Designing Commercial Services
Challenge: Create a net new digital return and exchange customer experience.
My Role: As a Service Designer, I helped define scope, led design sprints to audit the competitive landscape, built out design prototypes, led stakeholder meetings, and helped develop the implementation strategy.
Team Structure: Design Manager, Service Designer (me), Project Manager, Product Designer
Summary: Verizon was looking to rethink their digital return capabilities and scale the experience across channel to include exchanges and replacements. Our team audited leading return experiences to assess current customer expectations and needs. We then built out a simplified responsive experience that could accommodate returns, exchanges, and replacements at scale depending on the customers needs. We worked with stakeholders to phase the implementation process appropriately taking into account impact, risk, and level of effort to build the system on a new platform. The first phase of this project, digital returns, went live in September 2020.
Our Process
Upon receiving the initial project scope, our team began a product sprint. When leading the sprint, it was clear that our understanding of the current return process was limited and based heavily in assumptions. I suggested we rethink our approach to be more service design inclined and use design thinking methods: by expanding our discovery phase to help build out our current understanding and validate our assumptions of customer and stakeholder needs and pain points.
I worked with stakeholders to build out a service design blueprint of the current returns processes and to map out a taxonomy of each process to better understand if there were opportunities to align any of these processes as we built it out digitally. Alongside these artifacts, I built out a user flow to address what users had access to each part of the process to better understand the limitations of the current system and where we needed to account for potential fraud threats.
Our design sprint was critical in understanding the current competitive landscape and with a more robust understanding of our current state, we were able to rethink the process at large to accomplish greater transparency, a simplified experience, and stronger communication with the customer. I then designed the screens needed to accomplish these goals, aligning the needs across returns, exchanges, and replacements while accommodating backend data needs to initiate these business processes. We also addressed the end to end customer journey by engaging with our communications teams to rethink the moments we should communicate and how we should be doing that especially when tracking the process after submission.
Once the designs were ready we user tested two different approaches - one based on a minimalized experience to optimize speed and one based on transparency of information and phasing the experience by decision points. Overwhelmingly we found that due to the nature of high priced purchases, users appreciated the transparency and found that the trust it provided outweighed the few minutes more that it took to complete. We finalized our designs based on the feedback provided and worked with developers to address the feasibility of each screen. We phased our approach to focus on returns for our MVP but made sure to build it in such a way to limit effort in scaling for exchanges and replacements.
As Covid hit half way through our project, developer resources dramatically decreased while visibility and need for a digital return process increased. A week before we were scheduled to begin building we had to completely change approach and utilize current backend architecture rather than the new service platform we had planned. This meant taking an audit of our backend systems and working to find one that was able to be customized to our exact specs with little effort. Once we figured out a new approach we had to realign with a new developer team and get back on track.
Our phase one digital returns experience went live in September 2020, only 1 month delayed from our initial schedule. Since going live, calls for return labels were down by 7.5% in October YOY and calls for general return concerns were down 21% in October YOY with about 4500 successfully submitted returns.