Private Sector · Infrastructure · Service Direction
Clarifying digital service direction under operational constraints
Overview
An infrastructure supplier under post-COVID pressure needed clear service-led direction to prioritise digital investment under real operational constraints.
My role
Service Designer — I led customer and business discovery through interviews across sales, warehousing, and customer service, and synthesised insights to support leadership decision-making on digital priorities and investment sequencing. I worked closely with the engagement team (director, partner, and manager) to shape the evidence and framing used in senior leadership discussions.
What needed deciding
The challenge
The organisation employed 200+ staff across sales, warehousing, and customer service, supported by a global supplier network serving time-critical B2B customers. Post-COVID disruption, internal consolidation, and rising customer expectations increased pressure on service reliability.
At the same time, digitally native competitors were offering greater transparency, predictability, and self-service, challenging the organisation’s traditional relationship-led supplier model. Leadership recognised the need to invest in digital change, but there was no shared view on where investment would create the most value.
Different teams raised valid but competing priorities, and early ideas risked following industry trends or local preferences rather than addressing systemic service and operational constraints. Without clearer prioritisation, digital initiatives risked fragmenting delivery, increasing change fatigue, and reinforcing existing inefficiencies.
Leadership needed to decide which problems were worth solving digitally, and in what order, given real operational dependencies and limited change capacity.
The focus
To clarify which customer and business problems should be addressed digitally first — and which should wait — by shaping sequencing decisions around service reliability, operational dependencies, and constraint removal.
Priority was given to:
problems affecting both customer confidence and internal efficiency
customer pain driven by deeper data, inventory, or process constraints
sequencing decisions that would either unlock or constrain future digital value
How direction was shaped
Approach
Rather than starting with systems or solutions, the work grounded strategic discussions in how services actually operated end-to-end for customers and staff.
Customer experience and operational reality were examined together to understand where breakdowns in service flow affected reliability, cost, and trust — and how those issues compounded across sales, warehousing, customer service, and supply-chain functions.
The intent was not to design a future system, but to provide leadership with a shared, evidence-based view of where digital investment would reduce constraint rather than add complexity.
One grounding insight
A recurring insight from both customer and frontline research was that reliable commitments mattered more than digital touchpoints.
In some cases, lead-time commitments varied by weeks or even months due to upstream factory or shipping delays, with limited visibility once materials were in transit. Frontline teams lacked reliable inventory data, making it difficult to give customers confident delivery commitments — regardless of channel.
This reframed digital ambition away from visible features toward foundational reliability.
Key activities
Conducted customer interviews across key segments to understand reliability drivers, pressure points, and expectations
Ran frontline interviews and operational walkthroughs across sales, warehousing, and customer service to surface constraints and informal workarounds
Synthesised recurring customer and business issues into prioritisation-ready problem statements
Supported leadership working sessions by shaping evidence and framing used to assess impact, effort, and dependency risk
Leadership working session mapping service problems across customer, staff, and business impact to inform prioritisation and sequencing decisions.
Contributions to key decisions
I supported leadership in moving from opportunity-led discussion to constraint-led decision-making by:
Framing digital opportunities in terms of combined customer impact and operational effort
Making visible where customer-facing issues were symptoms of deeper data, inventory, or process constraints
Highlighting dependencies that would limit value if initiatives were addressed out of order
Providing evidence to deprioritise initiatives that would create visible change without improving service reliability
Why these decisions mattered
Without grounding prioritisation in operational reality, digital investment risked accelerating fragmentation rather than improving performance. Investment order needed to remove constraints first, or customer-facing change would expose underlying weaknesses rather than build trust.
This work helped leadership make explicit trade-offs — accepting slower visible change in exchange for more reliable customer commitments and reduced rework.
Outcomes and implications
Key deliverables
Discovery synthesis consolidating customer pain points and linking them to underlying operational and data constraints, grounding leadership discussions in shared evidence.
Prioritised digital roadmap providing a structured view of initiatives sequenced by dependencies, customer impact, and change capacity to frame investment trade-offs.
Decision-focused synthesis supporting leadership forums to assess trade-offs and agree where to start, what could wait, and why.
Outcomes and impact
Leadership aligned on prioritising internal data and inventory visibility before customer-facing improvements
Digital investment was sequenced around service reliability and operational dependencies rather than vendor roadmaps or local preferences
Teams accepted slower visible change in exchange for more reliable delivery commitments and reduced operational rework
Key learning
Under market pressure, digital transformation struggles when leaders prioritise visible progress over reliability. In this context, using customer and business discovery to shape investment order — not just opportunity identification — was critical to protecting customer trust while the organisation adapted at a sustainable pace.