RWS new digital customer experience after rapid growth by acquisition.
Background
RWS had grown very rapidly, especially after acquiring SDL, a much larger company with a better-know brand. This meant that internal structures had changed and the effects were felt across the organisation.
Problem
Expanding through acquisitions can lead to various complications. When RWS and SDL joined forces, the integration of their digital assets, including their websites, resulted in confusion among both customers and staff. The amalgamation of the diverse range of products and services offered by these companies posed significant challenges in terms of navigation and exploration. Navigating through the websites and comprehending which products and services best fit the customers' needs became a cognitively demanding task.
Solution
To enable customers to swiftly relate to their envisioned solutions and the advantages thereof, RWS embarked on a Service Design expedition in collaboration with Spective Global.
Conducting comprehensive primary and secondary research involving numerous stakeholders worldwide, we accumulated invaluable insights. These insights facilitated a deeper comprehension of customer requirements and facilitated the restructuring of the websites' information framework.
Conclusively, we formulated an Atomic Design System, providing a uniform and efficient foundation for constructing various digital assets with seamless consistency.
Impact
The realised impact solidified the initial hypotheses; the revamped information architecture notably facilitated smoother customer journeys across the sites, while the minimised information clutter resulted in decreased cognitive burden for users. Both customers and employees experienced enhanced clarity in discerning the advantages inherent in various products and services. Additionally, they gained the ability to readily identify the usage patterns of other customers and draw insightful comparisons with their own requirements.
Beyond The Brief
In order to take the project to the next level Spective propose:
Aligning all customer experience activities, across RWS, on Service Blueprints. This way all actors and departments can see how their involvement impacts the experience. These should be “living documents” which are kept fresh and always referred to for the understanding of pain points and areas for optimisation.
Building bridges across research silos. RWS has many teams doing research in different areas which could benefit the overall customer experience if they are shared and socialised. We propose to use ecosystem mapping to signpost and link to all this good work.
Impact analysis as a framework for all production. We would like to introduce impact mapping as a way to get the most from everything that goes into experimentation, design and production. This would create provenance from backlog items to business goals but addressing and linking, hypotheses, actors and metrics. Any item that does not have a populated impact map should not be produced.