Client Touchpoint Map & System Planning
Nature of product/system: CX and service delivery system for a national direct mail presort service
Personas: Commercial mail processing managers and direct mailer clients
Stage at which I join the project: At project initiation
My role: UX researcher and planning facilitator
Type of research: Formative, Qualitative, Business process discovery and improvement prioritization
Research Technique(s): Remote interview and session facilitation
What was the problem?
The Pitney Bowes Presort group was tasked with reducing it’s costs and bringing clarity and direction to it’s IT operations. To do this they asked the Experience Design group to produce a client touchpoint map, the subset of an end-to-end journey map that presents only those who interact directly with clients. Once I collected all the touchpoints and the major pain points at each, I facilitated a multi-session prioritization exercise that was used to create a long-term roadmap for system development and business process improvement.
What were the stakeholder assumptions?
Avoid any changes to their processes and culture that would put their 78 Net Promoter Score at risk.
Modernization of their client online information portal was necessary to add the desired functionality and improve its UX.
Many of the significant functional changes needed to their systems were already known.
WHICH METHOD(S) DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
I conducted remote interviewed with the lead executives of each group whose members worked directly with clients at some point in their journey from prospect to on-going customer. I also did remote interviews with a sample of operations managers from a range of clients.
From there, I compiled the results and conducted a number of sessions in which the Presort managers reviewed and clustered the findings in to themes, and prioritized the themes using an Importance vs Difficulty matrix.
DID IT WORK? IF NOT, WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTly NEXT TIME?
It took more sessions to cluster the findings into pain point themes and then high-level development project than I expected. As the process progressed I learned that the known sets of problems had gone without resolution for years. The main sticking issue was agreeing on the criteria they would use to organize and prioritize projects. Having an outside group facilitate the discussion helped Presort management finally come an agreement.
Once criteria were set, the problems clustered, and the IT project were identified, prioritizing them went quickly. Though Presort management was initially frustrated, in the end the were very happy with the results.
HOW WERE YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS TIED TO BOTH USER AND BUSINESS VALUE?
Starting with interviews of Presort management and clients, and including them throughout the entire process made it easy to trace the final IT plan back to client and business drivers.
HOW WAS YOUR RESEARCH RECEIVED?
Both the research and the resulting plan were widely accepted by the team and Presorts top executives. IT efforts for the following budget year were reoriented to incorporate the first projects in the plan we developed.
HOW DID YOUR RESULTS BRING IMPACT?
The touchpoint map and resulting priority matrix were used to the set long term CX system development roadmap for the division.