Peer-graded Assignment: Reflection_Visualization Tool

Challenge:

Most of the stakeholders I have worked with are willing to spend more than half a million dollars in less  than 6 months however have a “1 liner” problem statement. Before I deep dive into the problem  statement, let me introduce my role - I am an account manager and consultant to a leading retail company  and this is what I see in most of the business units.

So what was the challenge? The retail company’s customer support team had high call handle time and  spent considerable amount of their customer interaction time over phone in identifying the caller and  understanding their grievances. This did not seem to be the entire story; so here’s what we established  as the main challenges – enhanced customer experience and cost containment. These 2 problem  statements by now was impacting the entire organization however my point of contact and the other  stakeholders had a myopic view which were focused only on their KRAs and KPIs.

So the real challenge – Customer support team had high call handle time; calls to the customer support  team were driven from the website experience (or the deficiencies of the website); legacy and dated CRM  application, telephony infrastructure and workflow for the customer support team, multiple applications  and systems used by customer support team, customer experience success parameters were owned by  different stakeholders for the site and customer support team, silo initiatives by each stakeholder and  business unit, different budget allocations and planning by each stakeholder and business unit and  duplicity of efforts leading to higher costs.

Not all of this was black and white which is where the Visualization tool helped in bringing all hands  together to extrapolate the problem, deploy visual thinking to recognize and align their ideas to work  towards a common objective of improving customer experience and cost reduction.

Selection:

Working with different teams with different initiatives that would satisfy their silo objective had a  challenge of its own. Not having a macro and micro view of the problem, limited each team to focus only  on their individual requirement and not address the overall issue. The Visualization tool helped address  this.

The tool helped in context setting of how the problem looked at an organization level and enabled  different teams to contribute to the problem statement. Similarly, as we drilled deeper, the different  teams were able to highlight issues and limitations that needed to be overcome at a functional level. The  visual designs also clarified the overlap of operations and ownership of each team. The tool helped build  a RACI matrix for both micro level and macro level requirements and defined owners to address their  respective areas.

Application:

The curiosity created by the “1 liner” problem statement resulted in identifying different teams upfront  when the problem was identified. The teams involved were product teams, campaign managers,  personalization, UX/UI designers, site owners, customer service analytics, customer service operations  etc. Since the number of teams and employees involved were more, we started with a kickoff session  where 1 meeting was organized with all the participants to explain the methodology, the process and

duration of the exercise and expectations from the different teams. Post the kickoff, sessions were held  for individual teams and there was a weekly all-hands meeting.

The exercise started with a visual sketch at the organization level and identified problem statement  (enhanced customer experience and cost containment) where every team’s involvement was obvious but  it was not clear who owned which aspect of resolution. The teams recognized the problem however action  items were not well-defined. So we drew 2 visual sketches; one defining the factors impacting customer  experience and the second defining the cost components in operations. Both the visuals now had specific  roles of individual teams. The teams now could comprehend and talk details about challenges and how  their work could contribute in addressing the identified problems. These aspects were gathered and when  analyzed we also saw a trend that there was also duplicity of initiatives between 2 or more teams. With  the shared insights and the shared learnings, the teams were collectively able to define requirements for  new processes, workflows, technology advancements, centralization of systems, ownership and  responsibilities and continuous governance.

Insight:

Every team adopted white-boarding, sketching/illustrating through drawings to capture their thinking.  This led the team to visualize how the workflows and processes could be reengineered to improve  efficiencies and thereby also contain cost. Customer experience success parameters were jointly defined  and agreed upon by teams. Duplicity of efforts were eliminated and revised workflows helped nominate  owners, with defined roles and responsibilities and a structured cadence for governance.

It started with a simple exercise however the tool helped achieve manifold results. Design thinking not  just helped define clear problem statements, it graduated the thought process of the teams to visualize  the micro and macro requirements and define alternate ways to approach different components to  address the challenge. Design thinking evolved the way problems could be approached through  Visualization tool.

Approach:

Given a similar problem, I would like to combine additional tools to augment the entire experience.

Applying Visualization tool upfront and combining it with Storytelling tool, it can help overcome the  hurdles of working with larger groups with varied backgrounds by expediting context setting, addressing  whys and why nots and managing expectations of different personalities.

