Service Design – Co-op Digital Blog

Service mapping to make friends and influence stakeholders

August 14, 2019Co-op

This post is adapted from a talk Louise and Katherine recently gave at Mind the Product and NUX Liverpool.

Thanks to @kwastell and @louise_nicholas for a brilliant talk about #servicemapping @coopuk for #nux #liverpool tonight 🤩🤓🙌 #servicedesign #userexperiencedesign pic.twitter.com/qsKKVMwFI3

— Joe Bramall (@JDBramall) July 1, 2019

The act of service mapping with your product team and stakeholders improves relationships and helps everyone to work collaboratively.

Here’s why.

You build a shared understanding

Ideally, service mapping should be done with the whole team. That means digital experts from each discipline, subject matter experts, marketing people, policy and legal advisors and anyone else who has expertise relevant to designing, building, explaining, selling or governing the product or service.

Having everyone in the room at the same time means we all hear the same information at the same point which contributes to inclusivity. It helps avoid any part of the organisation feeling that the things that are important to them have been overlooked because they’re there to represent their area. It also promotes a more holistic approach to service design because it reduces the chances of working in silos.

After a service mapping workshop, we aim to have a clearer understanding of:

the role of each person in the room, their concerns, their priorities and their pain points
the scale of the service
how parts of the service fit together, for example, where a colleague’s journey intercepts a customer’s

For the workshop to be successful however, everyone must keep in mind the reason they’ve been invited to take part: to share their specialist knowledge. Each person must remember that specialist language and acronyms are often inaccessible and they’ll become barriers to understanding for many.

It’s a democratic way to prioritise problems

Service maps offer a visual way to identify pain points. Done well, they can flag all problems regardless of the specific user journey or whichever discipline’s responsibility they fall under.

Service maps make the areas that need attention indisputable because they help show us where the problems are – they’re often flagged by clusters of post-its notes. Each expert is likely to have biases around which of the problems to prioritise, so just making each and every one visible means we’re less likely to overlook something we’re personally less concerned about. Not only does service mapping help protect the direction of the product, in terms of building relationships with stakeholders, it’s beneficial because it feels like a more democratic way of prioritising what to work on next.

We can also look to the future more easily with a service map – it helps us anticipate and understand the consequences of the decisions we’re making. For example, if we make a decision early on in the service, will it have an impact later in the experience? A service map will help you to see this, and allow you to make better informed decisions.

Service mapping helps you tell the team’s story

A concept, idea or assumption is hard to visualise, so mapping it out and having a physical thing to point to helps make something nebulous more tangible. Service mapping has been a helpful way for the Co-op Digital team to tell our story to the wider team. It’s been a practical activity where we’ve talked stakeholders through the way we work and reassure them that there are often more questions than answers (especially in a discovery) and that’s ok – in fact, it’s expected. Showing this at the beginning of a project sets the tone for the way of working for the rest.

Working closely and intensely together in a workshop has helped build trust within the wider team. Each discipline is valued and respected, and listening to each person’s contributions helps build empathy. Everyone should be encouraged to contribute and bring all their knowledge into one place to create a chronological journey. The aim is always to create something that’s easy to understand – something that someone from outside the project would be able to look at and understand the direction of the product.

We’ve also found service mapping good to demonstrate the opposite: helping show that there is no problem to solve, or that a concept is not feasible, viable or desirable.

It highlights the challenging conversations so you can have them early

We know that progress on the product can be slow or even derailed if:

decisions keep being pushed back or just aren’t made
we don’t talk about the difficult things as soon as they come up
research findings aren’t considered at each step of design

To help us to remove these potential blockers, we include them in service maps so we can highlight them to our wider team. We know stakeholders are often time-poor and detached from the product so an overview rather than detail is what’s useful to them. We’ve found that many of ours really appreciate a service map they only need to glance at to feel informed so we’ve taken this into account.

We’re also conscious that we need to make it easy for stakeholders to give useful feedback. In businesses generally there’s often a pressure on colleagues to say something because they’re expected to – even if it’s not particularly helpful. By having the whole service visually laid out in black and white, it’s easier for everyone to understand and therefore give useful feedback.

Service mapping to show the money

It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that Co-op services are not only there to meet customer or colleague needs, they must also meet business needs and many stakeholders place more importance on this factor. With this in mind, we need to be aware of the business models and commercials when we create the map and we’ve been including things like efficiencies and incur costs in our maps. Including these aspects means we’re being inclusive with the wider team.

It encourages conversation and collaboration

We’ve found service maps help to:

get your team working together with a focus
bring clarity in times of change
make decisions obvious
make knowledge accessible
help stakeholders care about the right thing

The sheer physical scale of a service map is the simplest benefit. It’s big, visual and imposing. Put your service map up in your stakeholders’ workspace, people will naturally stop and look at it. When they do, ask them to contribute. Often, we need to get people’s attention to encourage collaboration.

That said, it’s act of making the service map with your team, collaborators and stakeholders that’s more important than the service map itself.

Louise Nicholas, Lead product designer
Katherine Wastell, Head of Design

What to do after a death: how we used service mapping to understand our clients

June 5, 2019June 5, 2019Co-op2 Comments

[Arranging a funeral] is the ultimate distress purchase made infrequently by inexpert, emotionally vulnerable clients under time pressure… Clients don’t know what to expect, spend little time thinking about the provider and feel under pressure to sort things quickly.

Funerals market study by Competition and Markets Authority

Organising a funeral is difficult and complicated.

To get a better understanding of how people do it and where we can make it easier, we were tasked with mapping out the full experience of arranging a funeral using a technique called service mapping.

Service mapping gives you a holistic view of both your product or service and your user. You don’t focus solely on individual interactions, but the whole emotional and practical journey as the user interacts. There are few areas of life that need this type of consideration more than planning a funeral.

Here’s how we did it, and what we learnt works well in the process we followed.

Work with people who know more than you do

We had 10 days. The people we involved were subject matter experts from Co-op Funeralcare and IT; marketing experts, plus us – a user researcher, a designer and a content designer from the Digital team. Having people from as many disciplines as possible involved helps to give the map a broader perspective. We spoke to funeral directors, the police, and people who’d recently arranged a funeral. We also analysed live and historical qualitative and quantitative data.

Never lose focus of the subject matter

Understanding funerals requires empathy and we wanted to keep this at the forefront of the map to understand what people were feeling, thinking and doing at each point in the process. This empathy also helped keep us grounded in the real user experience and the heightened emotions that go with arranging a funeral.

Our approach

There are many ways to approach a service map. We started by validating our assumptions. Here are 2:

Assumption 1: A second funeral is easier to arrange.

Not necessarily. Some practical considerations might be less difficult but depending on the relationship with the deceased, the emotional journey could be completely different.

Assumption 2: People shop around for a funeral director.

The common misconception is that people search for a funeral director online. But often, people already know which funeral director they’ll use based on recommendations or choose one simply because it is local to them.

Choose a user journey and follow it through to the end

We had to agree on the most likely client journey, otherwise we’d work on hundreds of maps with different viewpoints of ‘arranging clients’. The map should always evolve as you work. It moves and shifts and changes as you learn more. Thoughts and ideas change as you go through the client’s journey with them.

Pretty soon we had a massive map on the wall charting a typical journey from the beginning of the process to the end. What is the client feeling when they make the first call to tell us that someone has died? How do they feel when they meet the funeral director? Do they know how to register a death? And how do they feel on the day of the funeral? Understanding this means we can better understand this experience from the client’s point of view.

We uncovered many pain points – registering the death being a big one.

How people pay for the cost of a funeral was another huge issue. This led us to explore funeral poverty further. We found that most arranging clients want to ‘do the right thing’ by the person they have lost and will sometimes honour all of their wishes even if they can’t afford to pay for it.

Think about the practical and the emotional

Many people are in a heightened state of emotion, but how this manifests varies. There are recurring feelings such as worry, sadness and anxiety in the run up the funeral and often a sense of loneliness afterwards, when people call and visit less and life goes on. And we learned that grief is not linear.

Don’t forget the data

Using data from actual funeral arrangements we found interesting behaviours about arranging a funeral. The assumption was that the arranging client had a meeting with the funeral director or arranger soon after the death, discussed all or most of the details of the arrangement and that was that. The next time we saw them was on the day of the funeral.

But using analytics and Metabase we found it’s not uncommon for clients to have up to 6 arrangement meetings.

This makes total sense. You wouldn’t arrange a wedding with one meeting, why would you be satisfied with one meeting for a funeral? People don’t arrange many funerals in their lifetime and don’t always know what will be asked of them in the arrangement meeting. They might be distressed, so forget to ask certain questions or want to amend choices later.

Learn from what people actually do, not what you think they do

To us, the arranging client is the one who will pay the bill, but this doesn’t mean they make all the decisions on their own. We discovered whole families and groups that were involved in planning the funeral. This means different points of view, opinions and ideas. Only 1% of people know all the wishes of the deceased when arranging a funeral, and a third of people don’t even know if the deceased wishes to be buried or cremated, according to the Cost of dying report, 2018.

Take the map back to business

Once we had our map it was time to draw out our insights. We drew out high-level themes and opportunities then worked with the wider business to focus the 60+ opportunities into things that were new and would set us apart in the industry and other things we just needed to do. These were not features in their own right, more starters for 10 that needed further investigation into appetite and feasibility, which is exactly the result you want after working on a service map.

Tell your story well – and often

One thing to prepare for when you finish a map and have your insights and plan is to prepare to talk a lot about what you discovered. We presented the map to at least 12 groups of about 20 people each from around the business and we’ve been asked by external individuals and businesses to talk about it.

Tom’s tweet about the map has had a lot of engagement.

I’ve spent 3 weeks with a small team making a ‘service map of a death’ to try understand all the things people need to do when a loved one dies. It’s been fascinating. Is there any appetite out there for me to write up about method/process/the weird things we found? #userresearch pic.twitter.com/WUKmDSgIrY

— Tom Walker (@WalkerUXRanger) March 11, 2019

This could be because people are as fascinated about the subject matter as we are, but also service maps are a very tactile way of drawing out key opportunities and pain points. Done well, they can attract a lot of attention.

We’re now prioritising and working on the ideas and will be testing and learning from them over the next few months. Hopefully, we’ll have more to tell you then.
Rae Spencer, Lead interaction designer
Tom Walker, Lead user researcher
Hannah Horton, Principal designer

What is design, and why should you care?

March 11, 2019Co-op

Today the Co-op Digital design team held a 90-minute show and tell to address 2 questions:

What is design?
Why should you care?

Like all show and tells, this one was open to everyone. We wanted to give Co-op colleagues whose expertise are outside digital disciplines the opportunity to find out how the design process works. If everyone shares an understanding of the benefits of being design-led, it’ll be easier for experts from around the business to work together to deliver value to Co-op customers, colleagues and the Co-op as a business.

We need people from all areas of expertise to work together if we want to make successful products and services.

In the show and tell we talked about:

why design-led companies perform better
what service design is and how it aligns user needs with business goals
how the design process begins with research, before testing and iterating and testing again
the importance of designing products that meet people’s behaviour, and grow according to market and behavioural shifts
why we need to focus on the outcome of design, not the way things look
the difference between functional design and playful visual design and when to use each one

Showing examples of design

We also used the session to pull out examples of design at Co-op Digital from the past year. User researchers, content and interaction designers talked about:

product exploration in Co-op digital offers
content design and pair writing when designing How do I
field research for Co-op Guardian
service mapping in Co-op car insurance
proposition testing and design sprints in Co-op Food e-commerce
one Co-op online and the design system

We’ll post about some of these examples later this week.

Co-design is everyone’s responsibility

We need people from all areas of expertise to work together if we want to make successful products and services.

Thank you to everyone who came along. We appreciate your time. If you didn’t make it today but would like to find out more, email me.

Katherine Wastell
Head of Design

What we mean when we talk about service design at the Co-op

October 25, 2018October 26, 2018Co-op

I wanted to write this post to explain what service design is at the Co-op. Service design helps build more inclusive teams as well as products and services that meet user and business needs.

What we mean when we say ‘services’

To understand what service design is, we need to understand what a service is. A ‘service’ is something that helps someone complete a task, like finding information or getting something done.

At the Co-op we help our customers do lots of things, for example, we help them:

make a will with the Co-op Legal team
arrange a funeral with Co-op Funeralcare
register to become a Co-op member

We also help our colleagues. For example, we help:

Food colleagues find out how to do something in stores through the How do I? website
Funeralcare colleagues spend more time face-to-face time with bereaved families and less on admin through Co-op Guardian
Food colleagues check information about when they’re due to work with the Shifts website

These are just some of the services within the Co-op. Some of them are customer-facing, some are colleague-facing, some include elements of both. Some tasks can only be completed online, some can be done entirely offline, but most will include a mix of both.

Service design at the Co-op

And that’s what service design is at the Co-op: it’s designing the sequence of interactions a user has with us. It’s a holistic approach which considers the end-to-end experience, online and offline.

A Co-op service begins the first time a potential customer interacts with us (whether that be online or coming into one of our stores), or at the point a colleague is asked to sign up to one of our online services. The service goes right through to them achieving what they set out to do.

Digital teams can’t design services alone

In Co-op Digital we refer to service design constantly, but we don’t own it.

Service design includes colleagues from all around the organisation – those from legal teams, marketing teams, colleagues in customer-facing roles, as well as those who speak with customers from our call centre. And everyone in between too.

We cannot design good services that meet the need of our users without the expertise from around the organisation.

Mapping out the service to see the big picture

When we design or iterate a service, we map out each interaction, by each type of user, chronologically. This is service mapping.

We try to understand a customer’s mindset when they come to use a service. What task do they want to complete? For us to design an experience that meets their needs we need to know where they’ve come from, why they’re here, and what they’re here to do.

Service maps:

show the whole user experience, visually
join up multiple user interactions and channels, beyond digital
show the end-to-end experience from awareness through to completing a task

An inclusive way of working

We have walls dedicated to service mapping which we update to reflect anything that has an impact on the service, like if we’ve learnt something new in user research or if the business strategy changes. We map services openly like this so that everyone can see what’s been worked on.

Service maps help teams work better because they:

align product teams around a shared understanding of their users’ journeys
communicate the user journey to stakeholders
help everybody see problems at a glance
help the team empathise with the journey their users are on
allow anyone to contribute their knowledge of how a service works, or ideas to help improve it with a post it
put research and data into the context of the wider service

This photo shows our pharmacy ‘blueprint’ (a type of service map) created by Louise Nicholas and Derek Harvie. It maps the stages of the service, and customer interactions and operational touch points.

This is Jack Fletcher’s Membership storyboard which illustrates customer interactions throughout the service, online and offline.

A way to make better decisions

User research helps us identify problems. Highlighting them on a service map within the context of a user journey gives us a visual prompt about where we should focus our efforts. Being able to see problems, clearly, helps us prioritise what we need to improve.

Service design also helps us see where operational inefficiencies are and therefore where we can prioritise commercial gain – business goals are as important as user needs.

We use service maps to make better decisions because they help us:

highlight pain points and problems
spot gaps in our knowledge and the service itself
find opportunities to improve the experience
raise business inefficiencies
prioritise what we should try and fix first
pivot as a business to focus on the right things for our customers, members and business

Here’s the Food business’s ‘Store Hub’ service map designed by Kathryn Grace. It shows the reality of how colleagues in stores use systems and processes.

We need everyone’s knowledge and expertise

For it to be effective, the whole team should participate in service design. At least initially, a designer will lead the work, but the whole team needs to contribute for it to work. In a discovery, service design will shape how your service needs to work. In later phases, it should inform iterations and strategic direction.

For anyone working at Co-op, the research, content and design teams will be hosting a showcase of our ways of working on Monday 10 December. Come along if you’re interested in finding out more about service design, all welcome. Location to be announced.

Katherine Wastell

Head of Design

Co-op Digital talks service design at Design Manchester

October 11, 2017October 13, 2017Co-op1 Comment

Today’s the first day of Design Manchester 2017, Manchester’s annual design festival. From today until 22 October, there’ll be talks, exhibitions, workshops, films, fairs and parties across the city celebrating design in its various forms.

The Co-op is sponsoring the festival, and Co-op Digital is running and speaking at several events this year too. We’ll be talking a lot about ‘service design’ – something that’s really relevant to what we do here at Co-op Digital.

What do we mean by ‘service design’?

A ‘service’ is something that helps someone do something. Co-op services help our customers and members to save money; give to local causes; find out where their local Co-op store is and when they’re open; make a will or organise a funeral. These are just a few.

Co-op Digital has helped our Funeralcare team to give time back to funeral colleagues, so that they can spend more time with families when dealing with bereavement by putting parts of these services online which has made things simpler for users.

For businesses, service design is an holistic, end-to-end design approach that takes into consideration business, customer and colleague needs and creates shared value.

Service design is about collaboration and this is reflected in the events we’re involved in at Design Manchester.

Here’s a round-up.

Service design jam days

Service designer and user researcher Kathryn Grace from Co-op Digital is leading a two-part, co-created event on consecutive Saturdays. The first ‘jam’ day will be an introduction to the importance of service design in a city. Different companies and organisations from Manchester will be sharing skills and their approaches to service design.

The second jam day will be an opportunity to put into practice some of the things we learnt from the first day. The aim of the second day will be to develop a service within 24 hours.

We have a great design community in Manchester and we’re privileged to help showcase those in service design.

Panel discussion: Service design and Manchester

Technology Engagement Lead Emer Coleman and Co-op’s Group Design Director Ben Terrett will be part of the panel to discuss how cities grow and evolve. The panel will specifically be talking about how Manchester can attract people and businesses that can develop and maintain vital services that make a city work and make it an enjoyable and easy place to live in.

Design city reframed

Co-op Digital’s Lawrence Kitson will be speaking about service design as a team sport. He’ll explore how we can make a difference and affect change by co-operatively designing great end-to-end services that solve user needs and provide shared value.

Everyone’s welcome (not just designers!)

Yep, this is Design Manchester so we’re expecting to see a lot of designers over the fortnight. But our events are open to all. If you have an interest in how Manchester’s future is being shaped and how cities ‘work’, these events will be of interest to you. We’re mostly aiming to open up discussion and get people talking about, and sharing ideas about, the design of services across Manchester.

Kathryn Grace
Service design and user research

Gail Mellows
Designer

Getting aligned with a Membership service map

May 3, 2017May 3, 2017Jack Fletcher1 Comment

We launched our new Membership in September 2016. It’s a really massive and complex area of work and spans all 5 Co-op businesses from Food to Legal Services; Insurance to Funeralcare and Co-op Electrical. Our role at Co-op Digital is to support those 5 areas by making stuff as simple as possible for potential members to join and existing members to get stuff done and join in.

Anyway, since we launched, the Co-op Digital Membership team has been working hard to improve the online and offline experience for members and potential new members.

A ‘journey map’ for product teams

Six months ago, product manager Derek asked our team, plus Matt Edgar from Stick People, to map out the granular interactions of the membership experience on a wall in Angel Square. The digital team uses this to prioritise and keep track of the work they’re doing. On a weekly basis, they gather around the wall and update it with work in progress, problems, research and data.

It’s working well and gives the digital team a good level of autonomy.

However, because there are lots of people working on Membership who don’t necessarily work in digital, this level of detail isn’t understood by everyone. (Which is ok, digital isn’t everyone’s expertise). The map is also stuck to a wall so it’s not accessible to some of the wider team.

So we figured we needed a separate but related, digital as well as physical, higher level service map. It would include all the work on membership, not just the online part of it, and it’d be accessible to everyone. This way, absolutely everybody who needs to know, can be in the know.

Different user, different service map

So that teams and stakeholders can get an overall view of the activity that’s going on, Lawrence and I started mapping out the framework for a service map, or blueprint, to help everyone see the end-to-end experience, both online and offline.

Using this framework as a foundation we held a workshop with the delivery teams, the marketing team and the data science team to add what we know. And what we don’t know.

The Membership service map covers everything from when a customer becomes aware of the membership proposition, through to the sign-up process, earning and then spending rewards, choosing a local cause and voting at the AGM.

The purpose of the high-level service map is to:

see all the steps within the end-to-end journey
highlight what we know about user behaviour and service at each stage (quantitative and qualitative)
highlight colleague and touchpoint interactions at each stage
highlight metrics and data we track at each stage
show all the known work being carried out at each stage

The service map will add value because it will:

give us a single source of truth
make it easy for stakeholders to understand membership and engage with it
make our work visible to the rest of the organisation
show pain points, opportunities, recommendations for testing
help teams see what other sub-teams are working on and work together effectively
be the focus of membership service decision making in the future

Service mapping at the Co-op: it’s early days

Service design is a fairly new way of thinking and working at the Co-op but there are plenty of examples around the business of how useful this role can be.

The Funeralcare digital service uses a service blueprint to map the complex business of arranging a funeral from the colleague, logistical and customer viewpoints. And the Leading the Way team has mapped out the overall colleague, customer and product experience in stores.

What now?

Going forward we’ll use the map to monitor the service and make changes. The team will continue to work with the wider business to improve the service.

Jack Fletcher
Interaction designer

Helping Funeralcare rethink how we deliver our at-need funeral service

August 31, 2016September 1, 2016Co-op18 Comments

Hello. I’m Andy Pipes. I joined the new CoopDigital team in February as a product manager. Product managers design and build digital services that help Co-op customers, members and colleagues solve real problems.

CoopDigital is helping the Funeralcare business rethink how we deliver our at-need funeral service. The funeral business is a care service at its heart. It’s a traditional industry. It’s safe to say the internet age hasn’t really influenced its practices and delivery mechanisms.

The Co-op is the UK’s largest funeral business, arranging 90,000 funerals each year. We look after families in real distress. We play a key part in helping communities deal with loss.

I’m proud to have met and and work with some wonderful colleagues from around the funeral business. They do an amazing job caring for our clients, despite having to fill in lots of paperwork and struggle with technology that can sometimes get in the way rather than help them do their jobs.

CoopDigital is working to design a whole new service for everyone involved in Funeralcare. One designed to make these processes simpler. Do more on behalf of colleagues. Communicate better with clients. And we’re designing it alongside funeral directors, ambulance staff, call handlers, and funeral home managers.

This is Robert Maclachlan. Robert’s the new National Operations Director for Funeralcare. He’s been in the post just a bit longer than I have. His vision for a new operation for Funeralcare couldn’t be clearer: Give time back to Funeral Directors to spend with clients.

Meet Hayley. She’s one of dozens of funeral directors the CoopDigital team has met as part of our ongoing research. Hayley can spend six hours sorting out admin for every funeral she organises. Filling in forms. Checking on vehicles. Ringing round to find the right coffin, flowers.Confirming who’s officiating, who’s driving, who’s bearing the coffin.

In Hayley’s hands is her “system”. It’s a plastic folder full of all the paper forms she’ll fill in for each funeral. It works for her. We’ve met other colleagues with similar home-grown systems. But every piece of information buried on paper in that folder is a piece of information a digital service could act on.

So there are some big problems we want to solve. Above all, we want to create one simple to use system so colleagues can organise a funeral from the first call right to the last detail. Designed to accommodate the fact that every funeral that our colleagues conduct is unique.

The CoopDigital team practices ‘user-centered design’. This means we listen to and observe the people who will use the service. Our research team visits our colleagues in the field constantly to make sure we’re able to empathise with their concerns and challenge our assumptions about how we’d solve their problems. Three Funeralcare employees work full-time with our designers, researchers and developers in Manchester. An analyst from the Funeralcare IT team has joined us, so that we can introduce user-centred design and agile delivery to the in-house technology squad over time. We’re working together every day to help get the service just right.

Week by week we tackle a different area to work on, from receiving the first call announcing a death, through taking the deceased into our care, to booking transport, ordering coffins, and sending confirmation details to clients right the way through to creating an invoice and tracking payment.

On the walls of our workspace, we build out a picture of the emerging service. For each development period (a ‘Sprint’), we start with a clear picture of the user needs we’re focusing on. Then we sketch out a “flow” of the goals we’re expecting those users to be able to achieve after we’ve done that week. For instance, in the first week, we wanted someone receiving a call about a death to be able to log the most important details easily, and retrieve them later. Beneath the flow diagram, we list a few things that we’re most interested in learning as we test the service with colleagues in the field.

When we’ve built a small part of the service we take it out and test it in our funeral homes to see what the people who will end up using it think. If something’s not working we go back and change it and we’ll keep doing this until we get it just right.

We’re now 17 weeks into our journey. Here’s what we’ve made so far.

A First Call service that logs the important details about a death, and alerts an ambulance team to take the deceased into our care.

A Funeral Arrangement service that helps Funeral Directors capture all the clients’ decisions, plays back costs to the client, and keeps everybody updated about all the things that are still to be completed.

A hearse booking system, staff diary and staff assignment service.

A coffin stock control system, and a way for clients to browse the existing coffin range.

An audit system that works towards complete transparency about every important action in the service; a clear chain of care and traceability.

Various dashboards to show important “health check” measures for the business. Like busy times of the day for calls, and the % of contacts who are still waiting for an arrangement visit to take place.

Since we work fast, test often and iterate constantly, we understand that what we produce might not be right first time. Some of the areas of the service I am screenshotting above have been revised five or six times during the process.

But already we’re seeing how the service we’ve built will save time, do helpful things on behalf of colleagues, and present Funeralcare staff with useful information in a way they haven’t seen before.

As we start to trial the service alongside the existing process in a real funeral home over the summer, we’ll see what’s working best, what still needs tightening up, and where we need to really focus next.

I’ll report back on where we take the service over the coming months.

A side note

If you’re interested in doing work like ours, please get in touch. We’re hiring more product managers, designers and developers to join our growing, dedicated team.

Andy Pipes