Within Cazoo, I was a design lead across the Order Management and Customer Experience Systems teams. Across these two domains, the various designers and I oversaw multiple systems. These included the systems overseeing a customers order from placement to completion, and the tools customer service teams used to and manage them. One of our primary focuses was to optimise the legacy (and crumbling) systems that had been present since launch and were no longer scalable or reliable, resulting in poor experiences for users unfortunate enough to have an order caught in them.
After a series of workshops across the teams and interviewing both customers and customer service agents, we created a roadmap of features and optimisations to investigate and implement over the coming quarters. A cross-disciplinary team was involved in synthesising the outcomes of these interviews and estimating effort and risk for each item/epic.
One of the first processes we looked to optimise was the rescheduling process covered here.
Cazoo aims to offer self-service to its customers wherever possible. One of the instances this was not possible was rescheduling a delivery that was due to take place within the next 72 hours. Due to the logistical effort and third-party tools used in facilitating the last leg of delivery, we were not able to offer this as a self-service to customers. Instead, this was managed between the Customer Service and Logistics Planning departments, requiring several manual processes across multiple systems to achieve.
The legacy process required Customer service to manage a case by hand in SalesForce and communicate through Slack with Logistics planning. Logistics planning had to then manually manage the booking through Descartes, Google sheets, and Slack, communicating constantly with customer service through Slack to find a new delivery time (sometimes requiring multiple revisions to find a suitable time). Once a new slot was found, confirming this, logging the case as complete, and updating SalesForce to reflect the order status were all manual processes that Customer service had to complete.
Streamline the process used by the Customer Service and Logistics Planning teams to reschedule deliveries taking place in less than 72 hours. Reduce the variety of tooling and manual processes used by both teams to address this difficulty, with the end goal of improving the customer's experience when in this scenario.
Interviews
I collaborated with a small team of product and service designers to manage the discovery cycle of this initiative. An accidental outcome of the initial sessions to the risk and prioritise optimisations for the Customer Service tooling, we also learnt the wider team and stakeholders had several assumptions on how issues needed to be solved. Aware of this, we prioritised quick-fire interviews with the teams involved in the processes to validate or disprove these assumptions.
We spoke to 6 members of each team, shadowing and mapping the processes and tools they used and logging improvements they would like to see.
Playback & ideation
The team and I synthesised the interviews, paying attention to the assumptions that were validated and debunked. We were sure to play these back in the leanest form possible to our stakeholders to engage them in the process and manage their expectations.
Off the back of this synthesis, we began mapping a variety of solutions with a lean team of engineers (similar to event storming), aiming to streamline that ideation and technical discovery processes and deliver a thinnest slice quickly.
Streamlining
Through collaboration with the engineers, we outlined a new system that could be implemented over a series o engineering sprints. The proposition involved bringing both teams into SalesForce (removing the need to rely on Slack and Google sheets). This gave both teams a common ground to manage order information removing the need to manually share order details and progress updates.
Value added
The initial interviews gave us insight into several previously unknown pain points and opportunities to add value as we launched iterations. We learnt that a lack of SLA left both teams blind as to workloads, time estimates and priorities. By bringing both teams into a shared tech space, we proposed creating a dashboard allowing both teams to have visibility over case status and progress, priority, and agent currently managing the case in each team. This allowed both teams to share work more evenly, manage customer expectations better and bring observability to both departments. By approaching the problem with a tech solution and not just proposing a new SLA, we were able to introduce analytics through SalesForce, giving the business nuanced insights into the process.
The incremental launch of this new process was praised as one of the smoothest rollouts of a Customer Service tooling update in the business. Both teams felt more empowered and able to manage their workloads and more trusting of their colleagues in each department. The time taken to process a reschedule has been reduced by half a day for Customer service. Time per case has also halved for Logistics planning.
It’s worth noting these are conservative stats as we had no visibility over the time previously lost managing factors such as prioritisation and miss-communication.
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