Co-creating Conglomerate's After-Sales Servicing through Collaborative Workshop Approach

The client first engaged with us with a straight-forward business ask of designing a self-serve channel for customers. Together with another Design Facilitator, we conducted stakeholder interviews with 8 functions - from Transformation Office, BU Heads, Product Managers, Marketing, Sales, Logistics, Call Centre, to After-sales Service teams. This enabled us to map out the as-is customer journey and operation flow to start surfacing the pain points, which appeared to be not only lying on the customer experience layer, but also on the operational flow where there were many handoff gaps causing inefficiency.

As aligned with the client team, we pivoted and elevated the exam question from simply designing a customer self-serve platform, to taking a comprehensive and collaborative approach to identify both customer and operational pain points, and co-create the future state of after-sales experience.

We had then refined the delivery approach from designing and building a customer platform directly, to taking a collaborative approach of running 3 full-day workshops across 3 weeks, with a group of 30+ members from leadership and cross-functional operation teams.

I then started structuring the workshop agenda that could better facilitate the team to finding answers to the business challenge in an interactive and collaborative way, while inserting prompts and food for thoughts along the way to inform their design process.

On Day 1, we took a zoom-out view, with the objective was to bring alignment for cross-functional members on understanding the problem statement, and build a shared vision of how tomorrow looks like.
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We started off by introducing the Design Thinking approach and the user-centric mindset to engage and start bringing them out of the box (their usual business hat). Then, we played back our research findings on how as-is after-sales servicing looks like, together with surfacing the customer and operational pain points, so that the team began to align on the business challenge and why we were here today.
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With a good understanding of the current state, we then took the team to fast-forward to a few years later to imagine the future headline after the transformation versus without. This helped the team to reflect collectively and build a shared vision of how they want to evolve.

On Day 2, we took a zoom-in view. After refreshing the team with warm-up activities around user-centricity, we took them through a series of cross-industry servicing case studies, so as to inspire them of what does good look like.

We then introduced the personas to get them into the shoes of the customer to map out the as-is customer journey, identify any pain points, and reframe the problems to turn into opportunities. Then, the team entered the most fun part, ideation, followed by ideas prioritisation. In which, they explored ideas beyond having just a self-service channel, but some engaging and AI-enabled approaches to uplift the customer experience and servicing quality, while some on making operational handoffs more efficient.

As we wrapped up the day, we had a list of prioritised initiatives, which the delivery workstream took it offline to run viability and feasibility evaluation, and discuss with stakeholders to initially form the strategic roadmap.

On Day 3, we started off by having the delivery workstream to align the team on the strategic roadmap and what we want to deliver as MVP - the customer self-serve platform. The team then further zoomed into the MVP co-creation by storyboarding to visualise the customer journey of using the self-service platform with must-have features.

After building the WHAT, it's time for the HOW. In order to enable the success of developing the MVP, we had the teams to plan for tasks, surface potential blockers, identify teams to be involved to form a comprehensive view of what's next.

As we, the strategy workstream, wrapped up the 3-day workshop delivery, it enabled the delivery workstream to swiftly proceed to the UX/UI implementation of the MVP. The release successfully helped reducing the call centre usage by 60%, so that the team could better utilise resources for more value-added servicing operations.

In parallel, the client also took the strategic roadmap into further evaluation and planning internally.