Service Design
Overview
Watermark Insights, a SaaS company helping higher education institutions with their accreditation processes, was experiencing a decline in retention and adoption for one of its products.
Problem
Adoption and retention of the product are decreasing, but the CX team is reporting high satisfaction scores after implementation. There is a disconnect in the user journey somewhere.
Goals
Uncover the complete customer journey from the client's perspective, identify crucial gaps and opportunities, and leverage these insights to design more seamless and valuable experiences.
Foster better internal collaboration across various teams (Sales, Implementation, Client Success, Product) to enhance the overall customer-facing experience and improve operational efficiency for internal partners.
Roles & Responsibilities
Product Designer & Lead Researcher
I led an 8-week discovery process and facilitated stakeholder alignment through kickoff meetings with CX Leaders and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from Marketing, Sales, Client Success, Services, and Support. My responsibilities included conducting qualitative interviews with both internal stakeholders and external clients, reviewing existing documentation, analyzing usage metrics, and synthesizing the data into actions.
Users & Audience
The project engaged a diverse group of stakeholders, including both internal partners and external clients:
Internal stakeholders included Client Success, Services, and Support Managers, highlighting an emphasis on improving work life for partners by understanding their challenges in supporting clients.
External clients represented various roles and experiences across the customer lifecycle. This approach provided a holistic view of the end-to-end experience.
Process
Stakeholder Alignment
Initiated the project with kickoff meetings involving CX Leaders and internal Subject Matter Experts from various departments to ensure alignment and gather initial perspectives.
Research & Data Collection:
Conducted 1-hour qualitative interviews with both internal partners (e.g., Client Success, Services, Support Managers) and external clients to capture their experiences, pain points, and moments of success across the lifecycle.
Audited existing documentation, client resources, and internal notes.
Analyzed available usage metrics to understand conversion rates and time-to-value.
Synthesis & Insights
Organized collected data to highlight emotional and functional needs, identifying perception-vs-reality gaps in expectations. This involved drafting initial customer journey maps and stakeholder maps.
During the research, I uncovered the issues at the heart of the problem:
Misaligned sales promises vs. product reality causing frustration.
Complex onboarding and long time-to-value hurting retention.
Rigid implementation ignoring diverse client needs, causing delays.
Poor internal communication, especially sales to service handoffs.
Insufficient post-implementation support and training.
Deliverables
The primary deliverables included a detailed Service Blueprint and a Customer Journey Map from the client's perspective, supplemented by Stakeholder Maps and Experience Gap Assessments. These insights are crucial for informing product development and redesigning implementation processes to be more flexible and customized.
Key Impacts & Next Steps:
Strategic Influence: The findings are meant to drive strategic decisions, inform product roadmaps, and enhance internal communication all to positively effect the client experience at Watermark.
Process Improvement: Recommendations included exploring more flexible implementation approaches, potentially leveraging AI for data pre-population, and developing proactive support strategies to guide clients post-implementation.
Continuous Improvement: The next steps involve finalizing deliverables, sharing findings with product and cross-functional teams to initiate solutioning, and piloting new approaches to measure their impact on client success metrics.