Identity Group(IdG) is a 60-year-old American manufacture with a focus on signage, interior decor, and office products. With almost 500 employees and 8 locations across the United States, IdG was watching its growth and business decline. IdG was looking to rethink their digital footprint and create an e-commerce footprint to increase revenue and reignite growth and innovation.
Identity Group has been called "the largest sign company that no one has ever heard of." They were looking to rethink their sign buying experience. From their ability to quote a project to show casing the vast range work/clients they serve there was room to better the experience and speed up the process. Their process for quoting a sign project for a major hospitality brand typically took 15-30 days and a customer would speak to 7-15 people in that process.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
— Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist
This quote rang true to our approach. In the past, IdG had tried to solve this very problem by throwing an uninformed website or application attempt. The problem with this is the product has to meet specific standards, ADA Compliance, and goes through a complicated, spec to design to the manufacturing process. So before solving for any part of this, we focused on building a foundation of listening, learning, and understanding.
A small team and I flew to Wichita, Kansas, for a week to our hospitality sign manufacturing plant to listen, learn, and understand. Our trip to Wichita was beyond insightful. Each day, I conducted 3-5 interviews, led persona, user journey, and card sorting workshops/activities, and then presented some of the early findings and potential directions/ideas to internal users and stakeholders. We worked with customer service reps, sales reps, wayfinders, sign designers, line workers, and plant managers to understand the product and process. Because of our explorations, conversations, and everything else that went with the discovery mission, we were able to head back to Nashville with minds and notebooks overloaded with insights.
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Once back in Nashville, we hit the ground running to sort through all of the inform, new-found knowledge, and insight we had collected. We polished our personas and taking them on user journeys. We mapped out all of the current processes for getting quotes from clients, then made a hypothesis of what our new website could do in its place.
Our research was clear, and there were a lot of opportunities. So, we decided to focus our efforts on three things:
Something that showcases the vast landscape of clients, brands, and businesses we serve. It is not just showing pretty pictures, but telling the story and highlighting how we work for and collaborate with them to bring their vision to life beyond their expectations.
Centralizing all of the necessary information and documentation of the clients and projects to empower our customer service reps to provide the best customer experience possible.
Simplify the sign project quote/ordering process, making it easier and simpler for both the business and the clients. IdG's process typically takes 15 to 30 days, and the client could speak to anywhere from 7 to 15 people. Our goal was to give them a soft quote in 24 to 48 hours and have them talk to no more than 3 to 5 people, creating an experience that is quick and prevents lost context and information about the project.
*I'm just going to share the Soft Quote Tool for the sake of this not turning into a novel.
The goals were clear for the Soft Quote Tool: Eliminate the paper forms, collect as much of the necessary information upfront, create a platform internally so any internal party can find the information needed without a loss of context, and speed up the quoting process.
To ensure the continuity of our product and goals we had a weekly check-in with a small group of internal players(customer service reps, manager, production manager, architectural sign designer, wayfinder, etc.) This group empowered us to get feedback, missed information, and to prepare them for what was to come.
With any new tool, adoption is key to success! We knew that without the necessary processes to implement and adopt the tools, this would be true. So while we were in Wichita, Kansas, we had the foresight to document their current processes in which signs were ordered, manufactured, and delivered. By doing this, we uncovered tons of room to simplify, speed up, and remove friction from the process. Below is one of those process maps.
So the final outcome was so much more than we expected. We made a massive impact by listening to our customers and employees, rethinking 25-40-year-old processes, and the grace to fail fast and iterate.
What we created not only empowers our customers to get a soft quote in 24 hours and their final quote in 7 days or less but enables our employees to serve our customers beyond what they thought possible. We collected as much information as possible upfront from the customer, leveraged the hospitality brand sign standard's data, ADA compliance regulations, and Identity Group's expertise, to bring this experience to life. These new processes and tools free up our employees' time to focus on delivering a better experience to match the high-quality product.
