Santa Fe Relocation Services are market leaders in relocating people to all countries around the world. They have offices located in over 50 countries worldwide and provide services to both consumer and corporate markets. Their mission is to make moving easy for all their clients and provide a complete service to accommodate every step of the journey. They are constantly pushing forward and driving innovation in their sector by adopting the design thinking process to improve the services they provide and putting customers at the center of their products.

Their services include relocation, visa & immigration, accommodation, school search, orientation visits and settling in services. They have a range of products both internal and external to implement their service to a vast amount of clients. Using the design thinking process and collaborating they have made strides in improving the service they deliver as well as internal operations. This is a key element to reaching their business vision and hitting business goals.

The Problem

Santa Fe Relo approached us to collaboratively work on a domain alignment project. This was their new global web platform that would align and replace multiple sites they were previously using. This was a big task as it was a complete redesign of their current platforms to which the design thinking method is ideal as it’s an agile process.

Key aspects of the new platform needed to include:

• All Santa Fe services
• Destination guides
• Visa and immigration guides • News & blog
• Investor section
• Consumer
• Corporate
• About Santa Fe
• Commercial projects
• Reviews

This project was about collaboration and empowering the Santa Fe staff to ideate and create an impactful site that would improve the user experience and reach business targets.

 

Design Thinking Workshop

 

The aim of the workshop was to explore their clients in details and find opportunities to add value, reduce current pain points in the experience and reach business targets. We purposely held the workshop with employees from all over the business, this helps to generate out of the box ideas and thinking that may not have previously been thought of using the typical people in the process. This included CEO’s, Directors, CIO, Chief of Marketing, Sales and Ops employees being brought in from around the world to attend the workshop. As a lot of the people attending the workshop were extremely busy so time was of the essence to produce a tangible mock-up of the web platform by the end of the day.

Using the design thinking approach and tools our job was to empower the team and collaboratively produce an MVP, which would be the foundation of something to build from and re-iterate with the end customer at the center of the service. This is a collaborative fast-paced workshop to learn, build and review constantly until the product meets their business vision.

 

D.School – Wallet Project

Generally a lot of the people in the room wouldn’t know much about design thinking or the process. This is a quick 45-minute exercise we used from d.school to give the employees a taste of the design thinking approach. It works great to get the minds warmed up and is hands on.

This exercise is designed to give the participants an overview of the design thinking methodology. For the task they are put in pairs and asked to design the ideal wallet for their partner.

The task:

• Gain an insight into their partners wallet use
• Find an opportunity to add value based on what they’ve learnt
• Create some ideas based on this by sketching there thought onto paper • Review these ideas with their partner to refine and develop the wallet further

The key elements in this exercise are the fast pace, experimental, project-based and hands on. It’s important to get them thinking in the eyes of the user and comfortable with iterating rapidly.

 

Persona

Identifying their customers key characteristics, goals and pains is at the core for building a service that adds value. This part is essential as the entire service is built around the customer for it to be successful and reach business targets. Changing the perspective to the customers point of view will help to understand their journey and find opportunities to either soften a pain point or improve on a gain in the journey. Collaboration is a key element in this process to work with each other and bounce off each other’s ideas and expertise. We identified two main personas being the corporate and consumer clients.

Corporate clients are typically top management/key personnel roles in the company that are being relocated to a branch overseas. The company gave their employee a budget for the full relocation including home search, visa, school search etc. Their consumer market customers had a wide range of reasons for moving, the services they were looking for were similar whether it was moving, real estate, visa services etc. We looked at these personas in depth.

Corporate Persona

Goals

• Moving Abroad
• Acquiring a Visa
• Finding Real Estate
• Finding a school for kids
• Learning about the destination (lifestyle, culture etc.) • Cost of moving
• Finding a benchmark cost
• Finding out more about the moving process
• Advice on moving

Challenges

• Making a decision
• Finding the right price (budget)
• Time consuming
• Leaving family and friends
• Not knowing enough about the destination • Finding relevant information
• Adapting to change (out of comfort zone)
• Knowing and filling out forms correctly

How Santa Fe help

• Relevant details on the destination
• Offer pricing for a benchmark
• Quick easy-to-use tools
• Transparent and relevant information
• Offer moving, visa, real estate and school services

Consumer Persona

Goals

• Deciding where to move
• Learning more about the destination (lifestyle, culture etc.)
• Cost of moving
• Finding a benchmark cost
• Moving Abroad
• Acquiring a visa
• Finding real estate
• Finding a school for kids
• Finding out more on the moving process and what needs doing • Advice on moving

Challenges

• Making a decision
• Finding the right price (budget)
• Time consuming
• Leaving family and friends
• Not knowing enough about the destination • Finding relevant information
• Adapting to change (out of comfort zone)
• Knowing and filling out forms correctly

How Santa Fe help

• Relevant details on the destination
• Offer pricing for a benchmark
• Quick easy-to-use tools
• Transparent and relevant information
• Offer moving, visa, real estate and school services

 

Value Map

Values affect our decision making, with our decisions being biased towards what we value the most. Failure to take customers values into consideration will affect the choices we make when designing our service. We identified the customers core values to be:

• Job
• Family
• Cost
• Time/Efficiency • Kids Education • Quality of life • Their image
• Location
• Language

 

Empathy Map

Empathy mapping helps gain a deeper understanding of their customers by visualising what they hear, think, see and do. Again this helps to change focus and view the service from the customers perspective. Exploring this will help to design an impactful service that adds value to their customers resulting in better business outcomes.

Hear

• Support from family and friends How much will it cost?
• When are you moving?
• I’d recommend…
• Why are you moving?
• Have you been before?
• Are you sure, it’s a big step? How long does it take to move? Have you filled your paperwork?

Think / Feel

• How much is this all going to cost? Will the family benefit
• There’s a lot to do
• I hope it pays off
• Where’s the best area to stay
• Pressure from family and friends
• It’s worth it
• Is this the right decision?
• What are the next steps?
• Excited and anxious
• It’s a great opportunity
• The culture looks amazing and the weather is great

See

• Cost
• Benefits of moving
• Anxious family
• Potential homes and schools
• Information on the destination
• Documents and forms
• Exploring new city, pictures, things to do etc.

Do

• Explaining move to kids
• Contacting new job/branch
• Calling Santa Fe to plan
• Contacting family and friends
• Making decisions

Pain

• Pressure
• Making big decisions
• Finding relevant information
• Time consuming

Gain

• Adventure/exploring the world
• Better quality of life for family
• Career progression

 

Customer Journey Map

A journey map represents all the key stages and interactions their customers have on a chronological timeline. This shows from the point of thinking about moving to after the service has been carried out, including stages that don’t include Santa Fe Relo e.g. at the stage of deciding or being told they’re being relocated. It is important to add all the stages as this might identify opportunities for us to add extra value to the customer to improve the journey.

Once all the stages are set and the touchpoint and content is added, we start to find opportunities to improve the process. These are stages where we can either remove/reduce a pain or further improve on a high moment in the journey. We then collaboratively ideate on how to improve the identified opportunities. The ideation stage can be done separately then discussed in the team to be refined and developed. We do various iterations of this to drive collaborative innovation and create a high impact service.

 

Wireframes

By the end of the workshop we focus on delivering a tangible outcome that will form the starting point, which will be iterated and refined to form an MVP. Using UI stencils the teams collaboratively designed the new web platform homepage. Using all we learnt earlier in the day we knew what needed to be on the homepage, the key elements that would help their customers experience. This included links to key areas of the site, important call to actions and testimonials for social reinforcement. A few days after the workshop we turned the sketched wireframes into a high fidelity working prototype that the teams could test and discuss. We did several iterations of design, discussions and refining before we reached the final design.

 

The Platform

The site was built and we are still constantly taking feedback, discussing and improving the site collaboratively to improve the customer journey.