SPEOS, bpost group · CX, UX and service design · 2024-2025

The client saw five entry points.
SPEOS had to offer one service.

A SPEOS client sent their documents, then waited. Five entry points, five naming systems. To find out where one mailing stood, they called support. Improving the five access points separately would have been easier to defend internally. I argued the opposite: design the client's experience first, and fit the five access points inside it.

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30+internal and client interviews
6client organisations tested
4.5/5adapted SUPR-Q, taken after testing
17months, from research to handover
01The stakes

The monopoly was melting with paper. SPEOS sold digital as five separate applications.

  • The historic base is shrinking: paper mail is declining, and the European Peppol directive is redrawing e-invoicing.
  • The digital offer already existed, but built channel by channel: five entry points, five naming systems, no link between them.

A document flow manager was not looking for one more tool. He was looking for the answer to a simple question: where is my mailing, and what do I do if it gets stuck?

02My mandate

CX, UX and service design consultant, between innovation and IT.

  • First, understand the business: a tour of every department before drawing anything.
  • Structuring: a design practice that brings together the business figures, what the trades need, and what clients say.

The cell serves two internal clients: innovation, looking for where to go, and IT, which has to build. August 2024 to December 2025.

03Cross-team research

Seven business functions each described their own tool. No one owned a document's full journey.

  • Internally, seven business functions: operations, tech, finance, customer service, marketing, sales, production; each precise about their own scope.
  • On the client side: six organisations, over thirty interviews in total.

Seven precise views, zero complete journeys. The service had to fill that gap.

04The existing experience

After sending, the black box.

  • Five entry points, five naming systems: a batch ref here, a job id there, a mailing number elsewhere: nothing matches up.
  • Archives and billing lived apart, impossible to correlate with production: verification was done by hand.

Every question the tool could not answer became a support call. The client paid for the service, then paid again in time spent checking it.

05The workshop

Everyone in front of the same journey.

  • The journey rebuilt on the wall: six phases, from onboarding to support, and everyone pins their frictions exactly where they block.
  • Ten irritants, four families: accelerate, empower, make visible, make reliable.
  • The personas settled by vote: eight for the IT and operations manager, four for the large-account decision-maker, two for the production coordinator.
  • The collective vote decides: two priorities stand out clearly, and the initial scope tightens around them.

The departments walked the six phases from the user's side, not their own. The vote that followed settled priorities everyone had seen.

06The design pivot

Improving each application does not make a service. We designed one.

  • Improving each entry point separately would have been easier to sell internally, and would have left the client with no overview.
  • The design rule: a client should not need to know who does what inside SPEOS to use its services.

Business complexity stays backstage, each role sees only what concerns it, and paper and digital become two channels of the same journey.

07The value proposition

The Ad-Lib: the value proposition in one sentence.

Product or service

Our single document management platform

Customer segment

helps document flow managers, from large accounts to SMEs

Job to be done

who want to track and fix their mailings end to end,

Customer pain

by sparing them the technical project at onboarding and the support call at every blockage

Customer gain

and by giving them a real-time view from batch down to document, with direct action on it,

Competing proposition

unlike the five per-channel tools, each showing its own piece and leaving the client to reassemble the journey.

08The MVP

Two moments that carry the client relationship.

The two priorities voted in the workshop, turned into journeys: onboarding that happens right after the sale, and production you can finally look at.

A new client used to wait months.

Seen on the ground: every activation depended on a technical project, with a lead time counted in months and IT dependencies on both sides.

  • The client switches on their channels, maps their fields with the mouse and composes the workflow in one modal.
  • No technical project to plan, at SPEOS or on the client side.
  • IT keeps control of the platform core: it is the configuration that becomes the client's own.

Onboarding happens right after the sale.

Where is my mailing?

After sending, nothing: statuses hard to read, no alerts, and a support call as the only recourse, all the way to the invoice, hard to verify.

  • The dashboard tells an error apart from an expected action.
  • A single file can be reprocessed without resending the batch or calling support.
  • Traceability stays available for audit, and the SLA holds.

A real-time view, from batch down to document.

09Validation

Six organisations, a tested prototype, one corrected decision.

Different volumes, different teams, different standards of proof, and the same understanding of the service.

Adapted SUPR-Q, raw average of 4.5 out of 5, taken right after the sessions. Six organisations rated it: three large accounts, three smaller ones, two different needs. They say the same thing, the service makes sense.

And the research did its job: one traceability feature failed to reassure. It went back into design before development, enriched with file search and the ability to stop a batch in progress.

Walk through the activation

10The handover

The method stayed with the teams.

  • The design report, validated by the sponsor: the decisions, the full journey and the roadmap.

Seventeen months after the first interview, the teams defend the journey in the same terms as the business. The prototype stands as the direction, and the scope went to build.

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Contact

Are your clients juggling several access points? Let's talk.

For a role or an engagement, write to me. CV (PDF)

hello@christophevanengelen.com View my LinkedIn profile

I reply within one business day.

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