Service Design as a Common Resource
How we used Service Design tools to break the boundaries down within Enel company.
At the beginning of 2017, Enel started a broad process of digital transformation to redefine its offering and the internal structure charged to deliver it. The project goal was to upgrade the E2E omnichannel experience from a full customer-centric perspective. This goal has been best achieved by working with Service Design methodology and tools.
Crucial features of the envisioned experience were the introduction of the real-time feedback on the services delivered by Enel using the actual touchpoints, yet transfigured by the latest technologies, and the involvement of 100% of the customer base, instead of just the smart and tech-savvy early adopters.
We were going to face a serious challenge: our design would impact on many people, both end users and employees. In fact, Enel is the largest energy utility in Europe, distributes electricity and gas to more than 64 million customers in 37 countries, and employs more than 60 thousand people.
During the 28 weeks that followed the kick-off, a team composed by six designers led the company on a voyage that required more than 24 workshops involving top management and employees from different business units and produced seven customer journeys and more than 20 prototypes.
A major difficulty for this project were the boundaries between the singles company units, each one with distinctive habits and culture, and focused on considering only parts of the whole service. In particular, the Business part and the ICT guys were not used to work together: the first one usually set the goals, and the latter executed them, but a lot of effort was spent every time to understand each other. Moreover, the ICT was usually distant from the high-level decision process.
We thus needed to set a common language to make them communicate and make the design process possible. The Experience Maps and the Service Blueprints we designed during the process suited the purpose.
Mapping the future experience
We have adopted a simplified version of the Customer Journey Map to represent the to-be clients’ experience with products and services offered by Enel. The maps were aimed to visualize the new service experience as integrated by solutions that we designed with the company stakeholders during the co-design workshops. The maps tell what the clients would live and describe the role played by the service innovations in the new customer journey. Moreover, they supported the design team in swiftly communicating the envisioned solutions within the company, as well as the part they played in shaping a service which should always be consistent and satisfying for the user’s needs.
The maps have been drawn at the end of the co-design phase and, together with the Solution Cards that described every envisioned solution, represent the foundation of the detailed design phase that culminates in the Service Blueprints.
Like a traditional Customer Journey Map, the maps we adopted describe a scenario, indicate every phase of the experience, and make a chronological list of user goals and actions. Unlike a Customer Journey Map, instead, our maps do not include the users’ mindset, thoughts and feelings, do not focus on a well-defined persona and do not focus on opportunities emerging from the customer’s pain points. We have strongly stressed the narrative perspective of the tool to create empathy and disseminate knowledge through the company.
From a Service Blueprint to an actionable Backlog
We used the Service Blueprint tool to represent the functional design of all the innovative solutions envisioned during the co-design workshops. We have drawn different Blueprints for each of the seven customer journeys selected. Those diagrams focus on the customer experience and enlighten all the actions that the final clients can take when using the new service on three main channels of Enel: digital, call center and in-store. When considering the last two channels, we also represented the line of interaction with the Enel operator.
The Blueprints are divided into two parts: the upper part of the deliverable shows the interaction between users and service listed in chronological order. The lower section, instead, represents the backstage of the service: the tool, for each interaction listed, shows all the system communications, the internal processes required to perform the task, the timing and the service evidence. The upper part of the Blueprint should be read horizontally, while the lower vertically, considering each step of the user interaction.
We have detailed the Blueprints considering their actionability. We have turned them into a connection between the expectations of the business part of the company and the technological requests of the ICT division.
We have conceived those diagrams so that they could quickly nourish a Product Backlog to guide the Agile development process of a Minimum Viable Product. The same blueprints can also be used as support documentation in waterfall development. Therefore they can be used as an unambiguous operational tool that can translate the service requests coming from the Business into the functional requirements asked by ICT.
From Design Tools to Common Resources
During the projects, Service Design tools and methods, and in particular Customer Journey Maps and Blueprints, turned to be a sort of terra nullius that every stakeholder could appropriate and care of, by bringing in the process personal experience and knowledge, hence going in depth as for envisioning the service. The acknowledgment of a free space of discussion, made possible by the tools, simplified and shortened decisional processes, collaboratively identified priorities, created new tools, modeled on the specific client’s needs and aimed to generate targeted, feasible and shared solutions autonomously and quickly.
The project acquired the shape of a proper common resource as it was described by the Nobel Prize in Economics Elinor Ostrom, even though we refer to an immaterial process rather than a natural resource.
To maintain this resource, the people involved in its exploitation coordinate strategies to sustain it as a common property instead of dividing it up into parcels of private ownership. Common property systems typically protect the core resource and allocate the fringe resources through community norms of consensus and decision-making.
With our work, we have contributed to shaping a self-organized governance system, including effective communication, internal trust, and reciprocity, as well as the nature of the resource system as a whole.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank team members Alex Cascarano and Gabriele Demarin for their content contributions. A special thanks also to Enel Customer Journey Transformation Responsible Stefania Sammartano and Sketchin CEO Luca Mascaro.
Authors
Francesca Di Mari, CMO at Sketchin, her main interest is to understand how people cope with problems in their everyday life and which strategies they create to improve their experience.
Pietro Masi, US General Manager, and project’s Strategist. A forward-thinking executive leading and transforming CX for startups and global enterprises. Proven experience on the International project both in Europe and US.
Silvio Cioni is an Interaction and Service Designer with 20 years of experience in interactive media design. He is also lecturer and mentor in UX. Silvio is currently UX Architect at Sketchin.
Stefania Berselli is a passionate and curious designer that works as Architect at Sketchin. She loves teamwork, behavior analysis, and digital transformation to innovate inside organizations.
