User Experience Researcher & Service Designer
Acquia Services Roles
Acquia is an open source digital platform, offering software solutions primarily for website developers and marketers. The SAAS and PAAS solutions require an implementation specialist to get set up. Services assistance is either included with the solutions purchased or purchased separately.
Jan-Feb 2023
Problem
Customers were not reaching out to support. Leadership hypothesized it was due to confusion on who to ask for help, which led to incorrect expectations, service role overlaps, and a poor service experience.
The goal of the project was to identify the thoughts and feelings of the service employees experience so Acquia can clarify their service offerings across solutions to customers.
Scope & Constraints
The project was to be completed in two months, and additional customer research was not in the budget. There was little access to the stakeholders involved due to global scheduling conflicts. I primarily utilized the project brief which was scoped out at the beginning of the project as a guide.
Role
I was the project lead and Service Designer for this project. I was responsible for conducting research and developing insights for the Chief Delivery Officer, and directors over the support engineers, account managers, customer success managers.
I worked in collaboration with the subject matter experts from each service area across solutions and the Director of the Technical Account Managers.
Methodology
I interviewed 11 subject matter experts across solutions to gather qualitative data and analyzed past customer interviews.
Each of the eleven subject matter experts also participated in a collaborative workshop exploring “How might we remove confusion for customers?” and “How might we seize the moment to offer streamlined services to our customers?”
I audited our website on how Acquia describes each of our service offerings and found that what was advertised online was not what the service teams thought they were supposed to be providing, adding to customer confusion.
“Going back and forth with support can be a bit challenging because we don't have somebody that knows our system and knows our issues”.
- Customer quote
Outcomes & Lessons Learned
The primary insight was that customers often reach out to their technical account manager or customer success manager over support, because they had built trust with that person at the start of their journey. The action was intentional rather than due to confusion as leadership had hypothesized.
The outcome was that a new role was created by the Chief Delivery Officer replacing the customer success manager. This new role would be a single point of contact for the customer in need of help. This provided the customer someone who knows their system and has built trust with them from the beginning to improve their service experience. This also ended the overlapping efforts across teams when a customer contacted all of them when needing help.
