Project 03 of 09 Professional work Service design · Strategy · Enterprise
The service behind the screen
Across banking, energy, mobility and retail, I helped teams connect the customer’s experience with the business and operational systems needed to support it.
At a glance
Across banking, energy, mobility and retail, I helped teams connect the customer’s experience with the business and operational systems needed to support it.
- Role
- Senior Product & Business Design Manager
- Period
- Oct 2020 – Aug 2022
- Domains
- Banking, energy, automotive, retail
- Base
- Mumbai, India
The remit
Start by agreeing on the problem.
At IBM Global Business Services, I guided client engagements to frame strategic problems and align teams. The work spanned service and business design, bringing customer experience into conversations about organisational priorities and technology.
Enterprise projects involve several definitions of success. Making those definitions explicit is a useful starting point: what should improve for the customer, what should change for the business, and what must work differently behind the scenes?
Banking
A home loan is a service, not a form.
I led banking service-blueprinting workshops across home-loan application, approval and disbursement. The scope connected visible customer touchpoints with the operations required to move an application forward.
A service blueprint makes the handoffs discussable. It gives teams a shared way to examine where a customer action depends on an internal process, and where responsibility passes between people. That perspective matters when improving a journey that extends beyond a single interface.
- Application
- Approval
- Disbursement
- Customer touchpoints and supporting operations
Energy & mobility
Translate an emerging opportunity into an experience.
I shaped National Grid’s green-energy trading platform, using NPS to assess experience. For an automotive manufacturer, I defined an Android Auto experience strategy; the project saw a 25% increase in customer satisfaction.
These were separate engagements, with distinct customers and contexts. The common discipline was translating a business opportunity into an experience that could be defined and evaluated.
Retail sustainability
Connect an ambition to possible interventions.
For a global fashion retailer, I connected carbon-reduction requirements with proposed green-technology solutions.
This was work on requirements and proposed solutions. It is not presented as a measured emissions reduction or as evidence that every proposal was implemented.
Reflection
Design the connections that the customer cannot see.
The visible screen is often the smallest part of an enterprise service. The wider work includes problem framing, operational handoffs, alignment and the criteria used to assess experience.
My contribution across these engagements was service and business design, working with the wider delivery teams to connect strategic direction with the customer experience.
Experience lens
A loan, seen from both sides of the counter
A home-loan journey reduced to three moments. It is a thinking tool for where customer anxiety and operational effort tend to meet, not a depiction of any bank’s system.
Illustrative service blueprint. An original model for exploring the experience across customer, service and operations.
| Apply | Review | Disburse | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer What the person does | Gathers details and documents | Waits, and wonders | Receives funds, starts repaying |
| Frontstage What they see and touch | Application and guidance | Status and clear requests | Agreement and first schedule |
| Backstage What makes it work | Data capture and early checks | Assessment and hand-offs | Account set-up and release |
Stage 01 of 03 · The design question
How much effort should the customer carry, and how much should the system carry for them?
- Customer Gathers details and documents
- Applying for credit asks people to describe their finances, often in a vocabulary that is not theirs, and to find documents they rarely need.
- Frontstage Application and guidance
- The form is where effort becomes visible. Clear steps, plain language and the ability to save progress decide whether people finish or drift away.
- Backstage Data capture and early checks
- Every answer the customer gives has to land somewhere useful. Capturing it once and validating it early saves both sides rework later.
Stage 02 of 03 · The design question
What does someone need to know while a decision is out of their hands?
- Customer Waits, and wonders
- Review is often the most anxious stretch. Nothing appears to be happening, and silence is easily read as bad news.
- Frontstage Status and clear requests
- Honest status updates and specific requests for anything missing turn waiting into something the customer can follow and act on.
- Backstage Assessment and hand-offs
- Applications move between people, queues and rules. Every hand-off is a place where time and context can quietly be lost.
Stage 03 of 03 · The design question
How does the end of one process become a good start to the relationship?
- Customer Receives funds, starts repaying
- Approval is not the finish line for the customer. What they need now is clarity about what they owe, when, and how.
- Frontstage Agreement and first schedule
- The confirmation, the agreement and the first repayment schedule set the tone for everything that follows.
- Backstage Account set-up and release
- Setting up the account and releasing funds correctly is invisible when it works, and very visible when it does not.
Selected professional work. Diagrams are original explanatory models.