A customer-service back-office that treats every claim as a workflow.

Tefal's diamond-tier service program had been operated out of a constellation of spreadsheets and email threads, which scaled fine until volume crossed a threshold and then stopped scaling at all.

Client: Tefal (Newpan)
Year: 2023
Scope: Operations design · Back-office UI · Workflow
Role: Product partner
Team: 1 designer + 1 engineer
Duration: 3 months

The engagement

Context, approach, and the decisions that mattered.

The brief was to build a single back-office surface — a place where an agent could take a claim, attach the right documentation, route it to the warehouse, and close it — without inventing a new CRM. We designed the surface around the claim itself, not the agent or the customer, on the basis that the claim is the only entity that moves through every team. Every team ended up with a view that was a projection of the same underlying record, which removed the entire category of state-mismatch bugs that the spreadsheet workflow had been generating.

The claim is the entity

Every screen, every report, and every notification is a projection of a single claim record. Agents, the warehouse, and management see different views of the same row, never copies. State-mismatch bugs disappear by construction.

A workflow, not a form

Each claim moves through an explicit state machine. The UI shows the agent only the fields that the current state requires, which collapses the previous all-or-nothing form into a sequence of small, defensible decisions.

Selected artifacts