Service Design

Problem
We were losing clients.

Not because of bad UI or product experiences, but because the implementation process was broken. It was a rigid, one-size-fits-all box that ignored the complex, distributed nature of higher-ed institutions.

Sales was promising a vision the product couldn't immediately support. This created a massive "perception-vs-reality" gap, leaving our internal service teams to manage the fallout of a manual, high-friction onboarding process.

Discovery

I sat shoulder-to-shoulder with implementation managers and clients to find where the pain came from and where it hurt the most.

I led an 8-week discovery process and facilitated stakeholder alignment, acting as the bridge between Sales, Product, and Client Experience. I audited our documentation and conducted qualitative interviews to map the backstage friction. I uncovered that our biggest bottleneck was the manual data handoff—a process that mirrored the complexity of clinical referral workflows.

Pain Points

  • 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.

Sense-Making

I moved beyond designing screens and started mapping the journey. I focused on three areas:

  • The Handoff: I identified the exact moments where Sales promises were failing to translate into Product requirements.

  • The Implementation Bottleneck: I found that our "standard" setup was creating 40+ hours of manual work for clients, causing them to stall before they ever reached "active" status.

  • The Post-Grad Slump: I mapped the drop-off in support that happened immediately after a client went "active," which was the primary driver of our retention crisis.

Client Journey Map: Year 1

Solutions

I led a cross-functional design sprint to move away from the rigid product implementation to a flexible Service Delivery Model. As a group, we identified the areas of pain where solutions would have the most impact.

Product Considerations

  • AI experiences to import foundational data (faster TTV)

Single Source of Truth

  • Moved all internal notes to Salesforce

  • Using AI Agents to automate notes and sharing

Coordinated Client Experience

  • Handoff Huddles between Sales & Services for knowledge transfer

  • Proactive model to guide clients through first-year adoption

Design Sprint with CX

Results

From a broken implementation process, we designed a more coordinated service delivery model.

By building a single AI import for the data-heavy onboarding process, we reduced the manual workload for clients, and shortened their time-to-value. This also reduced our internal time to launch clients.

Internally, we established a unified feedback loop between Sales, CX and Product, ensuring that the features we built actually addressed the high-stakes friction points of implementation.

We are currently piloting a Proactive Support framework that uses automated triggers to alert our team when a client’s usage slows.

Next

Product Strategy