Building off our partner's decision to shift from a transactional technical support model to a subscription-based approach, it was imperative to consider how the brand/customer relationship needs to evolve in order to meet the needs of customers when and where they need support. How might we shift from a prototypically transactional organizational model to one focused on building life-long relationships with our customers? 

As part of a synergistic ecosystem, how the organization supports support agents, the physical manifestation of the brand promise, is as important as the frontline customer experience. How might we better understand their needs and craft holistic solutions? ​

Informing the underlying needs of customers (and employees) through contextual research would help us develop a rich understanding of the challenges customers and employees faced in their everyday lives. This included ride alongs, call-center shadowing, and dscout journaling followed by synthesis to align key insights about our customers across the end-to-end support journey while identifying opportunities to improve the underlying support architecture and create a better and more efficient experience for employees.

We then conducted a quantitative study with target customers to validate and prioritize identified need states. This ensured that the need states we are solving for aligned with our customers’ expectations. In other words, we were solving the right problems for our customers.

Extensive co-creation activities defined the service architecture, core principles for the service offering, and service concepts that demanded further ideation and validation. Our service concepts balanced the needs of customers and employees to create a holistic vision while providing clearly defined outcomes we could use to prototype, test and iterate. 

We mapped our end-to-end service vision from the perspective of the different actors in the service ecosystem, documenting how each are interacting with the service across different touchpoints and moments in time, The service architecture illustrated the interconnectedness of our service concepts and how they must be orchestrated to deliver value to both customers and employees. Rapid prototyping of key digital interactions allowed us to test and validate high-level concepts and prioritize features, creating a sequence that would inform the service capability roadmap. 

Our service roadmap illustrated the overall sequence of desired features, aligning to benchmarks (foundational, transformational, and magical) that would elevate the service into a strategic differentiator offering unique value in the market. This service roadmap aligned the enablers and capabilities necessary to deliver, and where value could be most realized through investment. A light value case reflecting our strategic intent and core value levers encompassed the overall viability of the design solution and the mechanisms for driving substantive business value.