Service design strategy

Establishing a seamless customer care operation at Skyscanner

The goal

It’s rare that you build an entirely new customer service operation and 150 person contact centre - but that’s what we did. “Book with Skyscanner” was a strategically important initiative where we transformed the company into an online travel agent in 9 months.

I lead a “Traveller Journeys” strategy, using service design methods, to identify experiential gaps and help Skyscanner go-to-market.

I led a co-creation process to generate Skyscanner’s “Traveller Care” principles.

These informed all aspects of service: from training, processes and products.

Design process

1. Created the “Traveller Journeys” strategy

Made the business case for an end-to-end traveller journey goal. Authored and executed the traveller journey strategy.

2. My “Jobs to be done” analysis identified critical user journeys

Analysed raw contact data to identify and prioritise customers' 10 most critical “jobs to be done”. Ran business discovery and user interviews to understand service choke points and identify critical journey improvements.

3. Launched an end-to-end UX testing programme

I created the first E2E user testing program at Skyscanner, with 30+ hours of in-person exposure to customers. I live tested the customer service experience with real users and played back the videos to our BwS Tribe in weekly updates. Pain point and service gaps were then fed to our operations and product teams for fixing.

4. Co-design workshops

Worked with operations and advisors to co-design improvements to customer service procedures and customer comms.

5. Facilitated co-creation of “Traveller Care” principles

Ran workshops with product, engineers and operations to co-create Skyscanner’s traveller care experience vision and principles. These values and principles underpinned our service experience, from training, tone of voice, to the product experience.

6. Led design for advisor tooling and self-service products

I went on to manage the design projects for our the customer-facing app (self-service flows, chatbot) and service-side advisor tooling (a completely new booking management system, contact management and knowledge base).

My impact

  • I highlighted 100’s of critical improvements to Skyscanner’s service experience. These were prioritised and resolved as part of go-to-market.

  • My end-to-end analysis and testing framework helped Skyscanner scale up launch in a another 28 markets in just 12 weeks.

  • I brought the voice of the traveller to a 200 person team, by playing back end-to-end user experience tests – it was the first time many of our staff had watched travellers struggling with our product.

  • The traveller care experience principles I led on are still being used to set the tone and standards of our service 2 years later.

  • I introduced service design to Skyscanner, and demonstrated user testing and workshop facilitation, which wasn’t commonplace before.