Creating a New Experience for Symcor’s Change Request Process: From Discovery to Validation

Context

Symcor is a leading Canadian business process outsourcing (BPO) provider delivering payment processing, customer communications, and digital transformation services for major financial institutions, including BMO, TD, Scotiabank, RBC, and 100+ others across Canada.

When a client needs something changed, they email Symcor and fill out a form in word doc.

The Journey Begins

Diagnosing the Current-State Experience

While the six-week timeline could have pushed us straight into ideation, this problem required a deeper understanding of the people and processes involved. We started with stakeholder interviews and existing research to ensure our design decisions were grounded in evidence.

💡 Data Synthesis

While interviews revealed underlying pain points and workflow challenges, quantitative data validated these findings at scale.

Synthesizing both sources provided a well-rounded view of the problem space, helping to uncover recurring themes, confirm assumptions, and prioritize opportunities with greater confidence.

From Data to Clairty

The Humans Behind the Complexity

Stakeholder interviews uncovered a complex ecosystem involving multiple parties, each playing a distinct role in the change request process. To establish a shared understanding, stakeholder roles, goals, responsibilities, and touchpoints were mapped, revealing how each party interacted within the broader change request ecosystem.

Research Insights

Systemic Sources of Friction for each:

Clients struggled with generic forms, fragmented communication, and lengthy turnaround times.

CSMs spend their time guiding clients through a form that should be self-serve.

Change Leads can’t begin scoping until complete submissions are clarified.

Repeated clarification cycles extended the review process and created growing email threads, compounding inefficiencies and friction for both clients and internal stakeholders.

The Problem

The journey was shaped by a series of interconnected challenges that created obstacles and setbacks for everyone involved.

Clients struggled with request submissions, fragmented communication, and limited visibility, while internal teams spent significant time gathering information and managing follow-ups.

These inefficiencies compounded over time, creating delays and friction for all stakeholders.

How Might We

Framing the Right Problem for each:

When working with cross-functional teams, it’s easy to get caught up in different perspectives and individual challenges, which can sometimes cause us to lose sight of the core problem we’re actually trying to solve. To work through each layer of complexity, I like using “How Might We” (HMW) questions to frame and define the problem at each stage. This approach helps me and stakeholders across teams build a shared understanding of the broader problem space, while creating greater clarity around the specific challenges we need to address.

Experience Mapping

Narrowing the Focus:
The Client Journey

While the change request process involved multiple roles and dependencies, the project focused on the end-user journey to address the most immediate sources of friction for Symcor’s clients.

The experience map highlighted key pain points from initial CR submission through hand-off, providing a clear foundation for prioritizing improvements.

Strategic Solution Exploration

Balancing Impact and Feasibility

Based on client priorities, budget, and development considerations, a range of solution concepts were explored to identify the right balance between user value and feasibility.

⭐ Chosen Solution

Client Portal Pro

While the most comprehensive solution may not always be the most feasible due to budget, technical constraints, or implementation effort, it was important to demonstrate what an ideal future-state experience could look like.

To help stakeholders visualize the full potential of a transformed change request ecosystem, detailed proof-of-concept designs were created for a comprehensive client portal, showcasing how key pain points could be addressed through a connected, end-to-end experience.

Wireframes

Bringing the Vision to Life

Testing

From Concept to Confidence

Three concept testing sessions were conducted with end users from Symcor’s banking clients, with recruitment and facilitation support provided by Symcor’s Client Success Managers. The sessions helped validate key assumptions, gather user feedback, and assess the overall value and usability of the proposed experience.

High Fidelity Designs

The Transformed Experience

The full client portal reimagined the entire change request experience by digitizing submission, review, approval, and tracking workflows within a single platform.

Key features included dynamic request templates, status tracking, consultation scheduling, centralized dashboards for managing active and completed requests, draft saving, and request archiving, providing greater transparency, efficiency, and self service for all stakeholders.

Personalized at Scale

Brand Agnostic by Design

Although the platform was designed as a single scalable solution, its visual identity can be adapted to align with each financial institution’s brand. To demonstrate this flexibility, four branded concepts were created for Symcor’s major shareholder banks, illustrating how the same experience can feel familiar to different clients while maintaining one underlying product.

Projected Outcome

Envisioning the Future Impact

While the portal remains a proof of concept, projected outcomes were defined to demonstrate its potential value for Symcor’s clients and internal teams.

Future Thinking

From Concept to Ecosystem

The current proof of concept focuses on the client-facing experience, but bringing the concept to life would require designing the experience across all three user roles. This includes defining how Change Leads and Client Success Managers would interact with the portal, manage requests, and support clients behind the scenes—creating a connected experience across the entire change request ecosystem.