Overview

Background

The retail business is a critical revenue driver for the Sending Technologies division at Pitney Bowes. Customers who use our physical and digital products also purchase essential consumables like printer ink, adhesive shipping labels, and envelope sealant fluid. These supplies account for nearly one-third of Sending Technologies' annual profit, making this revenue stream vital to the company’s balance sheet.

Problem

In the first half of 2018, the supplies business faced a significant $3M revenue shortfall. Historically, the retail team addressed revenue gaps by:
- Raising supply prices by 5-10%.
- Offering new deals to incentivize purchases.
While these strategies temporarily bridged revenue gaps, customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores were consistently declining. NPS scores revealed growing dissatisfaction, with clients voicing frustration about rising prices and transactional experiences. There was a real concern that continued reliance on these tactics would lead to a 20% client churn rate, as customers opted for third-party suppliers. It became clear that traditional approaches were no longer sustainable and risked damaging long-term client relationships.

Solution

To address the revenue shortfall while preserving customer satisfaction, we investigated using Research Methods and implemented a Design Thinking approach. This methodology allowed us to explore creative, customer-centric solutions while leveraging data-driven feedback to validate changes. The focus shifted from short-term fixes to creating meaningful, value-driven customer experiences that could boost revenue without alienating our client base.

My Role

As the UX Researcher and Service Designer, I was responsible for:

Facilitating Design Thinking sessions to enable the team to brainstorm and co-create innovative solutions.
Introducing and promoting a test-and-learn approach, encouraging iterative experimentation and continuous improvement.
Ensuring a user-centered perspective throughout the process to align solutions with client needs.

Partners

Product Manager for Supplies: Provided business insights and helped prioritize opportunities.
‍Data Scientist: Analyzed customer data to identify pain points and measure the impact of proposed solutions.

Defining the Process: From Crisis to Transformation

When faced with challenges like these, teams often reach out to UX and ask for a workshop so they can get their SME's together and solve a specific problem. However, the steep decline in NPS scores signaled a deeper crisis requiring a thorough investigation.
Before organizing a workshop, I conducted discovery interviews with key stakeholders, including the product manager, members of the retail team (selling via phone and web), and customers on our advisory board. This allowed us to uncover critical insights that informed our next steps.

Key Insights

Disconnected Systems: Backend systems lacked intelligence to guide representatives on which customers to contact or which products to offer. This led to issues such as:The same customer receiving multiple calls from different representatives within weeks, causing frustration.250 customers/month being added to the "Do Not Call" list.
Price Discrepancies: Customers noticed inconsistent pricing between phone and web orders, eroding trust.
Data Challenges: Sales teams lacked accurate, consolidated client lists, making campaign targeting inefficient. Critical data was scattered across multiple emails and versions, with no single source of truth.

Summary: The business was operating in a pre-information age, desperately needing a data-driven foundation to make informed decisions.

The Game Changer

Recognizing this as a critical issue, I partnered with the product manager to escalate the concern and gain business buy-in. With support from leadership, we:

Onboarded a Data Scientist: To build a robust analytics framework.
Hired External Consultants: To kickstart the data collection process and ensure a systematic approach.
Shifted the Focus: Empowered the supplies business with data and analytics before initiating a Design Thinking workshop.

The Workshop: Driving Innovation with Data

Within one quarter, we had established a data collection process and a basic analytics framework. This foundation allowed the workshop to focus on solving business challenges across different layers and prioritizing efforts for the data team.

The workshop was designed to encourage divergent thinking before converging on actionable ideas. To guide this, we posed the central question:
“In what ways might Pitney Bowes differentiate itself and delight customers while selling supplies?”

‍Key methods used during the workshop included brainstorming, ideation, and group collaboration to ensure creative, customer-centered solutions.

Introducing Experimentation

To wrap up, I introduced the team to the power of experimentation. I emphasized the importance of testing ideas with small groups before large-scale releases and shared success stories from other teams to inspire confidence in this approach.

When Design Thinking does its Magic

How was this workshop different from how the team usually worked?

Ideation

Ideation was injected with boldness and creativity
Design Thinking approach using the creative matrix promoted idea quantity over quality and allowed for both personal ideation and positive group idea-building
Team created a broader range of better ideas, improving the chances that some of them would turn out to work well

Prioritization

Using the Impact difficulty matrix for prioritization drove tangible results. The Product Manager used to prioritize using excel and agreed that with the spreadsheet, every one of the ideas stays in the list as an ‘item’ forever and it dilutes their view of what really matters.
Team did not have a problem saying ‘no’ to ideas and did not end up with massive sprawling to-do lists that had distracted their attention in the past.

“Visualization is a built-in idea multiplier and drives a totally different conversation than trying to do it in Excel. It helped us agree on a clear cutoff point and clear direction. We could visually see which ideas to go after and which to discard. It helped us say ‘no’ to many ideas so we could put laser focus on the best bets. Unlike before, we didn’t have to go off and do a business case for every single thing.” - Product Manager, Supplies

A Bold and Successful Experiment

One bold idea from the workshop was to remove ink cartridges from replacement meters for broken equipment. Previously dismissed as too risky for client satisfaction, data revealed that most customers already had ink cartridges on hand. Armed with this insight, we ran a small experiment by quietly sending replacement meters without cartridges.

We went out and tested and nothing bad happened. We were worried it might cause a huge problem for clients, but it turned out the number of people who noticed was minimal. So we scaled it up and now it's standard practice. - Product Manager, Supplies

Outcomes

Improved Customer Experience

Do Not Call List Reduction: Decreased from 250/month to 30/month, as clients no longer received repetitive calls.
Intentional Outreach: An automated dialer system now ensures that sales calls are timely and relevant, such as contacting clients when leases are ending. This transformed calls from transactional sales pitches to helpful touchpoints.

Segmented Client Service

Implemented a 2x2 segmentation model based on engagement and revenue.
High-value clients now receive white-glove service via phone.
Lower-value clients are directed to the web channel, freeing up phone representatives to focus on key accounts.

Cultural Transformation

From Opinions to Data: The team shifted from relying on past assumptions (“We tried this before and it didn’t work”) to embracing data-driven decisions (“44% of customers said this”).
Encouraging Creativity: A culture of experimentation now empowers the team to try bold, unconventional ideas with the confidence that small failures lead to valuable learning.

Business Success

Revenue Goal Met: The business recovered from the $3M shortfall.
NPS Scores Increased: Improved customer satisfaction validated our approach.

Revitalizing the Retail Business with Design Thinking