Transforming the death business is no easy assignment.
I understood that regardless of whatever advanced technology or process is used throughout the experience, a death in the family in never a good experience. Needless to say, when Dignity Memorial approached me about developing an end-to-end digital strategy to help them move from traditional brick & mortar services to more digitally centric services - I hesitated. Already familiar with the psychographic challenges (denial, fear, avoidance, pain, grief etc.) most people have when dealing with the subject of death, I wondered if anything we could ever propose would actually have impact on such a terrible experience. Ultimately, never one to shy away from a challenge, I took it on with gusto, with the aim of significantly improving what will inevitably be a painful experience we all have to face one day.
Service Corporation International (SCI) owns and operates around 2000 funeral homes and commentaries globally, most under the brand Dignity Memorial. By far the leader in the industry they are savvy about back office and front office optimization and have developed rigorous processes over the years. As with many companies these processes have grown old and separated into silos. Our job was to revisit every single step, interaction and process (digital, analog and human) then figure out how to improve the experience for both employees and customers while finding ways optimize revenue and efficiency along the way. Each of the areas above was included in the engagement spanning several months.
Our process called “Envisioning” requires a fair amount of rigor and document production all done in very tight time-frames, 12 weeks in this case. Most of the exercises and deliverables also require a lot of client participation. By the time we are done the team achieves a kind of "vulcan mind meld" - we all get it. In the diagram above each process has a dot below, the size represents the the relative scale of each effort. The document icon below some of the exercises show where milestones and documentation are delivered.
While it may not be possible to remove the natural pain from bereavement our goal was remove any additional pain which the family may incur from activities required before, during and after making the funeral arrangements and help guarantee that family will be handled with the utmost respect and service level at every touch point.
My role on the team was as the lead digital strategist. In short, I was responsible for the overall success of the project and had a hand in every aspect of the project.
A number of very specific exercises and studies were executed during the engagement.
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