Designing a clearer service experience

Understanding the people, touchpoints and processes behind an internal marketing service.

The challenge

ALU’s marketing team provided consultancy services to teams across the organisation. The opportunity was to make that service easier for internal clients to understand and engage with.

Rather than starting with a website, I approached the problem as a service-design challenge: understanding who needed the service, what they were trying to accomplish, and how the marketing team could support those needs.

This meant looking beyond a single touchpoint and considering the wider experience — from discovering the service to engaging with the team behind it.

01. Building a shared understanding of the service

I started by involving potential users of the service directly in the discovery process.

I facilitated a remote workshop using a customer discovery canvas, inviting teams across the organisation to share how they worked, what they needed and where marketing support could fit into their experience.

Bringing these perspectives together gave us a shared foundation for the work and helped us understand the service before deciding how it should be presented.

A customer discovery canvas filled in for the food and nutrition team, covering pre-call research, the customer conversation and wrap-up: team background, key stakeholders, agenda, business priorities, decision making, current state and next steps — Using a shared discovery canvas to understand the needs of teams across the organisation.

02. Turning individual perspectives into patterns

The workshop gave us a range of perspectives, but the next challenge was making sense of them collectively.

I synthesised what we'd learned and looked for recurring needs, behaviours and themes across the responses. I brought those patterns together in an empathy map, creating a more structured view of the people the service needed to support.

This helped move the conversation from individual requests toward a shared understanding of the customer.

An empathy map in four quadrants — says, thinks, does and feels — filled with notes from across the organisation, each quadrant closing with a common theme — Synthesising individual perspectives into recurring needs and patterns.

03. Defining who the service needed to support

With those patterns established, I worked with the marketing team to translate our understanding into personas and use cases.

Rather than developing these in isolation, I worked collaboratively with the team, giving them opportunities to review, comment and contribute as the work developed.

The personas helped us articulate who we were designing for, while the use cases made the work more concrete by describing when and why someone might need marketing support.

Three personas — Susanna, who deals with employees; Peter, with current students; and Max, with prospective students — set against their preferences, how they would find the service, what motivates them to use it, and how they would use it step by step — Connecting emerging customer patterns to the situations in which people would use the service.

04. Connecting the experience to the service behind it

Understanding the customer was only one side of the experience. We also needed to understand what had to happen behind the scenes for the marketing team to support them.

I worked with the team to map the service through a service blueprint, connecting the customer-facing journey with the touchpoints, people and internal activities required to deliver it.

This helped us see the experience as a connected system rather than a collection of individual interactions.

A service blueprint for the marketing agency. A customer journey runs from visiting the landing page through booking an appointment, a discovery session, creating a playbook and task assignment to launching a campaign, with a self-service path to the digital asset manager. Below, four phases are broken into customer actions, front stage and back stage — Connecting the customer experience with the people and processes required to support it.

05. Translating the service into a clear entry point

Once we had a clearer understanding of the service itself, I explored how people could discover and access it digitally.

The landing-page concept introduced the marketing team, communicated the areas where they could provide support and gave internal clients different ways to engage with the service.

The interface wasn't the starting point of the project. It became one touchpoint within the larger service we had mapped.

A low-fidelity landing page for the marketing agency, annotated with where each button leads: services, how we work, the team, the digital asset manager and a booking calendar. Sections cover services, the team, how we work, customer statements and contact — Translating the service model into an accessible digital entry point.

What the work enabled

The project gave the marketing team a more structured way to think about its consultancy service — connecting the needs of internal clients with the touchpoints and processes required to support them.

For me, the most important outcome was the shift in perspective:

The problem wasn't simply how to design a better webpage. It was how to create a clearer service experience — and then determine what role the webpage should play within it.

Reflection

Not every experience problem begins or ends with an interface.

This project taught me to look beyond individual touchpoints and consider the people, processes and interactions that make an experience possible.

That perspective has stayed with me: before designing the interface, understand the system the interface belongs to.