Case study · Enterprise · employee experience
Inside a 30,000-person enterprise, getting help with a laptop, a badge, or a broken app meant guessing which of seven-plus disconnected desks to call. As the UX subject-matter expert, I ran the research and helped stand up the task force that collapsed them into one front door — and took roughly a thousand tickets a day out of the system.
Over years, the enterprise had accreted seven-plus separate help desks — IT, access and badging, HR systems, application support, facilities, payroll and benefits, and more. Each had its own intake, its own queue, and its own tooling. Each one made sense on its own. Together, they were a maze.
Employees didn't know which door was theirs, so they guessed — and got bounced, re-routed, and told to open a different ticket somewhere else. The cost wasn't only frustration. It was thousands of avoidable, duplicate, and misrouted tickets a day, multiplied across a 30,000-person workforce.
I owned the human-layer research and helped stand up and steer the cross-functional task force chartered to fix it — sitting between the desk owners, IT, HR, and leadership. The mandate wasn't a prettier portal; it was a single support model that matched how employees actually think about getting unblocked.
The discipline that made this work showed up again as UX SME on the enterprise app store. An all-employee survey was being read mostly for its headline scores. I asked instead for the raw employee-experience verbatims — and in them saw a newly integrated business unit, one running national-scale payment rails, drifting toward a developer-and-support breakdown. Surfacing it early, from data people had stopped reading closely, is the same anti-waste move as the desk consolidation: find the expensive problem while it's still cheap to fix.
The consolidated model replaced guesswork with one obvious path, routed by severity, backed by self-service and walk-up support. The waste it removed was measurable.
The most expensive sentence in any organization is "we never thought to do it any other way." Seven desks existed because each made sense alone — and no one had ever sat with the employee trying to use all of them at once.
A slice of a deeper toolkit — 70+ named research, product, and facilitation methods, drawn from a working library of 175+ structured activities. The right ones get pulled for the problem in the room.