Visualizing The Future Of Customer Support For A Fortune 500 Technology Company

HP Customer Care engaged Idea (now Astadia) to help it envision the future of HP customer support. Leadership tasked me and another UX strategist with gathering insights from principal HP players and leading their future-oriented brainstorming.

Approach

We began by conducting a lengthy discovery process with the HP team. This included individual and group interviews with stakeholders from throughout HP’s support organization. We based these interviews on a loosely structured discussion guide designed to elicit information about in-flight projects as well as blue-sky ideas for the future of support. After analysis, this detailed discovery work yielded key concepts and ideas worth considering for the future.

Next, we lead the HP stakeholder team in outlining customer journeys based on these concepts. The journeys described the ways in which a customer might interact with HP in a given future situation. For example, a customer with a printer jam might use web-based chat to reach an HP agent. That agent might then send a video to the customer’s printer screen showing how to fix the jam. I personally led most of the group sessions during which we created approximately 50 such journeys.

Impact

Based on all of the data gathering and team outlining described above, I developed a visual representation of each journey outlined by the group. Using an innovative approach of my own design, I performed the following for each journey, in collaboration with a visual designer:

  • Wrote copy that fleshed out the journey and made it understandable and enjoyable for all HP audiences
  • Illustrated the emotions experienced by the customer
  • Illustrated the support channels used by the customer
  • Illustrated the changes in the customer’s mood throughout the journey

The information above appeared in two forms for each journey, one detailed representation and one simpler version, meant to be used in a Powerpoint presentation.

Our 40+ customer journey infographics received acclaim from high up in the HP organization and HP planners are using these journeys to guide future support strategies and projects.  The two examples below are of the simpler, Powerpoint-ready type.

Sample Journeys