ENTERPRYSE SaaS - TESCO ONECE
Unifying a complex legacy system to serve 22 million Clubcard users.
Tesco colleagues relied on fragmented legacy tools to support millions of Clubcard customers. I led the experience strategy to consolidate complex journeys into OneCEC, creating a simpler, scalable platform for customer support.
Tesco · OneCEC · Senior Product Designer · 8 months · Enterprise Transformation · Internal Tools
01 - THE CONTEXT
Years of growth had created a fragmented colleague experience.
Tesco colleagues support millions of customers across Clubcard, Grocery and partner services.
Over time, different customer journeys had been built across separate systems, creating fragmented workflows and increasing the effort required to resolve customer issues.
Reward Partners was one of these journeys.
Colleagues needed to move between multiple tools and screens to understand customer activity, investigate issues and support customers.
User journey
02 - THE CHALLENGE
Two systems, one job, and the colleague stuck doing the translation between them.
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CSMs had to juggle multiple systems, tabs, and statuses to resolve one issue.
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Workflows like order creation, cancellation, and voucher conversion were slow and error-prone.
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Inconsistent UI and scattered CTAs created cognitive overload, especially live, on a call.
CUSTOMER
"Call about a Reward Partner order"
CSM
Authenticate & retrieve customer details
ONE CEC
Resolve the Reward Partner issue
CEC BOOST
Log call
Resolving the issue meant a separate trip into CEC Boost — Reward Partners' own internal tool, operated apart from OneCEC — then a manual log-call step back. Constant switching caused duplicate data entry, longer handle times, and more errors.
How might we improve the CSM experience?
How might we reduce call time?
How might we reduce cognitive load?
How might we help new joiners onboard faster, with fewer errors?
Pain points
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Fragmented workflows - Colleagues moved between different tools to complete one task.
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Increased handling time - Information was spread across systems.
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Inconsistent experiences - Legacy patterns made training and support harder.
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Limited scalability - Maintaining multiple platforms slowed future improvements.
03 - MY ROLE
Senior Product Designer, leading direction across a 30-person programme.
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Led design direction across a multidisciplinary team of ~30.
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Mentored a junior UX designer and coordinated with business, ops, dev and analytics.
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Delivered wireframes, prototypes and high-fidelity designs, tested directly with CSMs.
Cross-functional kickoff
Before discovery began, every discipline mapped its own activities, needs, risks and dependencies, so the team aligned on scope and ownership before any design work started.
Stakeholder map
I mapped influence, proximity and cross-functional involvement before discovery, to understand who we'd need to align with closely versus keep informed.
04 — DEFINING SUCCESS
What we set out to move, before we measured what actually moved.
More complete interaction data helps Tesco understand why customers get in touch — recurring issues, friction, and where to improve the service next.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
CSMs need a unified, streamlined way to manage Reward Partner orders quickly and accurately, without switching systems.
GOAL
Deliver a unified, intuitive experience that reduces task time and errors.
HANDLE TIME
↓
Reduce average call handling time
USER SATISFACTION
↑
Raise internal (CSM) satisfaction
CUSTOMER
SATISFACTION
↑
Raise customer satisfaction
05 THE PROCESS — DISCOVERY
We challenged assumptions before changing the system
We ran extensive research, testing the existing solution, interviewing users and business partners, and coordinating with the API team to understand real capabilities and limits. We shadowed 8 CSMs handling live calls and interviewed 5 team leads, then ran a comprehensive assessment to narrow scope based on stakeholder alignment and the data.
BASELINE
2–8 minutes
Average length of a Reward Partner call, the metric every later improvement was measured against.
RESEARCH
8 CSMs shadowed
Observed handling live calls, to see the real workflow under pressure, not the documented one.
RESEARCH
5 team leads interviewed
Alongside CSMs and business partners, to separate front-line pain from operational pain.
06 THE PROCESS — DEFINE
The system wasn't missing functionality. It was scattered and overloaded.
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A cluttered UI, with an excessive number of CTAs and no explanation for why they were enabled or disabled.
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Too many fields that weren't actually needed.
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Information scattered across four different tabs.
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Too many differently-coloured CTAs, with no consistent meaning.
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Too many statuses: orders contained multiple rewards, each with its own status, plus a separate status per order, an overload that left some CTAs enabled and others disabled, unpredictably.
THE KEY DECISION
To streamline status updates and simplify backend operations, the entire team reached consensus: each order would contain one reward per order. That single structural change simplified the backend, the UX and the UI at once, and made the four-tab screen collapsible into one.
Refund user flow
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07 JOURNEYS & FUNCTIONALITY
Broken into journeys we could design, test and ship one at a time.
We pinpointed exactly where the new solution sat within OneCEC's existing framework, to keep it aligned with functionality colleagues already knew.
CORE JOURNEYS
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Order search
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Orders list
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Order view
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Cancel order
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Resend order
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Release order
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New order
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Change denomination
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Order notes
ADDED FUNCTIONALITY
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New order + Fast Delivery Vouchers
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New order + Top up
08 THE PROCESS — IDEATION TO TESTING
Starting with Cancel Order as the proving ground.
Cancel Order (covering Order Search, Orders List and Order View) became the first journey through the pipeline, in adherence with OneCEC's established design system.
STEP 1
Low-fi wireframes
STEP 2
High-fi wireframes
STEP 3
Figma prototype
STEP 4
Usability testing
We ran comprehensive usability testing with CSMs across every pathway, gathering insight into interactions, preferences and pain points, refining the design before any of it reached development.
09 — KEY TRANSFORMATIONS
What changed, structurally, not just visually.
01
Order simplification
Multi-product order → single-product order, simplifying the backend, the UX and the UI at once. Four tabs → one unified screen.
03
Operational time reduction
Bringing every journey into one platform, plus the simplification itself, let colleagues move through tasks faster.
02
Journey optimisation
Every journey became intuitive. CSMs go through training, but we designed as if they hadn't.
04
Customer-side alignment
CSMs can now search for a reward by activity or brand, matching how customers actually think about their vouchers.
10 - OUTCOMES
Tested and validated, with rollout underway.
These are the figures we have real evidence for. I'm keeping the framing honest: they're outcomes from prototype testing and validation, not yet a full production read-out, and I'll update this the moment confirmed post-launch numbers are in.
METRIC
BASELINE
EXPECTED POST-INTEGRATION
Avg. handle time
2–8 minutes
↓ 35–40% (based on testing)
Training time
3 weeks
↓ 20–25%
Error rate
Medium
↓ significantly (validation + automation)
CSM satisfaction
Mixed
↑ in user feedback sessions
Projected outcomes based on prototype testing and validation. Rollout in progress.
11 — REFLECTION
The opportunity was never the interface. It was the job underneath it.
The biggest win here wasn't recreating an old system in a new wrapper. It was understanding the job CSMs were actually trying to do, and removing the parts of it that shouldn't have existed in the first place. The one-reward-per-order decision is the clearest example, a structural simplification that no amount of UI polish on the legacy model could have matched.
BEFORE
2 systems, 4 tabs, 1 confused colleague
CEC Boost and OneCEC operated separately. Every Reward Partner call meant authenticating twice, searching twice, and reading across four tabs of inconsistent statuses.
AFTER
1 platform, 1 reward per order, 1 workflow
Reward Partners now lives natively inside OneCEC, with a single order record per reward, the structural change everything else followed from.