Speaking about the power of Service Design mapping

At Shawbrook's recent CPO & CTO Conference, the Savings Product & Design team gave an update on the work happening in this space. As part of the update, I spoke about how we had been using Service Design mapping to help visualise and bring the new colleague experience to life, to better understand the impact of the changes we are making.

The challenge

To enable colleagues to better serve customers, a new colleague system is currently being developed with multiple features all in one place. This means that all of the current systems will be replaced by one system. Although some screens had been mocked up for various features, there was no visualisation of what the experience would look like step by step from a colleague and also a customer perspective.

To add to this, the delivery strategy had changed from releasing the new system with all features fully developed to releasing the system in a more phased approach, meaning features would be delivered iteratively. This meant we needed to do some analysis on how the current experience for colleagues would start to move into the future experience through the various phases.

The challenge therefore, was to make sense of the colleague experience across the various phases of release capturing teams, systems, processes and touch points with the customer.

What we did

To bring to life the new colleague experience, we collaborated on the mapping. Within Service Design, there are many ways to map in order to identify and deliver various outcomes. For our goal, we needed to understand the steps colleagues will go through and tie those experiences to the customer experience to ensure that the journeys worked as expected and didn't cause any risk to the business or customer experience.

We knew this method would not only valuable to bring to life and critique scenarios before going live, where once live things are potentially harder and more costly to change, but the actual process of mapping together would help facilitate conversations around full experiences, instead of just talking about specific features. This would change the way the service delivery would be managed to ensure colleagues and customer experiences were fully considered.

Our first map

To start, we mapped all the tasks a colleague undertakes in an end to end view. From logging into systems and picking up tasks in a queue to picking up calls.

We then added more specific tasks for example e.g. moving money for a customer, changing a customers contact details etc. Once we had the tasks, we started to layer in which team would be carrying out the task, what system would be needed and if there were any dependencies on other teams or systems.

This map was high level in regards to the detail of each task, however by being so broad we were able to gain a clear overview of the amount of tasks and where the impact would be felt most.

What we identified from this map

The mapping helped us identify that, for some tasks, every step would be done in the new system and colleagues would have a smooth experience completing these particular tasks.

However, we were also able to identify that, for many tasks, the colleague would be able to start in the new system, but would need to move across multiple systems to either access information or functionality missing that was missing in the new system for this release. This would mean tasks would be slower to complete as colleagues would need to learn what is doable in one system and what is not and therefore need to jump from system to system - all potentially whilst on the phone to a customer.

The mapping helped us see across all the tasks how many would involve this type of challenge. This then helps us identify which scenarios needed to be mapped out in more detail to fully understand the impact.

Our second map

We made a list of all scenarios a colleague experiences to serve our Savings customers and prioritised which to map out first. We then started to make our way down the list.

To get us started, I constructed swim lanes for the colleague and mapped out steps from them starting a task to completing that task to ensure we understood the full experience. I then created a swim lane above for customer steps, to communicate where the customer and colleague interacted so we knew where key touch points where. I then layered systems the colleague would use for each of step.

Through conversation whilst mapping, we were able to identify challenges and questions to be answered which hadn't been addressed. For example when mapping the scenario of a customer calling in, we identified that colleagues would need access to all existing information about that customer to be able to best serve them, however some information would not be accessible in the new system and this would therefore mean a colleague would need to log in to another system to find it.

Without this information being accessible straight away, the colleague might create a risk for either the customer by not acknowledging their needs or the business by not acknowledging a case of potential fraud. By mapping we were able to first identify this risk and then use the map to communicate the risk to stakeholders. During a stakeholder session, the risk was classed as high and the feature to get this information into the new system became a top priority to be delivered first.

What we learnt

The mapping helped get information down and out of peoples heads. By completing the mapping collaboratively, it facilitated conversation and helped us see things that might not have been uncovered otherwise.

The mapping enabled teams to tie together the colleague experience with the customer experience which hadn't been visualised previously. It also encouraged teams to look at experiences end to end instead of focusing solely on specific features, which drove a more considered delivery of experiences.

Throughout our mapping activities, we identified many potential risks and challenges. We were then able to use the mapping to work through the risks with stakeholders to not only reduce the risk, but come up with solutions to remove completely. Doing this activity before going live, enabled the team to avoid unnecessary risks and costs to the business and customer experience.

Overall, regardless of whichever release we are in, through mapping we always ensure we are aiming to deliver the best experience to our colleagues and therefore our customers.