Dell

Dell Financial Services Lease Transformation and GCP

The vision for this long-term project was to transform Dell Financial Services into a single, comprehensive platform that would enable customers to manage all financial aspects of their assets in an initiative, integrated, and consistent manner. At the beginning of this initiative, there were multiple portals for different regions, each in varying states of maturity, but all lacking consistency and many capabilities required to fully support users in achieving their goals. This led to development of the Foundation version of the Global Customer Portal (GCP) application.

The work required a constant and complex balance of aligning business requirements, user needs, design system and accessibility standards, compliance, and technical feasibility and preexisting systems; this posed a number of challenges for the team to overcome and required the highest level of cross-functional collaboration and communication.

Deliverables

User personas and journey maps, research readouts, KPIs, user flow charts, feature prioritization matrix, Figma handoff files for Foundation and post-Foundation designs

Core Team

Senior Designer/Lead (me), Design support team, Researcher, Product Manager, IT Product and Cross-Product Leads, Development Team

Background

Stakeholders and executives identified the need for a unified platform that would enable customers, across all tiers and regions, to seamlessly manage the financial aspects of their assets. This initiative was strategically important for Dell to streamline operational efforts, while improving customer trust and satisfaction. Their larger-scale goal was to deepen customer engagement with Dell’s services and drive more long-term leasing and investment.

Executive Goals

  • reduce operational costs and decrease the need for ongoing sales involvement

  • increase our customers’ confidence and delight in Dell’s financial services

  • promote further financial commitment from our customers through extending leases and investing in large-scale solutions

  • increase Dell’s profit margin

  • encourage customers to invest in large-scale solutions by providing an easy, reliable way to manage the financial aspects of their assets

Scoping and Alignment

One of the earliest steps I spearheaded for this initiative was to pull business performance data on each customer profile (tier and region). This highlighted what regions had the most customers, and which types of customers had the most contracts and assets. This provided the team and our stakeholders with clarity on which areas to prioritize for Foundation and which to defer, enabling us to establish a scalable, aligned upon strategy early in the process.

Data from Current Portals

There were multiple key quantitative insights gathered from the current portal metrics:

  • US Elite and Platinum customers obtained the highest number of assets, contracts and revenue compared to all other global regions

  • Canadian customer across all tiers had the second largest number of contracts and assets, despite not having a designated portal

  • EMEA, ANZ and Mexico regions, as well as customer in the US Silver tier, showed the least number of contracts, assets, and revenue contributions

High-Level Foundation Scope

  1. Focus efforts on improving the experience for Elite and Platinum customer needs in the US region

  2. Prioritize localizing Foundation for all customer tiers in Canada, since no portal currently existed for that region

  3. Keep EMEA, ANZ and Mexico regions in their current portals until after Foundation, but define this timeline

  4. Defer the prioritization of US Silver customers, but identify and capture their user goals; other user groups may have similar goals and we may be able do more with less

Foundation Business Themes (High-Level Functionality)

The design team facilitated a workshop that brought together key stakeholders and cross-functional SMEs with the goal of aligning on a shared mental model of the project vision and objectives and how we would get there. Through two half-day sessions, we collaborated in discussions and activities to understand business, IT, user, and design impacts of various strategic directions. The outcome was a set of themes designed to guide the core team in creating and executing a roadmap for accomplishing our vision.

Foundation

  1. Data and General UI Display

  2. Customer Reporting

  3. Access and Admin (both customer and DFS Agent)

  4. End of Lease

  5. Documents

  6. Case Management

  7. Business Reporting (within DFS)

Journey Mapping

Dell’s ‘Voice of the Customer’ team worked with our design team to interview 32 customers and channel partners; this gave us an immense amount of valuable feedback to understand about their current workflows and journeys. Creating journey maps based on their current experience was critical for identifying what areas of the journey to prioritize, thus pointing the teams in the right direction for determining specific features to focus on first. Opportunities for the new portal were later added to higher fidelity journey maps to share with stakeholders as a deliverable

Impact