Experience Design Case Study
A leading provider of perforating and well completion systems was ready to enter a digital future and launch a comprehensive e-commerce platform. Applying insights and recommendations from a series of Futures Sessions, the company engaged North Highland to create a roadmap for the customer journey, a supporting operational structure, and the structure for an e-commerce tool. When the tool is ready, it will automate how the company engages customers and significantly increase the number of customers served.
Client Situation
Over the past 20 years, our client had seen successful organic growth, but struggled to grow its back office alongside the business. The company employed a paper-based, manual strategy in sales and needed to move to SAP and Salesforce to keep up with competitors in serving customers efficiently. To move the company forward, the CEO prioritized a major digital transformation.
North Highland and the client had earlier partnered to hold a series of Futures Sessions to shape the company’s digital vision, and this process led the company’s leaders to decide that a digital product configurator and e-commerce platform was needed. The platform will automate parts of the order process, streamlining the experience for customers and enabling the company to serve these customers in unprecedented speed and volume.
Our Approach
Picking up where the Futures Sessions left off, North Highland began by defining the key functions the digital platform needed to include. A multidisciplinary team from North Highland leveraged its Accelerated Service Design methodology to develop a service blueprint that identified the current state of each customer experience touchpoint. This blueprint also highlighted the architecture that was needed on the back-end to power a digitally-enabled, engaging experience. The embedded UX team created rapid prototypes to paint a picture of the future portal features and functionality, and technologists provided an assessment of the current architecture and systems in order to determine the level-of-effort of future development work.
Throughout the process, North Highland engaged key stakeholders at each step to ensure alignment and buy-in. When the platform launches, it will focus on inside sales teams and be used to automate internal processes. Over time, the tool will be adjusted to become more customer-facing. Throughout the project, the prototype will continue to be revised every two weeks to ensure that the strategy is still on the path to the ideal transformation.
The agile, iterative methodology of North Highland is new to the majority of our organization, but we’ve seen a level of engagement that would suggest otherwise – which I would attribute to the commitment the team has made to the success of our initiatives. - Digital Strategy and Transformation Manager
Value Delivered
North Highland borrowed key elements of design thinking—empathy, co-creation, and iteration—to keep the project’s focus on people, best ensuring the adoption of the future state tool. By designing and launching the prototype in phases, North Highland is helping to accelerate deployment and ongoing improvement around the tool.
Utilizing the blueprint, the company helped all stakeholders connect the pieces of the tool and highlight high-value areas of focus. This process supported alignment and buy-in around the prototype. North Highland also guided the organization to apply the principles of service design and design thinking in other parts of the business.
When finalized, the value of the tool will be its ability to serve customers at scale. Customer transactions will no longer be a bottleneck; teams will be able to process thousands of transactions instead of a few hundred in the same amount of time. The tool will be an integral part of achieving the client’s vision for a seamless, one-stop shop for all products and services, transforming the way customers engage with the company in the future.
Learn more about Accelerated Service Design here.