Workflow & Service Design · 2016 to 2017
Rebuilding a customer review around the people doing it.
An in-house transformation team, workshops with the staff who did the work, and a workflow built from what they did rather than what the process said they did.
Role
Middleweight Designer
Worked with
A second Designer, staff and the business
Focus
Customer reviews, end to end
Outcome
Significantly faster customer reviews
Setting the Scene
This is the earliest piece of work on this site, and it is still the one I think about most when a project starts with a process nobody has looked at properly.
Think Money Group was running a business transformation programme, and I joined an in-house agile team working on the software staff used to carry out customer reviews. A review meant going through someone’s income and outgoings with them, line by line: who paid them, how much, how often, what came out before it reached them.
Because it sat inside a transformation programme, the process itself was being rebuilt at the same time as the software that ran it.
Visual coming soon
The review process before the redesign
The Work
Starting with the people who did it every day
Process
There were two of us designing, and we helped run workshops with the staff doing reviews and with the business. That order mattered. The people on the phones knew where the process broke down, and the business knew what it needed to be able to evidence.
What came out of those workshops wasn’t a list of screens. It was an understanding of the workflow itself: the order things happened in, the points where someone had to stop and go and find something, and the bits of the official process that everyone worked around.
Design approach
We designed the workflow first and the interface second. The screens followed the shape of the conversation someone was actually having, rather than making them jump around a form to fit how the data was stored.
The heart of it was capturing income and expenditure clearly: employer, amount, how often, and what was deducted before it arrived. Small, repetitive entries that had to be quick to add, easy to correct, and obvious to read back to a customer who was listening on the phone.
Visual coming soon
Income and expenditure capture
Outcome
The software cut the time it took to complete a customer review, because the workflow had stopped fighting the conversation.
- One flow that matched how a review was conducted
- Income and expenditure entered and corrected without leaving the screen
- A structure the business could evidence against
Reflection
I have done a version of this project many times since without realising it. Sit with the people doing the work, find out what they do rather than what the process says, and design from that.
It also taught me something about who a tool like this is for. The customer never saw this software. They only felt it, in how long the call took and whether the person on the other end sounded like they knew what they were doing.