Role
Researcher, Facilitator, Service Designer
Methods & Tools
Service Blueprinting, Diary Study, In-depth Client Interviews
Timeline
February - March, 2024
Overview
Client onboarding can be a challenge to get right, and with payroll it only gets more complicated as going live with payroll can be much more stressful if done incorrectly. With Workforce.com’s sole team for onboarding clients, the team was facing setbacks and additional obstacles to implementing our payroll clients, and we wanted to understand how to address these challenges
Goals
Identify opportunities to improve the payroll onboarding experience for new clients.
Outcome
Established two distinct processes based on client profiles, reinstated an old process, and set up further resources to test with new clients.
Understanding the Payroll Onboarding Process
No one had an outline of the payroll onboarding process, so in a workshop bringing together representatives from our client onboarding team, leadership, sales, and product team, we blueprinted the general process from sales handoff to going live with payroll.
We identified multiple stages of the onboarding process, noting that the most unhappy stage perceived by our client onboarding team was when clients needed to transfer their data into our system with the team’s assistance.
A workshop with internal teams from sales and our client onboarding team indicated that the data collection stage of payroll onboarding was the most frustrating because communication with clients was sporadic and often involved corrections over mistakes and misunderstandings.
Diving Deep: Exploring the Blueprint in Detail
01 Unhappy Stage: Data Collection
Bringing our client onboarding team into a separate workshop, we looked more closely at the unhappy stage, trying to blueprint the front-stage and back-stage interactions that might be causing the issue.
In the process, it was uncovered that the team didn’t use a standard process but two general approaches, neither of which were supported by a formal process with our clients.
02 A Diary Study to gauge Line of Interaction
After determining blueprinting wasn’t able to detail the interactions with clients due to the two distinct processes and lack of formal process, I had our team members participate in a diary study for 3 weeks, noting down interactions they had with each client and detailing what went well, what didn’t, and how they felt about it.
03 Client Interviews to gauge Front Stage Experience
While the team was participating in diary studies, I ran a few interviews with clients who’d recently onboarded so that the experience was fresh in their memory.
Asking them about the best and worst part of the experience and what kinds of improvements they might suggest, I identified that most of the client’s pains centered on the lack of a clear timeline, communication, and not enough training. This resonated with the gaps discovered in earlier service blueprinting.
Insights
The diary studies indicated that our client onboarding team struggled most with setting boundaries on when clients could reach out and set up meetings with them. Likewise, communication lagged because deadlines were often moved and emails weren’t always promptly answered.
Client interviews reaffirmed earlier service blueprinting findings which indicated a lack of a formal process and primary communication channel decreased their confidence with the process as it was hard to know how much further they had until going live.
Additionally, complaints from our team around “too much hand-holding” aligned with clients’ complaints that they weren’t given enough opportunity to learn how to use the product while the team did everything for them, instead.
After reviewing the diary study and theming the entries and the interviews, the client onboarding team and leadership and I met together to discuss the best steps moving forward.
Solution
After reviewing the diary study and theming the entries and the interviews, the client onboarding team and leadership and I met together to discuss the best steps moving forward.
We decided our top priorities would be to create an official timeline. The client onboarding team also initiated a formal process tracker through Asana which was a previous method they’d used but had since gone out of practice.
The meeting also resulted in work around adding more training videos which was a collaborative process between marketing, product, and our client onboarding team, all of whom had interest in providing clients a better look at our product through guides and product walkthroughs.
Impact
By taking a service design approach not only did more of our teams now understand how payroll client onboarding was run, we also identified key areas which would target both client pains and team pains. The client onboarding team now has actionable improvements to make and artifacts to refer to as the process continues to evolve.
Takeaways
01 Journey Pain Points Stem from Earlier Stages Than Assumed
While the most unhappy stage marked by client onboarding team was towards the middle of the process, clients pointed to much earlier stages as the source of the problem — communication and setting expectations.
02 Service Design as Process Improvement
There's many ways that service design methodology can be applied, but it was most beneficial in this case to see a process and clearly identify gaps and where pain points were occurring most for both the team and our clients.