Blair McMillan

01 / Case study

Verizon Same Day

Making “we’ll get you a new phone today” actually possible.

Client
Verizon · Same Day Delivery & Setup
Role
UX Designer · Workshop Facilitator
The same-day replacement flow on a laptop and phone: a delivery confirmation, the steps involved and the appointment details

02 / The simple version

What the customer was promised.

  1. Phone breaks
  2. File a claim
  3. Get a replacement
  4. Get back online

Same day.

Behind the scenes, it was anything but.

03 / The real version

One journey for them. Many for everybody else.

The experience crossed systems, teams and operational processes that had never had to run to a single clock before. Every one of them had to agree for a phone to arrive, be verified, be activated and work — the same day a claim was filed.

The challenge wasn’t designing a better interface. It was designing a service that could actually be delivered.

The customer experiences

One journey

The organisation coordinates

  • Claim
  • Claim approval
  • Device inventory
  • Fulfillment
  • Delivery
  • Identity verification
  • Activation
  • Customer support
  • Exception handling

04 / In the room

Nobody could see the whole thing.

Each team knew its own part well and the shape of the whole service barely at all. So I ran a multi-day workshop with people from across the organisation — not to generate ideas, but because a seamless customer experience depended entirely on solving the gaps between teams, and those gaps were invisible from inside any one of them.

  1. 01Create a shared view of the experience
  2. 02Surface dependencies
  3. 03Identify gaps
  4. 04Make decisions
  5. 05Align teams around one service
  1. Lots of people, lots of systemsShared understanding
  2. Shared understandingDecisions
  3. DecisionsOne experience

05 / Working backward

We didn’t design the experience around the organisation.We worked backward from what the customer needed.

A company is arranged into insurance, fulfilment, logistics, activation and support. A customer doesn’t experience any of that. They experience one sentence: I need my phone replaced.

So we started from that sentence and worked outward to what the service had to do, and only then to which team had to do it. Ideas were mapped and refined collectively rather than handed from one department to the next, which let customer need, technical feasibility and operational reality argue with each other in the same room.

  1. Customer need
  2. Desired experience
  3. Service requirements
  4. Organisational dependencies
  5. Implementation

06 / What got built

Alignment isn’t a deliverable.

The work didn’t end when everyone left the room. The agreed journey became a blueprint for how the service would run across digital and physical touchpoints, and I carried those decisions into the experience itself, working with the development team through implementation.

The shipped “How it works” strip: an expert picks up the device, brings it to your location, helps you set it up, and the device is activated and ready
All of it, in four steps.Everything the organisation had to coordinate, told to the customer as four things that happen to them — because the only part they should have to understand is what to expect and when.

07 / The result

The result

4m+

Devices delivered nationwide since launch

And from the outside

  1. File a claim.
  2. Get a phone.
  3. Get back online.

Looking back

Sometimes the design job is making sure the customer never has to see the complexity.