How Service Design brought 10 teams together to launch a reimagined contact experience
Using a service design approach, the support experience design team at Atlassian orchestrated cross-team collaborations and delivered a brand new contact experience that simultaneously improved the lives of Atlassian customers and internal teams.
There were many challenges along the way: increased program scope (in order to greatly improve the customer experience), cross-team dependencies, uncertain ownership, and a complicated technical implementation.
We learned that service design is an effective facilitator to orchestrate and deliver an ambitious new experience that spans both customer-facing UI and internal processes and systems.
Create a clear plan for an ambiguous space
At the beginning of the year, we began the “Enterprise Contact Form redesign” project. Was this just about redesigning the contact form itself? Knowing very little of the problem, we began uncovering the background and purpose by hosting initial conversations with product and program managers.
The contactexperience wasn’t scaling to meet the increasing customer demands.
There was a mountain of open questions and existing research to consume. But before we could dig in, the main concern was: “How should we start as a newly formed, cross-functional team?”
We created a truth deck (a slide deck that acts as a source of truth for a project) that summarized our current understanding of the problem, project focus, and potential success metrics. Distilling the information into a visual story not only helped to refine the customer problem but also helped create alignment across teams and the stakeholders engaged in the outcome of the work.
We created a program approach mapped to a clear timeline, to showcase the phases and activities of the engagement. This helped set expectations for what would come next (and why) and helped to communicate the value of service design to the partners and stakeholders.
Even though this service design approach required time dedicated to front-loaded research, it helped us define a comprehensive strategy and coordinated implementation to improve the user experience.
Having shared expectations for the program approach helped us work more efficiently as a cross-functional and cross-organizational team, reduced confusion, and mitigated fears and anxieties resulting from ambiguity.
We presented the truth deck and program approach in the kickoff meeting with 18 stakeholders from the Marketing and Field Operations teams. By establishing alignment early with our stakeholders, our team was able to dive in and focus on the problem at hand.
Make an impact by turning research into stories
To understand our current Contact experience, we interviewed our Field Operations team about their experiences working with customers on contact requests. We also spoke to our Marketing team about their expectations and how the Contact experience stacks up today.
These research conversations provided a wealth of helpful information, and it became a fun challenge to organize it into digestible, relatable, and impactful insights to share out.
We leveraged workflow diagrams, a powerful storytelling tool, to visually portray the Field Story of each interviewee. Through this, we communicated how manual and disconnected their current workflows were, and begin to identify clear opportunities for improvement.
We summarized the interview notes into 6 provocative insights that highlight the root cause of the pain point from both the customer and Atlassians’ perspectives.
By developing insights from both the customer and Atlassian perspectives, we developed a comprehensive solution that met both the business goals and customer expectations.
To summarize the current state experience, we created an interactive experience blueprint to show the end-to-end customer journey and the convoluted routing process behind the scenes. This helped us communicate research insights and create a shared understanding of the contact experience showing exactly where we identified the customer and internal team pain points.
The Field Stories and workflow diagrams allowed our team and stakeholders to empathize with our users. This process led to an increase in motivation to improve the overall experience. The interactive experience blueprint helped to understand the internal contact routing process and pinpoint where the system could be improved.
Use design to get everyone excited about the possibilities
We brainstormed solutions based on all of our inputs, then we realized this was not just a simple form redesign project. To address the root cause of the problem, we needed to redesign the backend routing process. This increased the project scope and added dependencies on other teams to make it work.
Fortunately, we have the superpower to design and present the ideal solution without dependencies or creating design debt. A future-state prototype was a great way to socialize the recommended solution with stakeholders and help increase buy-in.
This “future-state” concept was aspirational, but not too far out of reach. The design proposal was tangible, so it was easy to see the potential impact, and ultimately break the work down into achievable steps. From there, our frontend and backend engineering teams committed to building the first version of this concept as a top priority!
This was an incredible partnership between design, business, and technology, coming together to bring this new experience to life.
Build momentum with roadshows
In preparation for the new contact experience launch, we showcased the work to different leadership groups for visibility and to gather feedback. The roadshow presentation told the story of the problem, approach, solution, and impact.
The roadshows helped socialize our process for user-driven solutions and garnered interest from other teams who wished to learn about replicating this work in their own areas.
Outcome
The new contact experience enabled higher user engagement on the form and successfully decreased response time for customer requests.
We are excited to continue growing the service design practice as a critical enabler on large cross-team collaboration efforts at Atlassian.
The power of service design
Want to use service design to launch a new experience? Here’s how:
- Align on the problem and approach while the space was still ambiguous
- Tell the story from both the customers’ and business’s points of view
- Visualize the roadblocks and areas of opportunities
- Inspire and motivate the teams by showing them what is possible and giving them a tangible north star to work towards
- Facilitate collaborations across teams by inviting them to become curious and involved in the process
