Service Design makes sustainable mobility a reality
Experience Dynamics helped smoothen the ride of sustainable mobility centers globally that empower e-mobility infrastructure for providers and purchasers.
The Story
Citizen’s companies is a global energy enterprise with a 40-year legacy in energy trading. As a leader in sustainable energy products and solutions, Citizens was extending its sustainability business to broker a service experience between sellers and buyers. This new e-mobility hub would provide value-added support along the electrification journey, engaging employee, supply chains, after-service care and more.
The Challenge
Rolling out an e-mobility hub to cater to buyers, sellers, and ultimately consumers, Supercool Sustainable Mobility Centers needed to bring touchpoints, channels, and personas together under one strategy. Supercool turned to Experience Dynamics to seek help coordinating and streamlining the experience involving B2B stakeholders. These stakeholders range from start-ups to enterprise organizations electrifying fleets or those building infrastructures, such as local governments who want to tackle clean energy as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The Strategy
To begin with, in Service Design we start with the discovery and refinement of the value proposition and business model. Even though our client was part of an established company, its newest venture operated more like a start-up. The risk for any start-up is the potential to go in fifty directions, instead of prioritizing what matters most to stakeholders.
Based on user research with Buyers and Sellers, the Journey Mapping would steer personas and pain points, such as “Where do I begin with e-mobility?”. Next, the Service Blueprint would be created with internal stakeholders close to the channels and business. Finally prototyping service interfaces or touchpoints based on a Touchpoint Mapping activity would help narrow down and evaluate the new value exchanges.
The Turning Point
Since the service design was beta launched first in Mexico (later in Italy and the USA), we needed user research insights on the ground. This is so localization and cultural fit can be factored in for each country from the start. A local Ethnography team was deployed to conduct interview observations with Buyer and Seller stakeholders.
It was clear from the User Research results that buying e-mobility solutions is scary. Local governments, for example, don’t understand the latest solutions, deployment costs, infrastructure requirements, and the total commitment to sustainable mobility solutions. Creating an employee role that helped users through the e-mobility transition would be critical… The Transition Advisor was born: the Apple Genius type person who helps you through your Supercool Sustainable Mobility Centers journey and guides you through the Transition to sustainable eMobility buying or selling.
The Execution
With user research in hand, we created we co-created a Journey Map with remote stakeholders using a collaborative board. Next, we followed up with a Service Blueprint:
The ultimate goal in Service Design is to create a Service Blueprint. The Blueprint becomes the steering document showing stakeholder interactions from Front Stage to Back Stage. However, any Service Blueprint is only as good as the Journey Map that informs it. This Journey Map is based on user research.
Two Service Blueprints detailed buyer & seller service experiences. This included support systems on the back end, Transition Advisor touchpoints, and what the customer experiences along the way. Since the Supercool Sustainable Mobility Centers are vendor and solution agnostic, it was important to design empowering interactions for buyers and sellers.
The Evidence
In Service Design, we talk about showing ‘evidence’ of the service. It helps you verify as well as your customer or employee notice the service sign of life. Our Supercool Sustainable Mobility Centers service strategy included a dedicated employee role, similar to an Apple Genius Bar but more oriented to the unique needs of B2B. This Transition Advisor works closely with stakeholders to empower and enable a smooth experience behind the scenes. In addition, we guided optimizing Web-based lead nurturing assets, support for Sellers with a dashboard, and stronger visual communication to evoke more playfulness in the store space–aimed at lower the intimidation of the new topic of sustainable e-mobility. The goal of the store spaces was to create instant familiarity with sustainable mobility and reinforce this is “doable now”– a key need we identified for the Latin American market.
The Result
The Service Design process provided:
- Tangible service interfaces to deploy or optimize
- Specific requirements for existing ideas, including grounding them on a strong value proposition
- Service interfaces and touchpoints (with rapid prototypes)
- An interconnected map of channels, employee actions, and the wider service vision
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Service Design makes sustainable mobility a reality