Breaking down silos to modernise Canada Post's outdated direct mail marketing experience
Canada Post's direct mail marketing service for businesses was struggling to meet the needs of modern marketers. With a patchwork of outdated tools sitting in silod teams, they lacked a single complete picture of the customer journey. This was blocking them from transforming the digital experience.
Role & Approach
Experience Lead meets Service Designer
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Planning & evidence review
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Ecosystem mapping workshops
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Journey mapping workshops
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Opportunity mapping & prioritisation
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Future state definition
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Ideation workshops
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Future state concept roadshow
Discovery Snapshot
42
Stakeholders engaged from product, marketing, sales, data, customer service and mor
16
Workshops were conducted to map the ecosystem, journeys and opportunities.
12
One-to-one stakeholder interviews to deep dive into different perspectives across the business.
4
Workshops to prioritise and ideate against the framed opportunities.
Deliverables
Drawing on existing research insights, I developed ten persona profiles to inform executive-level decisions about where money should be invested to fix the journey.
I built current-state journey maps, in collaboration with stakeholder groups, to document the customer experience, highlighting friction points and opportunities across each stage. These maps revealed two critical problem areas, 'planning' and 'evaluation', giving focus to the future vision and long-term strategy.
Insights
We identified critical friction points during the planning, delivery and evaluation phases. Some customers were operating at ground zero in terms of their knowledge and understanding of the channel.
Despite threat from digital, there was a willingness to use direct mail, but only if it could offer the same speed, flexibility, ease of use and measurability as digital channels.
There was a need to improve tracking and evaluatation, particularly for 'frequent flyers' who require real-time insights that can rapidly be fed into their next campaign cycle.
Impact
3x
Three strategic product roadmaps were built using insights from this discovery work.
+10
Alignment on the future vision and priorities was achieved across 10+ departments.
+30
Over 30 opportunity areas were identified and 10 initiatives were planned.
3x
Three pilots were identified to integrate AI into the customer experience.
Outdated Tool Experience
Building a Business Case
A standout opportunity from this work was the introduction of agentic AI technology to achieve a more intuitive and fast route to executing a marketing campaign, while receiving guidance on how to get the best results.
Due to the nature of the organisation, compliance and risk mitigation were of high importance. For this reason, low fidelity designs were created to support a business case for executive-level decision making. These were created in partnership with AWS, leveraging their rapid ideation framework.
Next Steps
With the onboarding of a new director to spearhead AI implementation, Canada Post are planning a re-platform of the first tool using strategic findings from this discovery to transform the direct mail experience.
General Manager - Platforms, Channels & Partnerships
"I want to take a moment to thank you for your contributions to the end-to-end journey work from this past year. From aligning business stakeholders to visualizing future experiences and presenting a cohesive story, your contributions and presentations have significantly influenced our business opportunities. You have incubated opportunities for value and growth, enabling teams to visualize future strategies and roadmaps."