A Service Blueprint that improves CX
A case study in transforming CX across customer touch points at Hum Capital
Hum Capital, a marketplace for startups to find funding opportunities was in it's early stages. Many processes were manual while they waited to be productized amongst a large backlog of core functionality still left to be built. As a result the customer journey resembled a path of stepping stones over water as opposed to a well paved path. Many customers where abandoned without any clear path forward. There was a debate whether these customers were worthwhile--the assumption was that most of these abandoned users didn't meet the sales qualifications required to get access to investors on the platform. So why bother?
I set out to discover a way to bring light to what a typical user journey looked like. It was important to connect making improvements to the user experience to business value. By segmenting the user journey into stages, and connecting each one to business KPIs, we could start making real user improvements driven by user data, not assumptions.
Methodology
A service blueprint outlines the entire customer journey, detailing interactions across various touch points such as online interfaces, customer service channels, and backend processes. It visually depicts the sequence of actions taken by both customers and service providers, facilitating the identification of pain points and opportunities for improvement within the user experience.
We utilized our analytics tools to uncover the path users take to reach key parts of our platform like the signup page. We then mapped out what was happening behind the scenes and what actions our customer-facing teams were taking.
We also created multiple versions for each stage, like in the case where we had users coming organically to our website (Inbound) and we also had outbound leads who came in via sales outreach.
The service blueprint itself was the first layer of discovery. The second stage was to highlight the experience gaps--places where users were getting left behind, or the experience was frustrating. We discovered this through user interviews and our analytics dashboard which highlighted key drop-off areas.
The last step which created true alignment cross-functionally was to wrap the stages in an easy to use figma prototype.
Discoveries and Insights
The highlight of this project was uncovering ways other teams were utilizing the blueprint. Outside of product and design, here are a few of my favorite use cases:
- Marketing leveraged the blueprint to identify areas where they could add automated messaging to startup founders who finished all the required steps but based on their financial data were unfortunately not able to get matched with a funding opportunity.
- Sales had a better picture of the experience gaps in the product experience. They were able to leverage these gaps in order to update their customer touchpoints.
- The people team used it for onboarding new team members. Especially in product and tech positions, this became a core piece of documentation for new employees to understand what services we utilized and how it related to the intended customer goals.