End to End Customer Experience
The Challenge
Pitney Bowes, a traditional hardware company, was releasing its first SaaS product. Knowing that the company’s processes were optimized for hardware leasing and service, the General Manager in charge of what became SendPro asked me to facilitate the operationalization of the end to end customer experience (e2e) for the product, including:
Describe the desired e2e experience based on client research and inputs/prior work of key stakeholders
Identify key elements that need to be reworked/gaps that need to be filled from the current experience and working with stakeholders to define:
What needs to change?
What needs to happen to make the change?
Who needs to be involved to make the change?
Worke with stakeholders to identify and work through barriers and challenges
Prototype and test new customer experiences with clients
Framing
The first part of this work was to outline the ideal customer experience. Based on customer research and stakeholder interviews across the company, I developed a journey map detailing the process from learning about the product through onboarding, use, and retention, and articulated principles of customer experience. Within that ideal experience, I identified several priority episodes based on their importance to the client experience and their importance to the business case, and the level of risk. I then analyzed why these episodes were at risk, for instance, lack of ownership, multiple ownership, differing priorities, and identified where in the company responsibility should be.
Solving
For some episodes I organized and led cross departmental teams to address the gaps. For example, product help traditionally came from support staff who would fix hardware on-site, and some knowledge base files accessible to clients, so the initial product requirements did not include in-app help. I brought together individuals from engineering, IT, UX, and the website group to develop help content and create a mechanism to include in-app in the first release of the product.
Ongoing Learning
After the product was released, I conducted ongoing evaluative research to understand the usage and challenges with the product.