Challenge: I work in a large financial organisation with global presence. Due to the sheer size of the organisation, work was distributed geographically across front office (FO), middle office (MO) and back office (BO), Over the years, there were multiple changes and transitions of varied work and thus back office lost the very essence of their ultimate objective of customer delight as they had started working in silos not concerned about how their job ultimately impacted the front office in providing exceptional services to client. While at the same time front office staff were only driven by customer requirements and unaware of the sheer volume/ size back offices was dealing with and therefore they needed the cushion of service line agreements (turnaround time) for each request. Front office had only one complaint (BO responses are late and they only say response is within service line agreement). I embarked on the journey with the objective to enable seamless synchronisation between the Front and Back offices thoroughly designed end to end service blueprint to enable the team to serve their customer better.

Selection: For the selection process, I realised that there is a lot of information available and I would be required to connect the related information and hence chose visualisation tool. I realised it will help to have all ideas on the drawing board and then I can attempt to categorise the possible themes out of areas of concern. Visualisation would help structure information, help better analyse, comprehend, synthesise and generate better ideas.

Application: Step 1: It was critical that I brought all the 3 groups together (FO, MO and BO). Post collecting multiple existing artefacts an initial workshop helped to at first understand and map the existing processes and the corresponding MO and BO support processes. This was done via drawing the stakeholder mapping, personas, designing the user journey and value proposition mapping. Once the knowledge was accumulated and the information about how the process works in the current ‘As Is’ condition at FO, MO and BO. Using a little bit of mind-mapping technique and use of post it’s and visual representation, it was put in the form of a visual step by step graphic process. Step 2: The next step was to co-create the target/ desired process. We had a dedicated workshop focussed on designing how the process should function in an ideal world. As we started ideating on how the service could be designed into a desired state of seamless coordination between FO, MO and BO. it was imperative that we also identified and priorities problematic areas with the areas of opportunity. We used post-its, white boards and charts to initial manually redesign and came up with service blueprint with end to end diagrams that visualised the relationship  between various service components - people, props and processes that are directly tied to touch-points in a specific customer journey,

Insight and Approach: We were able to come with a final version of service blueprint using visio and mire. It turned out to be helpful for the organisation to comprehend and have a holistic understanding of its services and the underlying resources and processes that makes it possible. It pin-pointed dependencies between the employee facing and customer facing processes in the same visualisation and was clearly able to highlight 5 steps which were redundant and non-value adding. This helped in identifying pain points, optimising complex interactions and ultimately saving money and time for the organisation while improving the customer experience. It helped align FO and BO systems to attain optimum process flows and journeys for an enhanced user experience for both employees as well as customers.

To conclude, this was once of the effective conclusion in alignment with stakeholder expectations and since it was co-created it resonated with all the parties involved. I would use this powerful tool in my upcoming transformation engagements because I strongly felt it is easier to explain someone visually, the power of retention and validation of whether something is relevant/ irrelevant is way faster and efficient. As I reflect upon what could I have done differently, there are clearly 2 themes that emerge: First, engaging with only business was perhaps not the best thing and engaging with Technology folks would have expedited the process and second, representation of both ‘As Is’ and ‘Desired’ in a single view for quick comparison and validation of each step.

