Leading Service Design Workshops for a Telecommunications Company
Lesson Learned:
The people who have the answers are probably not in the room.
Leading Service Design Workshops for a Telecomm Company
In this article…
Project Overview
Type of Project:
2-Day Service Blueprinting Workshop
Role:
Lead Consultant
Client:
Undisclosed due to NDA
Date:
December 2019
Location:
NY/NJ Metro Area
Project Goal:
Organize and facilitate a custom service design workshops to fulfill two goals:
help familiarize employees about human-centered design and service blueprinting, and
improve customer support operations and self-service offerings for a highly complex service ecosystem.
Project Details
Customer support can often be a thankless, unglamorous job, and yet it is such a fundamental part of of what makes a service offering exceptional. In the realm of telecommunications, customer support is not only highly utilized by a broad range of customers, but if done poorly, can be incredibly costly to maintain, and significantly impact the perception of a service offering.
In an effort to reduce costs and improve employee retention, I was tasked with leading a service design workshop effort across two days, to help this organization improve overall awareness of human-centered design while also establishing actionable next steps for improving their offerings.
Updated: Dec 2024
Pre-workshop prep
In order to maximize time during the workshop, we worked with the client to gather and analyze existing research data, to include:
customer interview transcripts
employee-customer interviews (that is, employees who are also customers, troubleshooting issues with their phone and plan)
historical quantitative data including call volume, duration, and transfers
recorded customer support calls which were exemplary of typical interactions
This allowed us to collaboratively create a research summary, which was then provided to the workshop attendees in advance of the session.
In addition, we invited employee-customers (who were “distant” from experience design work) and call-center representatives to attend portions of the workshop to get their input and further build empathy with the participants in these service processes.
It’s important to note that this workshop was catering to two audiences: those who were new to service design and service blueprinting, and those would be using these methods in the immediate future, right after the workshop. A common challenge with workshops like these: the newbies get overwhelmed, and the service design professionals get bored, and left with vague, non-actionable artifacts.
Thus, we created a two-day agenda with pre-assigned groups to ensure:
Newbies were supported by small group leaders who were knowledgable, and could focus on learning the methods and mindsets;
Service designers could work on real problems and create actionable plans for their near-term projects.
Day 1 primarily focused on service design methods and service blueprint familiarity, while day 2 focused on refining outputs, facilitation coaching, and structured prioritization sessions.
The two-day workshop
Day 1: Introduction to Service Design & Problem Definition
After giving an initial overview of service design and the service blueprint structure, we gave teams ample time to familiarize themselves with the problem space. During the session, we had teams read research summaries, rotate “round robin” style through live interviews and listening to call-center recordings, and eventually, the large group reconvened to share what they learned.
The result was staggering. What had previously existed as some abstract concept (“Customer support is tough work, and customers need more support”) now crystallized into deeper, empathetic conversations: about call center employees and how they struggled to carry out their jobs, and about customers and the relatable problems they were trying to solve. Participants even admitted that, while other workshops felt superficial at best, this one magnified the potential impact that good service design would make. People could see the immediate impact they could make and felt invigorated to begin work.By the end of Day 1, even the attendees who were not scheduled to attend Day 2 were eager to start applying these methods to their own projects. The ones who returned to Day 2 were engaged, and full of ideas.
Day 2: Refinement, Benchmarking, and Prioritization
Day 2 brought us to a different office, where we continued to refine the service blueprints that we drafted on Day 1, but with a much smaller team team of service designers. These folks divided up the work to create focused service blueprints on specific work streams, including self-service, call resolution, and call escalation.
The goal of this group was simple (but not easy): establish clear next steps to propose to senior leadership to improve call center operations.
After an initial refinement period, where blueprints were annotated and iterated upon, we identified potential success criteria & metrics for various “problem” portions of the service blueprint, coached the small group on facilitation tactics to continue workshop activities after our project concluded, and we also led structured prioritization activities to give teams specific targets for their conversations with leadership.
The end result: teams pinpointed areas of employee pain, came up with measurable goals for fixing these pain points, and created a meeting cadence to continue the service improvement process.
What we learned
While there are many takeaways from this session, a few important items stood out to me.
The people who have the answers are probably not going to be in the room… unless you invite them. Luckily, this group had relatively high "UX maturity” in that management was very bought-in and conscientious of including various perspectives, for both the customer and employee experiences.
Qualitative data carries immense value in conjunction with quantitative data. Spending time listening to recorded calls and talking to employees created deep empathy and thorough understanding of causation - which numbers simply cannot replicate.
Tying meaningful metrics to goals increases the likelihood that realistic goals are set, and progress is better managed. The phrase “what gets measured gets managed” resonates here, but a common problem with that saying is the measurement is what gets managed, not the experience itself. Triangulating success criteria is more likely going to lead to realistic goal-setting as well as clear, measurable targets for near- and long-term goals.
It’s one thing to get emails from event organizers after a session that our facilitation was appreciated, but it’s another when we get emails from attendees that they learned something and found it immediately applicable to their work. It was deeply fulfilling to know that this thorny, often dreaded topic of customer support became something exciting. And, if there’s anything I know about service design: engaged, excited employees make better experiences.
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