Overview

CX Blueprint

Completed: 2017
Timeframe: 10 weeks
Team: 3 UX Designers
My Role: End-to-End Product Design
Collaboration: Marketing, Sales, Professional Services, Training Team 

Objective

Extend our market reach by creating a customized CX package through researching the needs of CX professionals. Create value without using development resources by re-framing existing products — not so easy. 

Deliverables

Research Brief, Competitive Analysis, Process Flows, Visual Design, Clickable Prototypes, Marketing Collateral & Brief, JTBD Brief, Jira Documentation

Process & Methods

Topic Research, Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, Affinity Diagrams, Value Proposition Canvasses, Collaborative Synthesis, Wireframes, Prototypes, Product Validation

Overview

The Customer Experience blueprint is an integrated solution for CX managers to collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback. Focused views of NPS and easy sorting of customer stories makes it easier to find the “why” in customer issues and highlight success.

Company-facing Insight Canvases map live data to the customer journey and communicate a CX culture internally. These interactive dashboards combine the storytelling of qualitative data with the live results and metrics of quantitative data. Conditional logic allows customers to add variable states and alerts within the dashboards. The Key Events Timeline adds context to longitudinal data by toggling an optional overlay of key events like product releases, marketing campaigns, and pricing changes.

The Problem

Addressing business needs & customer segments

As a business, we wanted to try a new approach to extending our product and staying competitive. By building customized solution packages, or blueprints, we could make minor but valuable adjustments to existing software and target high-value customer segments. Because the changes were closer to customization than new development, we could use the Professional Services team instead of Dev to build out the solutions.

In theory, this would shift the bulk of the work to researching specific roles and designing solutions that wouldn’t need development. Because this process required fewer resources, the Sales team could try generating interest based on the designs. If it worked, we'd have a low investment model for extending our market share. 

For our first blueprint solution, we chose Customer Experience management as a high-value role that was gaining momentum across multiple industries. CX is a crucial differentiator for our enterprise customers. They need to anticipate issues before they become a problem and make customers feel like individuals, quickly and consistently. They need to speak to numbers, but they also need to accurately communicate the voice of the customer. To address these needs, we created a solution for analyzing feedback, internally communicating CX culture, and closing the loop.  

“Numbers don’t say everything — We need to communicate the story behind the numbers to take action. We rely heavily on storytelling.”

– CX interview participant

Process

Understanding CX culture & its problem space

I knew very little about CX going into this project. But, that’s part of what I like about being in a product team. Through preparation and research, we went from novices to relative subject experts over the course of a month or two.

Our first step was to research trends in CX and do an earnest analysis of how our competitors were addressing the field. The competitive analysis abbreviated our search to understand the language, problems, and potential applications surrounding the field. Researching CX events and conferences gave us an understanding of thought leaders within the field and the emerging problems and goals that practitioners face. This prepared us for interviews. It brought us up to date with vernacular and helped us understand how to frame our questions ahead of time.

Our primary goal was to understand CX professionals and their needs. We hoped to build something that would differentiate our product from our findings in the competitive analysis. For this reason, we contacted several non-customers including the North Amercian head of CX for a travel booking service, the global head of CX for a file storage platform, and the CX manager for a start-up. Each offered different viewpoints and levels of program maturity.

For each interview, we loosely followed an established script based on our preparatory research. We rotated roles, with two people asking questions, and the third transcribing the audio recording. Each interview was followed by a quick internal debrief to discuss common themes and how the participant's role affected their needs. Notes were then transcribed from audio recordings and organized under a series of common headings. It seems like an extra step, but it actually helped each of us commit the interviews to memory. The notes became essential in collaborating with Marketing and were used directly by CEO and COO while attending CX conferences.

Synthesis

Identifying themes

Following the interviews, we each reviewed the notes and began a series of group exercises to synthesize the qualitative data. As a group, we worked through affinity diagrams to identify themes and condense redundancies. Then as a divergent thinking exercise, we created a value proposition with our findings. In a brief design sprint, we used word docs to outline ideas and met again to synthesize and prioritize solutions. Many new ideas were created through this process.

From these rough ideas, we completed another round of design sprints using simple wireframe prototypes to present concepts to stakeholders. Through this process, we got a better idea of key limitations, required inputs, and the viability of our concepts. It helped us define our value proposition, product goals, and minimum viable product.

After collaborating on rough concepts, we did an informal Key Driver Analysis to identify which ones would yield the best returns. From this selection of possible solutions, we could move forward with higher fidelity comps and then close the loop by presenting our work to the CX professionals we’d interviewed.

Product validation was important. By presenting the ideas we started to learn more about the CX culture, how the tools were used, and how they fit into the organization. Many of the proposals addressed discovered needs, but totally missed the mark on culture and implementation. Some were moving in the right direction but needed better framing. Validating our proposals helped clarify the direction of the product.

As we got closer to the final rounds of iterations, we began preparing our research for the marketing team. We put use cases into a Jobs To Be Done framework to create a story around individual findings for our marketing and sales teams. We communicated why we were building the product and identified language and trends in the CX field. We detailed the how the product worked and areas for potential growth.

“For me, success is when everyone in the whole company is aligned around CXM efforts & individuals are held accountable to the program’s success.”

– CX interview participant

Outcome

Why it didn’t work...

This was a solution in search of a problem. We couldn't re-package our current product and expect CX professionals to embrace it. We needed to solve real problems and connect to CRM's to be useful. We had the research and an understanding of user needs. But, without engineering resources, we weren't going anywhere.

As a concept, Sales had difficulty describing and selling blueprint solutions to existing customers. Without interest from customers, the blueprint solutions weren’t valuable. 

While our team was disappointed that the experiment didn’t succeed, we enjoyed the process.  I loved designing with real stories from industry experts. It made a world of difference and enriched the challenge of designing a product.