Dryft
Service
Design
Digitising the Swedish handyman experience…
Stockholm-based handyman company - Dryft was in the process of digitising its customer journeys to unlock more of its services to online consumers. With several new partnerships, digital developments and marketing initiatives underway however, an integrated perspective was lacking that tied it all together.
Following a UX audit and redesign of their eCommerce website (case study here), I sought to apply a Service Design approach to the broader service architecture that supported Dryft's customer experience. Working closely with business stakeholders, I mapped out a new architecture that fully articulated and connected Dryft's evolving customer journeys alongside new experiences and capabilities that were under development. This work tied together previously disparate elements with strategic clarity, harmonising the company's various initiatives and providing a foundation for future detailed design.
Creating an architecture to support the strategy
Diverse services, procured digitally, over a lifetime relationship
To unlock lifelong relationships with online consumers, a seamless and heavily digitised service experience was needed for new and repeat customers to access and manage services - regardless of scale, price or complexity. Dryft had established three business channels to deliver services across these factors - "Traditional", "eCommerce" and "Energy Renovations". The envisaged service experience for each of these channels relied on a common infrastructure with capabilities that did yet exist - such as a cohesive and navigable service catalogue, complex configurability of services, quote and booking management, customer profiles, and more.
It all needs to be tied together..
Separately to this, other initiatives were underway - including external partnerships with eCommerce, real estate and energy audit companies, as well as a homegrown customer platform that aimed to provide much of the above capabilities. What was however lacking was an overall architectural perspective of these different channels, experiences and capabilities. For example - the future customer platform was only useful for customers who agreed to sign-up. An understanding of the overall service architecture that supported customer capture and retention, from branding / marketing through to service delivery, loyalty programs and repeated services was therefore needed.
Through engaging various stakeholders in the business, including the Chief Growth/Digital Officer, COO, Head of Marketing, Head of Customer Success, trade group leads and business developers, I was able to gain strategic and operational perspectives on Dryft's service delivery and development efforts.
With these perspectives in hand, I produced several diagrams and schematics to visualise different aspects of Dryft's emerging operations and service architecture that could inform future detailed design work. Integrating the perspectives of these stakeholders, I noted where new connections and touchpoints could occur, or existing ones modified, to support a cohesive and strategically-aligned customer experience.
My final outputs to Dryft were therefore strategic and conceptual in nature, as this was the stage of thinking the company was at, and therefore where the most value could be provided in a short time.
Dryft is a Stockholm-based handyman scale-up pioneering eCommerce, digitised customer journeys and sustainable services within the Swedish handyman industry. Seeking to capitalise on the EU's emerging green economy, Dryft aims to bridge the gap between the existing conventional experiences and expectations of the handyman industry and those of a sustainable future empowered by digital innovation and service excellence.
To capture the existing and emerging markets for handyman services, Dryft is growing and driving innovations across three business channels: eCommerce, traditional, and energy renovations. Key developments include educational content creation, increased digitisation of customer journeys, and building a customer ecosystem through which personalised value can be delivered over lifelong relationships.
Below is the digital service blueprint / architecture that I created for Dryft. This schematic encompasses all existing and emerging customer journeys originating either from within Dryft's ecosystem or through an external partner experience. This schematic shows the journeys in their entirety, emphasising the location, scope and applicable design principles for key touchpoints, as well as the strategic connections between journeys.
This architecture highlights important integrations, such as the different ways customers may connect to Dryft's customer platform (under development), as well as an advanced eCommerce flow that incorporates deeper service customisation, quote management and guest / member flows.
With an incredibly diverse catalogue of uniquely configurable services of varied scale, price and complexity, a flexible architecture is crucial for capturing value from a variety of customer / user types - notwithstanding the fact that Dryft is a business that ultimately wishes to encourage customers towards repeat and higher value sales in the most sustainable way it can. Dryft however has three distinct business channels that each have different quote creation and conversion experiences - a key challenge is therefore to ensure that these experiences, while although distinct, do not result in abandonment because users are prevented from modifying or transitioning to other services of a different scale, complexity or price. The architecture below considers how various human and digital touchpoints can facilitate this.
Below is an example high-level breakdown of the anticipated lifetime purchasing behaviour of a given customer type. Understanding how different customers may seek services of varied scale, complexity and price at different points throughout their relationship with Dryft can inform loyalty program strategies as well as form the user-centric design basis for the overall service architecture. This is essentially similar to user personas / stories used in UX Design, but with an extended time dimension that ensures the architecture works for all target customer types throughout the entire relationship, which is critical to Dryft's strategy of lifelong relationships.
I initially focused on improving Dryft’s website UX but quickly recognised the need to understand the broader digital ecosystem that facilitated customer capture and retention. Mapping Dryft’s evolving operations became crucial to aligning both Service and UX Design improvements, such as IA, navigation, and user journeys, with the company’s overall strategy. This holistic approach bridged the gap between Dryft’s fragmented marketing landscape and the structured website experience I was designing - both of which are part of the broader service journey.
While mostly serving as a guide for my own work, the overview I created also served as a strategic tool for Dryft’s development and marketing teams, enabling them to make informed decisions across multiple domains. It detailed how marketing channels fed into the website’s funnels, outlining the user experiences and paths toward conversion for each business channel. Additionally, it provided some backstage perspective through highlighting the various digital platforms, services, and marketing content creation that contribute to different aspects of the customer lifecycle.
A key perspective that needed to be understood was how Dryft's underlying digital systems would support both guest and member experiences across the highly differentiated customer journeys of each business channel. The surface-level design needed to account for a variety of experiences, such as complex eCommerce configurations both in and out of session, customer and staff quote modifications, quote management, booking management, home maintenance & renovation data collection, personal profile management, tailored loyalty program experiences, and more.
The diagram below attempts to organise these different elements as events along a generalised customer journey timeline, with the relationship to the underlying digital systems shown in parallel. This exercise is the first of many that should follow to understand the technological investments Dryft needs to make to reach full service maturity.
Content coming.
Research is critical. With significant investment required to redesign and "level-up" the entire digital experience of a business, validating and refining design scope with customer research is incredibly important. In retrospect it may have been more valuable to focus on driving customer research over concept development. The only counter to this is that Dryft were at the chaotic beginning stage of a lengthy development drive, and I was of the view that an initial concept / blueprint could be a useful starting point / prompt for more focused design scoping and validation.
One designer can’t do it all. In retrospect, picking a single focus (such as customer research or building a loyalty program strategy) and going deep with it may have been a better approach with my limited time at the internship. My work did however provide a valuable holistic perspective on Dryft's emerging service architecture, ensuring future design work is strategically aligned.
Confused? Go agile. While I engaged with leaders in the business many times to ensure my objectives were relevant and processes on track, this could have been made more productive through adopting an agile mindset and methodologies. An agile approach would have provided task structure and prioritisation that would have greatly benefitted me in Dryft's busy scale-up environment, where access to key stakeholders was limited.
All this has to be tested. As with the research, testing of new designs is another crucial step that I did not have time to carry out. It would have been good to validate the customer types (discussed with business leaders but not with the customers themselves) and to interview users to uncover paint points and hidden opportunities in the current service.