Aug 2017 - Oct 2017
Clutter found that customers were causing our movers to wait for up to several hours to arrive, which increased company expenses. To save 3-6% on company's yearly expenses our Business Development team built a feature that allowed HQ to auto-cancel jobs and track intermediate events.
Role
Sole designer leading end-to-end process
Theme
Customer Journey, Service Design
Team
1 PM, 3 Engineers
Constraints
6 weeks, while onboarding
Clutter is first and foremost a premier, storage company, aiming to free real estate by storing customer belongings in warehouses outside of city limits. We offer customers a convenient solution to their storage needs by providing full-service storage: we pack, move, and store your belongings for you. If you need anything from storage, we'll bring it back to you.
How might we anticipate variability in the field in order to prevent unnecessary time being added to jobs, and subsequently lower the amount of money Clutter spends?
Our movers scan packed items for storage, prepare items for moving, transfer items between warehouses, and deliver items to customers. This creates a chain of touch-points for customer belongings as well as variability in the field caused by: physical exhaustion, unsafe environments, weather, transportation, and human error.
Clutter pays movers by the hour, therefore paying those in the field for time that they spend waiting for their customers. Each minute is valuable because of its compounding effect on the company’s yearly expenditures.
By shadowing Move & Pack Specialists in the field, I was able to ask questions as we drove from customer to customer (Los Angeles traffic is brutal so I had the chance to have meaningful conversations). This immersive experience revealed how a mover must be physically and digitally apt in order to succeed.
After going out in the field several times, having 1-on-1s with Operations and Product, as well as shadowing calls, I identified the core needs and pain points of each group.
Move & Pack
Customers will delay their arrival unpredictably
Operations
Implement new procedure that'll force quit jobs
Customer Service
Call volume up by nearly 75% from previous month
Product
Decrease annual spending and address all needs
Customer
Fair circumstance for no show and cancellation fees
Reducing the amount of agency movers have in the field and automating procedures will lower Clutter's spending by 3-6%
Eric has been with Clutter as a Move & Pack Specialist for several years, and has had experience being a team lead for numerous jobs. I had the pleasure of shadowing him in the field to observe his interactions with customers and his process in the warehouse. After my time with Eric, I mapped out his journey as a primary user of Clutter WMS.
My PM and I drew out decision trees and state changes to illustrate how the feature would work across each group of stakeholders. Checkmarks indicate touch-points that occur over the course of the average Move & Pack Specialist's job.
We wanted to create intermediate steps that would return timestamps so that Operations would be able to more accurately track each step in a job. Operations also needs the capability of cancelling job without requiring movers to individually contact CX. The proposal will allow warehouse operations to remotely supervise and monitor the progress of jobs.
To better understand how the new process would effect Customer Experience, Operations, Move & Pack, and our internal CMS, we outlined scenarios using service blueprints. The following is the ideal scenario of a customer arriving on time or within the grace period.
If movers in the field are waiting for customers to arrive, they must be appropriately notified of changes or important checkpoints during their job. I emphasized the significance of microcopy because it would communicate to movers what they should do next.
There are three main scenarios that occur when Move & Pack Specialists are on the job:
Our solution gave students the opportunity to test themselves through another effective method of recall. The final solution of the question bank allowed users to:
We added a step where Move & Pack were required to take a photo of themselves at the customer's location, which created an overview of the team and time of arrival. From there, the job clock started on the main checklist page.
If Move & Pack have arrived and the customer is not present, they would receive notifications from the Clutter WMS app at 5 and 15 minutes. If they've waited for 30 minutes, they'd receive the option of waiting 10 more minutes or cancelling. If they wait, once 10 minutes are up, the job is automatically cancelled and the customer is notified of their cancellation fee.
After testing the product in the field, I would go back and combine steps in order to reduce the number of touch-points with the customer. There were instances where the customer was forced to sign twice and it was also disorienting for Move & Pack to take a photo of themselves once they arrived onsite.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with Move & Pack and Operations at the warehouse locations. I'd spend 8 hours each field day helping Move & Pack prepare the trucks, greet the customers, move a few boxes, and observe how our team interacted with the Clutter WMS app.
This immersion helped me gain a lot of insight on the nature of the work and how we could further optimize performance using geofencing and automation. This project made me curious about how ethnographic research practices and guerrilla research informs design.
With a heavy emphasis on Engineering at Clutter, I now had experience in an environment that moved fast to break things. As the only designer at the time, I was responsible for advocating for more time to conduct research and for the user's experience. I learned that there is a delicate balance of shipping new features and allocating time for the full design process.
