From Chaos to Clarity with Service Blueprinting
How we went from having no onboarding in place for a new product launch, to having a robust plan with clearly defined roles.
Problem: a new product was about to launch, and we had no idea how to implement it.
The AP side of our business was a launching a new business-to-business payments product, called Pay.
Successful onboarding was dependent on a robust backend implementation process by a business partner, facilitated by a customer-facing implementation from my company’s team.
As the launch approached, the team realized they had been so caught up in building the product, that they hadn’t built out process around it.
Challenge
It was suggested that a “customer journey map” should be built to map the customer’s experience of onboarding, to help identify gaps.
While I was not embedded within any of the teams working on this project, I was the company’s UX researcher, and thus they looked to me for journey mapping, and asked me to own mapping out onboarding.
Target Audience
This map’s audience was internal Emburse employees, to reference the onboarding process. But it was not limited to just Implementations Managers, as there were multiple other teams that would utilize it too to familiarize themselves with the whole process.
My Role
Mission
Timeline
Service Designer
Map the implementation process of the new product, identify gaps and friction points,
create plan to resolve
Two months
January 2022 to March 2022
Collaboration
To complete the project, I needed to collaborate with...
6 Internal Teams
Engineering, Implementation, Sales, Support, Cards Product, AP Product
10 Team Representatives
1 Partner Company
Methods & Phases
Phase 1: Collaborative brainstorms
Separate sessions with representatives from each team where we added steps to the overall map together and mapped out the actions of all involved parties
Phase 2: Map synthesis
I cleaned up and summarized notes, and identified areas of unknowns
Phase 3: Service blueprint and validation
I formatted the map into a service blueprint and validated the steps with all teams to ensure clarity and accuracy
Thoughts on Mission
Service Blueprinting or Customer Journey Map?
The Product Manager who brought the project to me had asked for a Customer Journey Map, but it became clear to me in the description of the type of detail that was needed, and in the goal to identify gaps in the overall experience of sales-to-onboarding-to-use, that what was needed was a Service Blueprint.
I customized the structure to account for the level of detail necessary and to capture all the roles involved, as well as what actions were completed automatically by the product. The blueprint included...
Front-Stage Actions
Customer
Sales Team
Implementations Manager Account Manager
Back-Stage Actions
Partner Company’s Support Team
Services/Product
Partner Company’s Bank Partner Company’s Service Pay Product
Artifacts
Process Documentation
Email Templates
Phase 2:
Map Synthesis
I added details in a master sheet to improve share-ability of the work in progress.
We discussed gaps and who the owner of that step should be...
Outcome
With the success of the first map, we repeated the service blueprinting exercise with other pieces of the overall service that led up to the point where customers could use the Pay product--including Sales and Support--to achieve clarity before launch.
The exercise resulted in a single source of truth that was used across teams, and allowed us to go-to-market with confidence in the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved.
We summarized and visualized a customer-facing diagram of the process to share during sales calls, that is still used by our teams now.
Reflections
When I began the project, I was nervous that other teams would resist working with me, a UX researcher, focusing on something so service-oriented.
I learned that my position made me uniquely suited to the project, because I was not already familiar with the implementation process or sales, for example. When I gathered details on those parts of the journey, I needed my interviewees to go into more detail than they would have if they were speaking to another implementations manager. This detail allowed me to document the journey without relying on the audience having pre-existing knowledge, which resulted in a service blueprint that was understandable by a wide range of teams and roles.
This project inspired me to explore service design further... I saw the value of having an outside consultant (if you will) be the go-between to map out a process. The satisfaction I felt when we completed the blueprint and had determined ownership of all steps was immense. Without this process the launch for the product could have been disastrous and created a bad customer experience, and this exercise felt highly impactful to the user experience.
The one disappointment of this project was that I was not able to follow-up and evaluate where we needed to make changes to the defined process. Once I had completed my work, the company wanted implementations to own it moving forward, and it was difficult to take off that service design cap.