Atlassian
Redefining customer support to accelerate business transformation.
Role
Team lead, stakeholder management
Deliverables
Stakeholder interviews, Competitive landscape, User interviews, Problem definition, Insights and experience principles, Service blueprint, Concept workshop, Future-state customer journeys, Product roadmap, Experience scorecard
The Challenge
One of Atlassian’s brand promises is “providing legendary service to our customers.” However, with an increasingly decentralized service ecosystem, a major push to move all customers to the cloud, and no cohesive strategy to support new and migrating cloud customers at scale, we had a big problem coming down the pike—and fast.
Historically at Atlassian, large-scale, transformational strategies were developed in a vacuum resulting in little to no adoption. Strategy had become a bad word with a pessimistic outlook. I knew it was critical to stand up a cross-functional team and facilitate alignment across every business unit along the end-to-end customer support journey.
“If we want to stop shipping our org chart to customers, there is no better antidote than laying out end-to-end journeys to really see, feel, and suffer through what our customers are experiencing.”
EXECUTIVE STAKEHOLDER
The Approach
We took a user-centered approach and leveraged a service design mindset to turn strategy into real action — with measurable outcomes. The first step was to identify the stakeholders and partners across the end-to-end customer support journey whose participation and buy-in would be critical for the success of our program. We then established a clear working model that allowed for various levels of engagement and formed a core group of subject matter experts that we met with weekly. Ultimately, we facilitated alignment across more than 70 stakeholders in 20 different business units.
We analyzed thousands of support tickets to better understand our customer problems and to learn how our team of support engineers resolved their issues. What we found was an astounding opportunity to reduce support costs and empower our customers to help themselves.
Consider this…
For the first eight months of 2020, almost 20,000 tickets for our core cloud products were resolved by linking customers to Atlassian documentation. This volume contributed to 17,000 technical support work hours logged (or 425 work weeks).
We determined…
If we offset just 5% of the nearly 20,000 tickets landing in the technical queue by better enabling our customers to resolve autonomously, that would free up more than 106 work weeks.
Armed with the understanding that lack of adequate support for customers upstream was leading to downstream cost for the business, we set out to talk to our customers directly to understand why. We translated both quantitative and qualitative data into a human-centered story—distilling an ocean of research insights into shareable visual artifacts that rallied stakeholders from across the business around specific opportunities for major business impact.
Inclusive Design
To ameliorate the challenges of working in a far-flung ecosystem, we brought domain experts together, sometimes for the first time, to co-create a connected journey of solutions for support customers. Interactive workshops gave stakeholders a platform to contribute innovative concepts that could be quickly vetted, iterated, and absorbed by the business.
An end-to-end service blueprint mapped customer expectations of support services to the actual Atlassian support experience to help us break down assumptions and align to a shared reality of the current-state.
Opportunities
We described high impact concepts in a story-driven business case to illustrate the new support-at-scale strategy. As the entry point to our complete analysis and implementation plan, this visual approach to a business case engaged the imagination of stakeholders and helped secure roadmap commitment and funding from leadership.
Experience Vision
We contextualized the service strategy across key segments in interactive customer journeys and socialized them across the business to build excitement and buy-in for the future of Atlassian’s legendary service. Packaging complex business transformation into tangible customer stories and outcomes helped us engage and inspire our most skeptical and hesitant stakeholders.
Watch our recorded stakeholder presentation below.
Wins & Outcomes
Team Growth & Learnings
My team was asked to stretch their skills…a lot. For many, this was their first time working in a highly collaborative, cross-functional setting with such an expansive scope. I was committed to building trust with my newly formed team and creating a safe environment focused on growth. By the end of the program, we had developed new service capabilities as a team and up-leveled our craft.
