SWIFT: a support channel strategy, designed with the people who run it

SWIFT needed to rethink how it supports its customers across channels — deflecting more cases to self-service without losing the satisfaction its users expect. We ran the work as a participative strategy, mixing service design and product design, and built it alongside SWIFT's own stakeholders rather than in a silo.

The engagement, at a glance:

• Insights — 10 stakeholder interviews, 1,000 support cases analysed, industry best practices
• Alignment & diagnostic — one shared reading of the as-is journey and its moments of truth
• Strategy & blueprint — a support channel strategy and three redesigned customer journeys

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The challenge: deflect cases to self-service, without losing satisfaction

Defining a support channel strategy meant holding several goals in tension at once:

• Consumer satisfaction — maintain the level of support quality users expect
• Support sustainability — decrease the number of cases requiring human treatment, through case deflection
• Value proposal — create a channel experience aligned with, and concretising, the support packages' value proposition
• Multichannel & self-service — integrate availability across channels and design a mix that drives adoption of digital self-service, including a ground-zero freemium service
• Heterogeneity — handle very different case types, from emergency and critical to troubleshooting and simple questions
• Stakeholders — engage them in defining the strategy and build their buy-in

Defining that strategy required a participative methodology, mixing service design and product design — not a strategy handed down, but one built with the organisation.

Insights gathering: align everyone around a common analysis

The first phase gathered the data and the people needed to align on a shared picture. We ran the work across four tracks feeding a single insights dashboard:

• Stakeholder interviews — 10 one-to-one sessions across teams and regions, with an interview guide, to surface customer-journey elements, objectives and pains
• Insights analysis — internal studies and strategic orientations, a qualitative analysis of a sample of 1,000 cases, plus quantitative data (analytics, volumes) and qualitative data (personas, UX and consumer knowledge, support surveys)
• Industry best practices — on support, self-service and channels
• Optional customer research — field research, focus groups and a customer survey to validate hypotheses

Alignment & diagnostic: one shared reading of the journey

We brought all stakeholders into a one-day alignment session to share a common diagnostic and orient the strategy. It combined a training moment to level shared knowledge — self-service myths and realities, customer-experience principles — with a presentation of the consolidated insights dashboard and the as-is customer journey: the meta journey, the detail by steps, and the different use cases (clusters of cases, customer types). From there we identified the customer moments of truth, the journey misfunctions and the key challenges to reach the strategic objectives, and proposed a first version of the new multichannel support journey.

Strategy & blueprint: turn the diagnostic into a concrete strategy

The final phase turned those orientations into a concrete support channel strategy, through three solution-design workshops and a validation meeting with stakeholders — a small working team, an iterative process. We delivered:

• Final customer journeys — three multichannel cases
• A strategy: strategic plan and elevator pitch
• A support distribution strategy — a support experience framework, the value proposal and experience defined by channel and touchpoint, a customer / consumer / end-user and support-package matrix, and use-case clustering

Why it worked: a strategy the organisation helped build

The hard part of a support strategy isn't drawing the target journey — it's getting an organisation to adopt it. By mixing service and product design and running the whole thing participatively — from the 10 interviews to the workshops — we built a strategy grounded in how SWIFT's support actually works, and owned by the people who'd run it. Insight to alignment to blueprint, with the stakeholders in the room at every step.