Acme Security
Activating and onboarding for cybersecurity products
Acme Inc., a large IT company, had customers scratching their heads over how to activate their enterprise software with a multi-million dollar price tag. Sliced Bread was approached to join forces on an epic, in-depth service design project.
The mission: Demystify onboarding and resolve a pile of remaining unclear concerns. We worked to unearth the underlying issues across each internal and external step, across all the teams, people, and tools involved.
Revealing roadblocks that prevent an incredible experience.
We dove headfirst into the world of Acme's products, engaging in deep conversations with 22 customers and 37 internal employees throughout the entire purchasing and ownership journey.
Our research revealed many things including a key discovery that internal hiccups caused problems long before the customers got their hands on the product. In particular, online tools were misbehaving during the sales process, leaving a tangle of conflicting error ticketing workflows.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
To understand the true root causes of Acme's drama, we delved into the impact of company culture, uncovering a double-edged sword. Acme's culture encouraged individual teams to make bold decisions and move at lightning speed, resulting in frequent releases. However, this also led to a lack of coordination between teams and even within them.
Addressing problems such as licensing issues meant more than just fixing some software tools—it required a holistic transformation.
One print. Two print. Red print. Blueprint.
Our research uncovered a wealth of crucial details that needed to be tracked, so we meticulously documented everything in a series of service blueprints. These blueprints detailed the front office and back office individuals, processes, and pain points at each step of the process—from sales to delivery to customer onboarding.
We spelled out the different touchpoints between the users, Acme teams, technologies, and artifacts to highlight every issue. These service blueprints served as a reference point for our brainstorming sessions.
Reaching for the stars, one solution at a time.
The project peaked with a collaborative workshop for all six teams involved in the delivery process. We discussed detailed findings, facilitated brainstorming sessions, and prioritized specific solutions. It was a design sprint extravaganza, where teams not only identified key changes, but also crafted new service delivery blueprints, established a delivery schedule, and agreed on success metrics. Our aim was to set Big Hairy Audacious Goals and make them a reality.
The Results
Our client was overjoyed to finally understand the root causes of challenges that had plagued them for far too long. Most importantly, our research revealed that many rollout issues stemmed from upstream problems, long before the customers ever interacted with the product. By addressing these internal challenges with third-party sales tools, ticketing systems, and licensing, we could eliminate the majority of customer issues downstream. Solving problems at their core? It feels like a superhero victory.
