Voice of Customer

Design Thinking Project Overview

In 2023, I took an internal course in Design Thinking, which led to a formal qualification. The course covered the discovery and ideation phases of the design process, including activities like making a list of assumptions, conducting interviews, and facilitating ideation and storyboarding workshops. To apply what I learned, I took on a project to better understand our internal support process and what happens to customer requests and issues as they move through the complex network of internal teams and systems.

Goal

The goal was to make our customers feel heard by improving the flow and access to information throughout the customer lifecycle.

Stakeholder Mapping

The first step was mapping out the company stakeholders involved in this process. This turned out to include quite a few people, so I organized them into a chart with four quadrants:

• Manage Closely: High power, high interest
• Keep Informed: Low power, high interest
• Keep Satisfied: High power, low interest
• Monitor: Low power, low interest

Assumptions and Questions

Next, I brainstormed assumptions and questions about the problem statement with stakeholders from the "Manage Closely" quadrant. These assumptions were mapped on a chart of uncertainty versus risk. The highest-risk and lowest-certainty assumptions were prioritized, as they posed the greatest threat if incorrect and we had limited knowledge about them. The output of this stage was a prioritized list of questions for each persona.

Personas

We then created proto-personas for the customers and stakeholders, which we planned to validate during the next phase.

Stakeholder and Customer Interviews

We set up a series of one-on-one interviews with customers, particularly those who had previously raised issues or made suggestions. Using our defined set of questions, each interview was conducted with at least one note-taker and one facilitator. We conducted a total of 12 interviews.

Blueprints

At this stage, we also took some example case studies where the support process had gone wrong, leading to customer dissatisfaction. By analyzing support cases in our Salesforce system and speaking with the individuals involved, we mapped out these cases as process diagrams, highlighting how they moved between teams. This helped us identify where things were going wrong.

Causal Loop Diagram

To understand the complexity of the support process and why issues were getting stuck, I worked with our innovations team to run a causal loop workshop with eight stakeholders. We mapped the causes and effects into a large, interconnected diagram, which clearly illustrated the challenges we were facing.

Ideation and Storyboarding

The next phase involved ideation. We conducted a series of workshops involving around 12 stakeholders over 3 sessions where we took the overall themes gathered from the research and framed them as "How Might We" questions. The key points from the research were used to illustrate the main jobs to be done and the challenges. After an initial brainstorming session, participants developed their best ideas into three-part storyboards, mapping out small parts of the customer journey.

We then collaborated to create a new, cohesive customer journey by joining all the storyboard elements into a single experience.

Presenting the Findings

I compiled a presentation of the findings and ideas generated by the group and presented it to senior leadership across the business. The feedback was positive, and we received the go-ahead to move forward with the best ideas.

Using AI: A Chatbot

The first solution was aimed at improving how product issues were initially reported. Feedback came in inconsistently, whether through an online form, a sales representative, or a customer success manager, resulting in unnecessary delays or miscategorization. We designed a prototype that demonstrated how AI could help users self-serve and, if needed, route requests to the support team with consistent and accurate information. The use of chatbots to enhance support processes is something that is now in further discussions.

Improving Visibility of the Customer Voice

Another challenge that emerged from the research was that customer conversations and feedback were fragmented across multiple systems. The right teams were often not informed, causing delays or products being designed without sufficient customer insight. My vision was to centralize all of this information.

After presenting my research to a cross-business customer research forum, I was invited to join a working group addressing similar challenges across the organization. I became a key stakeholder in this group.

Through a rigorous selection process, we chose a tool called "Great Question" to address three main needs:

1. Recruit and manage a panel of end users for market research and feedback.
2. Help schedule, facilitate, record, and analyze user interviews, usability tests, and surveys.
3. Centralize this research into a single, accessible location for the business to query.

The system went live in April 2024, and within six months we had recruited about 50 panel members and conducted around 50 conversations. Using generative AI, teams are now able to ask questions about our customers and products, generating meaningful, actionable insights.

In the future, we hope to integrate other forms of data, such as support tickets and conversations from other teams. This initiative is now being promoted across the business to align everyone on a unified approach to customer communication.

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