Digitising Customer Financials

Product
Financials form

Role
Product Designer

Tools
Figma, Miro, Pallet Design System, Azure DevOps

Duration
June 2024 - Ongoing (multi-phased)

Overview

NZTE’s annual collection of customer financials serves two critical purposes: informing customer service strategy and providing evidence of economic impact for external audits. Historically, this process relied on email chains and manual data entry into our CRM.

After several false starts, I inherited this project when it was reprioritised by the business. I worked with Product to reshape the initiative into a phased, achievable delivery plan — leading discovery, research, and design for the first digital iteration while setting the foundation for future automation.

The goal: to simplify financial data collection, reduce internal workload, and improve reporting accuracy through a more scalable, digital solution.

Outputs

  • Discovery & Planning: Visualised current-state task analysis and facilitated scoping sessions with business stakeholders. Helped Product plan out a phased project approach

  • Research Support: Planned and facilitated 6× 30-minute evaluative user interviews with Customer Managers using concept prototypes.

  • Insight Analysis & Share-back: Analysed qualitative data, synthesised key insights, and presented findings to Product.

  • Design & Delivery: Led design exploration, refinement, and developer handover for a digitised financials collection form in myNZTE, including a pilot release plan.

  • System Design Contribution: Created and handed over 11 new components to our Pallet Design System for future reuse.

Impact

✅ Operational Efficiency (Pilot Phase):

  • Through process mapping and task analysis, I identified that Customer Managers were taking 10 steps and approximately 2 hours to collect and process financial data for each Focus customer. The pilot digitised form reduced this to 7 steps and 1.5 hours per customer.

  • With 1,000 Focus customers in total, this equates to an estimated 500 internal hours saved annually — freeing up time for higher-value customer engagement and reducing operational burden.

✅ Scalable Foundation for Automation

  • While a future-state scenario (moving to 3 steps and 30 minutes per customer) was modelled by the Product Owner, my task analysis and pilot insights directly informed this vision — identifying where automation and CRM integration could unlock an additional 1,500 hours saved annually across the Focus portfolio.

✅ Elevating Design’s Strategic Role

  • Beyond efficiency gains, this project demonstrated the value of embedding Design early in operational service projects — using process mapping and early user validation to align technical decisions with real-world workflow needs and organisational priorities.

Project Reflections

This was my first foray into NZTE’s Export customer work under a refreshed strategy prioritising internal workload reduction. Partnering closely with our PO at the early planning stage and using visual tools to unpack complex workflows proved invaluable. The experience reinforced two lessons I’ll carry forward:

  1. Early design involvement unlocks strategic influence — shaping not just the product, but how problems are framed and solutions prioritised.

  2. Operational digital products demand a systems-thinking approach — understanding data structures, internal processes, and success metrics is critical to delivering meaningful outcomes.