Reflection

Challenge     I’m  working  as  a  summer  intern  for  a  tech  startup  building  an  intelligent  chatbot  for  police   agencies.  The  chatbot  helps  residents  get  answers  to  questions  that  they  frequently  ask  their   local  agency.  The  chatbot  is  offered  as  an  online  service  and  customized  for  each  agency.  The   challenge  we  face  is  how  do  we  optimize  onboarding  a  new  agency  to  the  service.  There  are   questions  of  who  should  be  doing  what  and  when  and  other  questions  of  how  to  streamline   certain  tasks  to  reduce  the  time,  money,  and  effort  spent.

Selection     I  chose  to  use  both  visualization  and  storytelling  tools  to  address  this  challenge  of  optimizing  our   onboarding.  According  to  Angela  Myer,  an  experienced  designer,  visualization  is  anything  that   takes  us  “beyond  just  using  words  or  language  alone”.  It  is  the  process  of  bringing  a  shared   understanding  of  the  message  you  are  trying  to  convey  through  the  use  of  pictures  and   drawings.  For  visualization,  I  decided  to  create  a  journey  map  showing  all  of  the  internal  and   external  roles  involved  in  onboarding  a  new  agency  from  start  to  finish.  I’ve  seen  journey  maps   used  successfully  to  help  with  the  design  of  services,  providing  insights  into  both  the  customer   experience  and  the  process  used  by  the   internal  team  delivering  the  service.      While  journey  maps  are  a  form  of  visual  storytelling,  my  team  used  the  verbal  stories  from  our   customer  success  and  sales  team  members  to  flesh  out  the  phases  of  the  journey.  In  the  end,   we  wanted  to  be  able  to  tell  the  whole  story  from  the  internal  team  perspective,  but  also  the   external  customer  agency  perspective.  By  looking  at  the  entire  journey  visually,  we  hoped  to  see   how  each  role  contributes  to  the  overall  process,  where  time  is  spent,  and  how  the  process   could  be  optimized.

Application

To  create  the  journey  map,  I  formed  a  team  with  representatives  from  Customer  Success,  Sales,  Management,  Data  Analytics,  and  UI  engineering.  We  started  by  putting  the  names  of  all   the  internal  and  external  roles  onto  sticky  notes.  It  turned  out  we  had  more  roles  involved  than   we  thought  -  five  external  roles  and  six  internal  roles.  Each  of  the  roles  had  its  own  tasks,  so  we   put  each  task  on  a  sticky  note  as  well.      Using  a  large  wall  we  put  up  the  roles  with  each  having  a  row  for  its  tasks.  We  then  divided  the

tasks  into  five  phases,  Learn,  Try,  Buy,  Review,  and  Use.  This  seemed  to  be  a  very  effective   overview  of  the  entire  journey.  The  team  actually  added  roles  and  tasks  to  fill  in  the  journey  as   we  talked  through  the  stories  of  this  agency  versus  that  agency.

Insight

It  was  useful  to  be  able  to  move  roles  and  tasks  around  to  organize  them.  As  we  came  up  with   more  ideas  it  was  helpful  to  be  able  to  move  pre-existing  ones  to  fit  and  organize  as  needed.   While  it  was  all  done  with  pen  and  paper  on  the  wall,  the  team  thought  the  visualization  was   valuable  so  I  turned  it  into  a  digital  format  that  can  be  updated  as  well.      One  major  insight  we  had  was  when  a  certain  task  should  be  performed.  The  task  in  question   was  inputting  agency-specific  knowledge  into  our  service  and  the  question  was  raised  whether   this  should  be  done  before  contacting  the  agency,  while  they  try  the  bot,  or  after  they  have   already  purchased  the  service.  We  are  currently  adding  in  content  before  contacting  the  agency,   but  as  we  think  about  scaling  up  with  more  agencies,  we  are  concerned  that  this  will  increase   the  cost  of  sales  to  each  agency.  We  might  put  effort  in  for  agencies  that  are  not  interested  in   the  service.  On  the  other  hand,  it  might  be  the  most  effective  sales  tool  to  have  agency-specific   content  in  the  sales  demo.     The  action  items  resulting  from  the  journey  mapping  exercise  included  additional  research  into   how  effective  the  agency-specific  content  is  in  sales  and  how  costly  it  is  to  collect  and  insert  into   the  service.  Depending  on  the  answers  to  these  research  questions,  we  may  put  the  content   gathering  earlier  or  later  in  the  process  (as  shown  with  the  red  boxes  and  question  marks  in  the   journey  map  shown  below).

Approach

While  the  journey  mapping  was  successful  at  giving  us  insights,  there  are  some  things  that  I   would  do  differently  next  time.  While  our  first  pass  at  the  journey  map  shows  the  phases  of  the   journey,  it  does  not  show  how  much  time  is  spent  in  each  phase.  In  the  next  iteration,  I  would   add  in  the  time  spent  in  each  phase  or  find  a  way  to  show  that  in  a  new  visualization  along  a   timeline.  I  would  want  to  see  both  the  calendar  time  and  the  hours  of  effort  required  per  task  -   that  would  help  us  visualize  both  the  time  and  cost  of  the  onboarding  process.

