CUSTOMER PORTAL

Discovery project for a new customer portal

THE PROBLEM

Castle Water is one of the largest business water suppliers in the UK and provides water and wastewater services to organisations in England and Scotland.

Increasing customer expectations around online account management and an existing online portal not suited for key customer demands have led to a great volume of customer service interactions on the form of phone calls, emails and webchat. In the majority of the cases, queries refer to account balances, invoices and payments, all of these activities that should be possible to perform online.

Additionally to this, less than 4% of their existing customer base is enrolled in their current online portal.

The goal of this project is to create a new portal that can help the organisation to enable customer channel shift towards an online experience.

To allow customers to self-serve on key activities, increase the number of online payment and by consequence significantly reduce the daily volume of calls received by the customer service team, while reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

The discovery phase has been focused on the gathering of requirements and user needs, understanding the organisation as a whole, its processes and customer structures, as well as their technology landscape, in order to provide a functional prototype than can illustrate our proposal.

DATE

December 2019

STATUS

On going

MY ROLE

I've been responsible to lead the discovery phase, interviewing key stakeholders from different areas of the organisation, as well as supporting technical conversations and the review of providing documentation and process maps.

Working alongside a visual designer and a lead developer to clearly define the scope of the wireframes and the prototype.

The deliverables I provided are comprised of key user stories, list of requirements, user journeys (As-Is & To-Be) and a service blueprint.

Key activities

Desk research
User research and analysis
Stakeholder interviews
User Journeys
(As-Is and To-Be)
Sketching

Wireframes
Requirements definition
User stories
Service blueprint

THE PROCESS

The discovery phase of the project comprised a series of activities with stakeholders of different areas of the organisation over a period of 9 weeks.

Initiation

The process consisted of initial desk research and exploration of the existent online experience over their website and mapping of the user journeys (As-Is). This helped to identify key pain points, inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement as well as pressing issues for immediate prioritisation.

Stakeholder Interviews

These were conducted over various sessions and included different teams from different areas of Castle Water. This allowed understanding the organisation and its processes as well as to identify patterns around issues and requirements.

Outputs

The key outputs delivered to the client from this phase are the following:

Journey Maps

As-Is - A visual representation of the experiences customers have within the current solution, identifying pain points and opportunities.

To-Be - A representation of how the future state of the existent journeys could look like, focusing on efficiency and the simplification of previously complicated and/or long customer interactions.

Service Blueprint

Allows the visualisation of different elements within a service that are linked to specific touchpoints in a customer journey. In this case, the service map provides an overall view of all the key customer journeys working as a jointed flow for the customer portal; this way visualising the different channels and first line of interaction for activities that occur or cease to occur.

Wireframes

Starting with sketches, wireframes allowed us to present to the client how the new portal could look like. A visual implementation of the proposed user journeys.