & Document Review
The team analyzed large datasets on web shop and portal usage, supplemented by a high-level comparison of portal performance across markets to identify behavioral patterns, pain points, and attrition in the current CX.
User Interviews
The team interviewed portal users to understand their needs, behaviors, and experiences with key features, identifying strengths, pain points, and barriers to adoption, while spotting opportunities to enhance the CX.
Heuristic CX Review
The team used demos and test accounts to assess hero features and service pages, applying the 10 heuristic design principles to identify usability issues.
As-is Journey Mapping
The team mapped the current CX based on user and stakeholder interviews, highlighting HCPs' actions, needs, and pain points, while outlining internal operational and technical challenges to ensure realistic solutions.
Technical Exploration
The team explored the organization's technical constraints, leveraging internal expertise to address back-end limitations and recommend a transition plan.
As-Is Journey Map
Heuristic CX Review
Insight Selection
The research delivered multiple evidence-based insights that informed our thinking.
Awareness
While the company makes a distinction between the two, healthcare professionals don’t see the online portal in isolation from the web shop. When asked to share the feedback for the portal experience, the web shop comes to top of their minds.
Simplicity
In the implant industry, where time is a commodity, healthcare professionals need the portal experience to be as simple and straightforward as possible – with leading platforms presenting unique ways to reduce complexity.
Onboarding
Once user accounts are being created, healthcare professionals feel left alone to discover the web shop. As portal functionalities are buried in the navigation menu, some healthcare professionals don’t know the portal exist in the first place.
Habits
Healthcare professionals are ready to embrace new digital tools yet whenever the digital experience fails to meet their needs, they fall back to their habit of contacting Account Managers on the client side to resolve the issues.
Vision
We created a vision to inspire and guide the design of the eService platform.
Vision Statement
The Transformational Journey
Design Principles
To create a portal that feels intuitive and inviting for customers, the team translated these insights into three principles that displayed significant potential to enhance the customer experience. These principles are shaped by the voice of our users, inspired by best-in-class examples, and grounded in the realities of the client’s business.
Simplicity
Make life simpler for the users of our platform – delivering an experience that is always clear and intuitive.
Flexibility
Cater to the different needs of users, covering various countries, devices and practice set-ups.
Analog: Google Search
Analog: Sonos
Transparency
Build customer’s trust via clear and proactive comms and solutions.
Analog: Fitbit Bedtime Reminder
Solution
Creating the Future-State Journey
Next, we used the as-is journeys as a loose foundation to create a future-state journey map, visualizing the ideal customer experience when engaging with the service. This map highlighted interactions at each step of the journey and helped the team prioritize key areas to ensure a consistent and coherent service experience.
Heuristic evaluation, user and stakeholder research highlighted additional opportunities to improve the user experience.
To-be-journey Map
Creating & Refining 'Hero Moment' Prototypes
The team then developed prototypes of the key moments to bring our ideas to life.
A hero moment prototype is an early example of an idea, concept, service or process that is built to create clarity and be learned from. It's a key interaction within a customer journey that leaves a lasting memorable impact on the person that experiences it. It is used to translate the service vision into practical and visual examples that help build deeper and long-lasting relationships with customers, employees, and the business.
Prototypes
Co-Creation Workshop
The team planned and facilitated an ideation workshop with 22 representatives from various teams within the client organization to identify and align on the key hero moments. Our teams prioritized a backlog of ideas based on the risk and certainty levels to align on the hero moments to bring to life. This workshop was followed by a series of working sessions involving additional subject matter experts in different areas to continuously refine the hero moments.
Testing & Validating the Prototypes
To validate the prototypes, the team conducted interviews across multiple markets, testing low-fidelity versions with both customers and account managers.
The focus was on examining the assumptions underlying each product feature and answering questions such as:
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How effectively do our improved journeys and designs address the needs identified during our initial research?
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What gaps remain, and what additional elements should be included?
Prototype Testing with Customer Interviews
Building the Technical Roadmap
To ensure feasibility, the team, together with client stakeholders, outlined a technical roadmap and technical considerations for optimizing the front-end experience across various journeys and features. This has bolstered our confidence that the proposed solutions are feasible and do not rely on particularly technical UI/UX implementation.
Outcome
As part of the final presentation, the client received a clickable high-level prototype of how the digital customer experience should come to life in the future. This was supported by a to-be journey map and technical recommendations, all grounded in evidence-based research: enabling the business to move into MVP development.
The team received outstanding feedback from the client's senior leadership and succeeded in establishing a new, trusted client relationship by delivering high-quality work and confidently guiding the client throughout the project: providing context, inspiration, clear communication and advice, and challenging key assumptions.
The project's success led to follow-up engagements, further strengthening the relationship with the client.
Looking Into the Future
Moving forward, the client has heeded our advice to build additional confidence in the solution by validating the outstanding assumptions that are the most critical and provide the least data at this point. Additionally, the client plans to develop a CX measurement plan led by high-quality data and a holistic approach encompassing multiple measures.
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