Making the Proof-of-Concept Blueprint

Iterative Mapping

With the understanding that jumping straight into contextual interviews with SME’s would not be efficient, the team decided to start with some desk research. We asked our design and architecture partners for each touchpoint to provide the most up-to-date design artifacts (Figma files, journey maps, etc) to help us understand the end-to-end journey structure at a high level. Then we asked our research partners to gather and share any relevant past studies that could provide insight into the emotional and behavioral aspects of the end-to-end journey.

I created a short project introduction deck to help partner teams understand our ask and build trust quickly, which we would share at the beginning of each engagement.

After a few weeks and multiple rounds of questions, we were able to start constructing a skeleton blueprint called a “planning matrix”. We used it to compile all the information we gathered before crafting a more polished, streamlined blueprint.

Learning about the user flows in each channel, we saw that the customer would have to take different actions based on the channel (i.e., retail customers wouldn’t be offered to add a perk to their order because the rep would be focused on closing the sale, whereas a customer shopping in digital would have to engage or skip the perks offer ) and that some phases of a flow could be optional (i.e., customers could skip the option to trade in their old phone for credit).

Our goal was for the blueprint to tell a single story of what the common customer actually looks like - which channels they prefer, when they change channels, where they go next, etc. We were not able to access behavioral analytics, but I documented the benefits of data integration in future maps and escalated my idea to leadership.

To work around this gap, I manually listed the customer actions that could occur in each channel, then analyzed the similarities and differences of each flow, and created a few iterations of possible structure for review with the wider team. Because intent-based service blueprinting was an entirely new way of documenting and visualizing experience, the working team met often to share information, align, and iterate as we learned from our early experimentation.

Validating with SME’s and Customers

To continue validating and refining our draft blueprint, we consulted SME’s from each phase area and continued iterating the map. Concurrently, I worked with our customer research partners to plan and execute a lean exploratory study to layer in direct customer feedback about the holistic journey.

Our researcher provided a readout to the team, and ultimately the outputs of this activity provided us with…

• Insight into how the customer defines what their “end-to-end” looks like

• Language that customers actually use to label phases and describe sentiments

• Prioritization of the most painful and most delightful areas of experience within the broader E2E context

• Previously missing information about what happens in the “cracks” between our silos

We incorporated the new insights into the blueprint, and continued building the story.

Measuring the E2E Experience

A key part of our deliverables was to consider how quantification of experience quality might help working teams to understand the big picture quickly. As the blueprint evolved, we began working closely with our partners in Customer Insights and CX Strategy, who were responsible for gathering and analyzing behavioral analytics through a business lens. They would help us understand how we might measure “customer intent health” - or how well Verizon is enabling the fulfillment of an intent. Having a “prototype” blueprint gave us a realistic, tangible anchor for these discussions.

The Customer Insights team was working on a concurrent project to develop a modular metrics ecosystem, so we needed to consider how Customer Intent Health metrics might fit into the bigger picture - understanding where data comes from, how it’s used & shared between systems, how it might be interpreted by different teams, etc.

This was a particularly high-complexity aspect of the project. UX acted as a thought partner on the strategic vision.

Ultimately, the metrics ecosystem work was a much longer-term initiative and the Customer Insights team was hesitant to start building out and testing real-time Customer Intents Health metrics until the broader system was ready.

The team established some great foundational thinking on the subject, but needed to continue moving forward with our blueprint proof-of-concept showing experience health evaluation metrics so that leadership could understand our intended direction. In preparing to present our work to leadership, I updated our blueprint template to include rows dedicated to phase health and an overall health score using dummy data.

Final Milestone: Steering Committee Review

The team prepared to wrap up the pilot, working together to create an executive readout of our learnings, insights, and deliverables. We handed off a deck that neatly illustrated…

1. A digestible proof of concept of the Get a New Phone customer intent blueprint.

2. Metrics Ecosystem insights and intent health next-step recommendations.

3. A UI template and documented blueprinting process, enabling faster blueprint development.

4. A proposed working model for Experience Managers and Service Designers (created through conversational alignment, visualized by UX).

What’s happened after the pilot?

Knowing that the blueprint was a living artifact that would become dated quickly without consistent upkeep and that our original idea might not scale, the team decided to focus on creating a few more intent blueprints so that we could refine and standardize our process and artifacts.

Steering Committee leadership used a large-scale printer to make physical copies of the first few blueprints to tape up around the offices, asking various people in the Basking Ridge and New York offices to weigh in on the presentation of the customer intent idea.

We used the Get a New Phone blueprint to workshop discovery and ideation phases with 10+ product teams, learning how product teams would actually use these kinds of artifacts in real time and documenting insights on an ongoing basis.

Since this pilot wrapped, great progress has been made and lots of change has happened. Multiple reorgs ultimately dissolved the founding Customer Intents team structure, though the Customer Intents framework has been referenced and leveraged in company-wide transformation initiatives since.