We’re at an early stage of setting up our Service Design team, but we’ve already made great steps towards improving ways of working and improving focus on our customer wants and needs.
Our Service Designers work collaboratively with design teams across all of the brands in BT Consumer. This lets us take a holistic view of the services that we offer and influence how we make the most of the benefit to our customers.
One recent piece of work addressed some of the benefits our EE customers get — including Apple Music, Amazon Prime and more. When we received the work, it was a partially-formed solution aimed at improving the account management of customer benefits.
Our approach
We mapped the end to end service rather than the physical web page journey, so we could highlight every digital and physical customer touchpoint — whether they were text messages the customer received or an in-store conversation with our staff. This holistic view let us see everything our customers interacted with on their journey.
The next stage was to apply our known qualitative and quantitative research to the map. When we laid our research on our map, we could see any friction points our customers had and identify any areas of delight for them.
We then made sure we verified all of our gathered insight and mapped it with our BT Design squads and alliances. This was key to making sure we were bringing others with us on our journey. These squads would be working on the detail so their input and awareness was crucial — and was also invaluable in correcting our insights and adding anything we may have missed.
We fixed the gaps in our knowledge to see the bigger picture and made sure we could identify problems we needed to work on. We identified areas where analytics were not available and areas where we needed to ask questions of our customers.
Once we identified the problem areas and made sure they were backed up with insights, we were able to prioritise any problems with the squads. This was essential to make sure we didn’t create silos of work and that the service of benefits was considered across multiple alliances for planning and backlog prioritisation.
Feeding back our work to the project and propositions team made sure the solution that was originally given to us, our ways of working and also our outputs were understood by the business and the business focus could be changed to address the problems we identified.
Key outcomes
By bringing multi-disciplinary squads and alliances together, facilitating workshops, gathering and articulating insights, and looking at our services from an end-to-end point of view we were able to:
Break down silos — when we look at a service in its entirety, there are some gaps between squad and business knowledge. We’ve been able to identify these gaps in our knowledge of customer behaviour, customer needs, team silos and quantitative data.
Identify new problem areas — by identifying new problem areas we are able to provide focus to various squads and alliances on previously unknown customer needs and problems that need to be solved or investigated further.
Discover problems not solutions — by working higher up the ‘project pipeline’, our Service Designers can become immersed in the early stages of propositions and programmes of work. This makes sure the identified problems are handed over to our squads and alliances to work on rather than giving them predefined solutions — allowing our creative teams to work their magic with more freedom.
Although we’re only a few months into our Service Design journey at BT, we’ve managed to achieve so much in a short space of time. We have prevented work going into our squads that doesn’t address key customer needs, reframed propositions into problems to solve and most importantly improved our ways of working and focused on being customer-first. We’ve also been able to demonstrate and involve our senior stakeholders (and others) in our work to encourage them to consider user needs.
We’re continuing our journey into embedding Service Design into BT, so please comment below if you have any insights.