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Vol. 16, No. 4, Fall 2005
Aradhana Goel, Information Designer, MAYA Design; Francia Glandorf Smith, VP, Consumer Affairs and Advocate (Retired), US Postal Service; Jon West, Senior Analyst, MAYA Design
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Everyone uses the US Postal Service, but the experience is not always completely satisfying, and sometimes it's confusing-signature confirmations, the variety of envelopes, the choice between certified and registered mail. For its part, each year the USPS handles more than 200 billion pieces of mail, delivers to more than 140 million addresses, and interacts with more than 7 million residential customers at post offices, call centers, and websites. The culture and values of this organization are (no surprise) based on operational efficiency, but the lack of focus on the customer can lead to fragmented experiences.
Aradhana Goel and Jon West, of MAYA Design, and Francia Smith, retired vice president of community affairs and consumer advocate for USPS, relate the story of the Postal Service's attempt to improve customer satisfaction. MAYA partnered with the USPS to help it get a stronger understanding of its customers. This was done through a variety of methods. Maya's team, for instance, designed seven customer personas that included names, personalities, pictures, backgrounds and, most importantly, goals. These personas included that of an at-home/online merchant, as well as that of a representative of the growing immigrant population, which often uses the post office as a bank from which to send home money and gifts.
The next step was to consider the customers' goals and the mediums, or interfaces, through which they experience the USPS. In this way, the team hoped to improve postal services beyond the merely incremental. Considering the interfaces helped team members to imagine ways in which the customers achieved their goals. For instance, to buy stamps, a customer must navigate through a set of activities such as “locate vending machine” or “pick denomination.” With each activity, the customer encounters an interface that can help to satisfy that goal and possibly lead to another activity. Ideally, the customer would experience continuity and connection from one interface to the next. Studying these activities in order, the team identified any confusion, stress, or missed opportunity as a “breakpoint.”
Clearly, these breakpoints had to be addressed. However, as the authors write, “It is too expensive to fix each [single] breakpoint separately; any fix may introduce a new problem; and too often the breakpoints are symptoms of much larger, fundamental issues.” Instead, the team began to organize breakpoints by their affinity, or similarity, to each other, which reveals patterns and allows larger solutions to be designed. The team organized these solutions by benefit (to the customer experience) and cost, making it easier to guide the product-development process. Similarly, instead of creating individual ideas, they developed programs-which are as the authors write, “a more strategic way to think of product-development goals and the different ways to accomplish them.” The best thing about these tools is that they can be built upon and employed throughout the organization to coordinate activities over time.
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