Service design for an IT services company
Summary
This is my story of when I joined Simpragma Solutions in 2020 as a Ux designer. My first project was to work on their website revamp before even I joined officially. I perceived it like an update due to my experience but when I worked closely with the CEO, I understood the brief better and worked on re-designing the whole service structure. Not a typical research case study because we brainstormed on and off parallel to some other projects as well. I had a great new perspective on the real IT environment and how to work with developers.
In this project, I worked on analyzing the company's old projects to identify our expertise to establish our niche offering in the market. It involved a lot of workshops and brainstorming with senior employees who understand the business well. We decided to work on various touchpoints from there on. The first touchpoint was the website.
Service design is a continuous process and might take time to show results. Sometimes results are not as expected so rather than perfecting everything we worked on MVP to test out our guts.
Background is important
I shifted my focus from Industrial design to Ux completely not long ago, before I did this project. Though Design has its ways and the design thinking process stays intact but there can be some tools that need practice over time.
As I worked in start-ups in the very initial stages, I had the habit of working very quickly on any task as every minute would cost us as a start-up. My approach changed in this company as I got some more time to think and execute.
“The boundaries of design are the same as the problem of perception.” -John Hench
The beginning
When I started web design I had a process in mind that I was going to follow but it changed with new insights.
I observed the old website
Finding the right users is a complex and time-consuming task and there was not much web analytics available. So, I quickly began analyzing the website to find some evident or obvious issues.
Key Assumptions
- Too much information to grasp and the user will lose interest after reading a few lines.
- The inconsistency of heading and texts makes it difficult for users to focus and read through and eventually they lose interest.
- A lot of services were offered as initially, the company wanted more projects to build clients. As a result, their services were not very clearly described.
Validation from users (Qualitative research)
Besides getting the validation for the above-stated assumptions, I also got some more insights into problems users found.
Discussion & Brainstorming
So I took all the research and discussed it with different team members from the operation, sales, and marketing as well.
- Our founders were convinced that we need to define the business properly for our users.
- Sales and marketing pointed out that as a B2B business we mostly need the website for our clients to have a quick look to understand how our services can benefit their business.
- Our clients are mostly top business decision-makers, people responsible for digital transformation, CTOs, IT heads, and innovation visionaries.
Communication plays a crucial role for any designer. Effective conversations can help in identifying the gaps between what stakeholders need and what users want.
Problem Statement
As a business, we need to clearly find and describe our niche for our potential buyers to be unique. To Communicate the former we need to build and work on various touch points. As we might have to test and iterate a lot in beginning we will build with minimum viable touch points and begin with the website.
Finding the Niche
Divergence
I deep-dived into the company's old project summary to understand various aspects like
- Client background and how did we establish a connection with them?
- What challenges company faced while acquiring each project?
- Challenges faced during projects and why.
- What were the project objectives/goals?
- What application components were developed?
- How does it help the end Customer of our clients?
- What primary technologies were used?
- Size of the team deployed.
- Financial outcome and reasons.
- Key learning from each project.
I realized there was a simple pattern in all the projects and that was just reducing human effort for repetitive tasks. Automation was a clear pattern in all the previous projects but it is a generic term and has a vast range of possibilities.
Convergence
All team members must be on the same page. We all brainstormed about narrowing it down to automation projects for the future but there was a catch that it was still too broad. Now we needed to find our edge in automation based on our expertise.
I looked at what other IT services companies were doing in terms of automation. One major company was Automation Anywhere.
They had divided their services by industry, function, tech, and job role as well.
Ideation
I listed down all the services that we could provide to various industries as we were thinking wide at that moment.
I had a discussion with our team with all senior members. We discussed all the above-listed solutions and their feasibility in terms of expertise and resource allocation.
- We decided how much resource we can allocate to our services as we have another source of revenue generation which is staff augmentation.
- It was crucial to identify leaders for future change in services. We needed people with the domain expertise to stick around.
- A contingency plan in case some of the employees are not willing to undergo a huge change and thus leave the company.
- Hire and train fresh talent for both services and resource outsourcing.
- We concurred that we cannot offer too many services to different industries as that business model will need a larger workforce. Talent acquisition is a tedious and expensive task.
Design thinking is an iterative process. We go back to to steps and re think whenever required.
Our Niche
I changed the way we narrowed down our services. I saw another repetition pattern in certain projects among different domains. Most of the services were related to ease of customer and thus customer experience automation became our niche for all the industries.
A realisation that customer experience is much bigger than user experience and thus required the whole teams expertise.
Diverging into our niche
It was time I moved ahead and diverged again into solutions related to customer experience automation that we could offer to different industries. We came up with a list of customer experience automation solutions that we could offer
- Document mining & reporting Intelligent automation platform
- Document processing- invoice processing, bill processing Intelligent automation platform
- Compliance monitoring Intelligent automation platform
- Software operations Intelligent automation platform
- Infrastructure/resource prediction Intelligent automation platform
- Item movement bots/item status Intelligent automation platform
- Customer service Intelligent automation platform
- Sales/marketing Intelligent automation platform
All the decisions were mostly based on experience and expertise in the field. Well, most of the projects were related to customer service like setting up call centers, setting up chatbots for microfinance and P2P lending companies, and even building a voice bot for a huge microfinance company.
Proto Persona
Based on previous projects I built a proto persona of clients that could potentially connect with us.
Empathizing with our users
Based on the proto persona I did a quick workshop where we brainstormed and empathized with our customers.
What user needed
- Round-the-clock service for their customers.
- A quick, scalable, and low-cost solution for setting up a contact center to interact and resolve their customer’s queries.
- Language should not become a barrier at any time.
- Customer service should work from pre-sales to post-sales at any given point.
- Customers should be able to interact through any medium and get a linear service experience.
- Reduce query resolution time.
- Increase query resolution rate.
- Automate outbound interactions as well to increase customer base.
User’s Feared
- Most of the chatbots and voice bots were not NLP trained that were offered in the market.
- There was a fear of losing customers’ trust if the services were up to the mark.
- Cost of scaling up their operations.
- Competitors stealing away their customers with better plans.
- They are not able to provide similar services round-the-clock.
- Customer data’s safety and security.
- A human agent's behavior cannot be optimized every minute.
- Their competitors adopt technologies faster.
What Relief we can offer
- Build omnichannel experience for our client’s customers.
- Round-the-clock linear service.
- Inbound and outbound interactions automation.
- Build a quick scalable solution where ROI is way higher than scaling with human agents. The cost of scaling up is negligible over time as most of the expenditure happens once.
- Personalized interactions with branding for our clients.
- Transfer to a human agent for unique scenarios. This will keep the trust intact.
- Maintain various KPI results like average handling time, query resolution time, query resolution rate, etc.
- Provide Analysis like sentiment analysis based on customer feedback during interactions.
- Our technology is autodidact working on Machine learning principles and predictive based on the Ai platform.
Our Niche
Intelligent automation for contact centres
Devising Solutions in our Niche
In the past, we had done a lot of projects of customer service automation for microfinance companies and some were still ongoing. We seemed to have attracted the fintech and NBFCs a lot. So we decided to use that as a base for our solution as financial services involve a lot of identification, verification, and authentication processes which can be used for other industries later. Based on Financial services we devised 4 solutions.
Agile Development
As businesses, we need to build things fast, and especially when building something new we need to leave the perfectionist mentality aside and test our Hypothesis in the real environment. So, I started building up the website in parallel.
Branding workshop
I am not a branding expert so to start with I used Ebaq design’s brand strategy framework. I asked our business design team to be part of a workshop for our branding exercise.
Color selection
Font selection
Website Design
We decided that we would come up with the website first quickly. Post that we will begin quality lead generation via Linkedin and create more marketing material for that.
MOSCOW approach
To finish the website quickly, we divided the work between design, content, and development where I was part of most of the work for keeping the experience intact.
Homepage design vs live page
Live Homepage
We added SVG animations later to make it slightly more interactive but have a fast loading speed.
Detailing the solutions
The solutions page did have a lot of content as our clients would generally read up some details about it.
Other services
As we were re-designing the business we still needed some of the old services to be intact to generate revenue. So I divided the services into 4 categories and reduced the text to minimal.
Live Services page
Cloud and Migration
Automation & Optimisation
User Experience
Consulting
