Challenge

Merchant Link, a leading payment gateway and data security provider, wanted to reduce the time it took to finalize sales and onboard customers to their services. They needed help aligning their executive, sales, customer support, and operations teams for an end-to-end review of their internal collaboration and external customer support processes. Merchant Link wanted a consultancy to guide their team through a holistic review of their processes and provide solutions to align sales, customer support, and operations for better performance and outcomes.

Approach

Experience by Design (EBD) started with a high-level project plan to align Merchant Link executives, project stakeholders, and our team. The plan called for a brief discovery phase to unpack the current state of things and provide input and direction for a follow-on solutions phase of collaborative interdepartmental workshops.  The workshops were based on a service design framework that would help Merchant Link’s executives and project stakeholder team align and holistically rethink roles, responsibilities, processes, tools, and needed outputs from the perspectives of front-line operations personnel and customers.

Once the plan, timeline, and proposed approach were approved, we began discovery by conducting stakeholder interviews, collecting process documentation, and sample work products and outputs for review. We used these to model the steps, work activities, dependencies, and other aspects of the existing processes into a single diagram. We used the diagram we created to work with the Merchant Link project team and identify areas of misalignment, gaps, and pain points that negatively impacted efficiency. We documented the issues and proposed solutions in a findings brief that was presented to Merchant Link executives and key stakeholders.

Using the information and insights from discovery, we moved on to creating a proposed solution. This centered around a series of collaborative workshops involving representatives from sales, contracts/legal, customer support, and billing operations. Two key challenges identified during discovery that we worked to resolve were:

• The misalignment and gaps in processes and information needed to get a customer in the system and “ready to bill”
• A lack of visibility between the legal and operations teams regarding contract terms, and clear triggers to inform the latter to begin the client onboarding once a contract had received final approval and been signed by all required parties

During the workshops, we worked with Merchant Link teams to create a series of concept models to align key concepts and artifacts, and to help us rethink workstreams, processes, and information flows in ways that would reduce friction and improve performance and service delivery across the sales and customer onboarding lifecycle.

Result

We provided Merchant Link with a detailed analysis of its existing onboarding and new customer support operations, identified what was working well, and provided recommended changes to improve alignment and performance. To guide the necessary changes, we provided Merchant Link with documentation for new processes that helped unify work activities and formalize interdepartmental collaboration. This result was a more efficient onboarding of new customers and improved performance for the business by eliminating hurdles, gaps, and inefficiencies that created time lags and lack of visibility, and placed extra load on the customer support and operations teams.

 

List of Services

• Business Process Analysis + Modeling
• Service Design
• Project Planning + Management
• Collaborative Design Workshops
• One-on-one Interviews + Contextual Inquiry
• Concept Modeling
• Process Analysis + Redesign