Problem
When deal makers complete their deals, they prefer and often are required to have a record of their deals that can live on in perpetuity. This use case was historically been an afterthought for both our company and competitors.
Our past solution used antiquated technology that made it near impossible to access. In addition to this, the ordering process for our customers was extremely opaque, and the internal process to produce these archives was error prone and expensive. We lost money on this section of our business.
Re-examining the closing process for our customers became a serious opportunity to dramatically improve the last experience a customer might have with us, while also reducing costs to the business.
Discovery
With this being a service design problem, it was important to understand how all the different aspects of closing an M&A deal worked for both our customers and our internal support staff.
We used interviews to map the customer-facing processes, and on-site ethnographic studies to break down and understand the tasks associated with the production of deal archives.
The initial discovery work we did was enough to run sketching workshops to storyboard on how we might solve for this, which we were then able to test with customers and support staff.
Solution
Based on what we learned, our solution took a three-pronged approach:
- We updated the customer ordering experience to match conventions established by common e-commerce experiences. (eg: transparent pricing, order status updates, and order history)
- We built an internal facing order fulfillment tool and infrastructure that was more secure and less manual.
- We used a backwards-compatible file structure to make accessing the data on an archive easier without compromising on security. This innovation also allowed us to deliver archives via the cloud.
Results
The infrastructure and streamlining of processes we put in place reduced production time down from 24 hours to about 9 minutes. The ordering experience saw a steady increase of orders after release, and opened the door for future unexplored revenue streams, such as hosted archives. Our archive technology eliminated the customer demand for physical copies in months, not years, in favor of online downloads.
