Amazon
Two ecosystems, one customer.
Whole Foods Market's Catering-on-Amazon platform lacked a cohesive, efficient support experience, making it hard to place and modify customer orders. As Amazon integrated ecosystems with Whole Foods, its customer service tools needed to meet Amazon's streamlined digital standard.
The goal was to create parity between the two tool ecosystems, so customers and Customer Care finally meet in one place.
Map out the current state, then build from the gaps
A workshop, a journey walked end to end and a channel map came before any interface was drawn. What the mapping produced decided which parts had to be designed and which were already solved.
01Discover3 sections
Everyone who touches an order, in one room.
An insight-gathering workshop was run with the Whole Foods on Amazon team and Whole Foods Catering stakeholders, to establish how catering support actually worked rather than how the tools implied it worked. The output was a wall of open questions rather than a set of answers, and every unresolved question was grouped by theme before any of them were triaged.
The route an order takes, and the tools under it.
The journey was walked tool-agnostically first, as the sequence a catering order actually passes through, and only then were the tools mapped underneath each step.
Drawing it in that order is what made the gaps visible. The blanks and the question marks on the channel map were the finding, not a gap in the recording.
Two roles, many pain points.
Support agents and kitchen team members were interviewed separately and described the same failure from opposite ends: agents could not find an order, and kitchens could not act on the one they were sent.
The interviews were parsed for the statements that named the failure most directly, and six were selected and are quoted here as they were said.
It is such a waste of time to have to switch between tools or screens to find orders.Support agent
I just want all the actions I need in one place.Support agent
We often receive incomplete or unclear requests, because agents don’t have the right information upfront.Kitchen team member
I always have to search using an email or phone number, and sometimes that isn’t enough to locate the order.Support agent
We don’t always know which orders are urgent or require immediate attention.Kitchen team member
It takes too long to find the right order when a customer isn’t authenticated.Support agent
02Define2 sections
One composite, built from what was actually said.
Insights were grouped by theme and friction points were flagged individually for redesign, so the work that followed was scoped against named problems rather than against a general sense that the tooling was poor. A composite was written from the research to hold the findings in one place, covering what she needs and what gets in the way. Every line attributed to her was said by someone in the interviews.
“We relied on back and forth calls with customer service just to work out what went wrong. It felt like we were constantly playing catch-up instead of focusing on the food.”
Cathy is not a real person, but everything she says here was said by someone.
What she needs
- Order details that are right the first time
- Changes that reach the kitchen before prep starts
- One place to check, not four
What gets in the way
- Orders arriving incomplete or late
- Last-minute changes she hears about second-hand
- Systems that do not talk to each other
- Peak catering season, when none of it can wait
Every channel and every tool on one wall.
Working alongside developers, project managers and end users, the current-state tool ecosystem was mapped end to end. Seeing every channel and every tool in one picture is what turned a vague sense of friction into a specific list of gaps, which is the artefact the design work was scoped from. Current tooling by channel is mapped against the journey it has to serve; names and systems are scrubbed, while the structure and the state of each touchpoint are as they were found.
Scroll the map sideways to read it.
- Duplicated 15
- Gap or unknown 18
- In place 53
- Works well 6
- Not applicable 10
03Develop2 sections
What Amazon had already solved.
Proven Amazon design components and core customer support workflows had already solved common customer issues, and were assessed for whether they could adapt to Whole Foods catering workflows. This audit came before any new designs because it informed the scope of the project, allowing development effort to be placed into the gaps rather than into rebuilding what already existed, and agents met patterns they already knew.
Scroll sideways to follow the flow.
The gaps, designed rather than borrowed.
What the audit could not cover was designed from the gap list: the surfaces where catering has no equivalent elsewhere in Amazon and where an existing component would have been a poor fit rather than a familiar one.
Scroll sideways to follow the flow.
04Deliver1 section
Tested against the jobs it was built for.
Visual design and user testing ran through to launch on the unified platform.
One platform, built to Amazon's standard
A unified, enterprise support platform that brings Whole Foods catering onto Amazon's digital standard, giving agents every action, every order, and the full customer context in one place.
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01
One place for every action
Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market Customer Care work from the same place rather than across two ecosystems. Agents locate orders, see full customer context, and resolve issues without switching between disconnected tools.
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02
Built on proven patterns
Reusing established Amazon components kept the experience familiar for agents and reduced duplicated development effort, so what shipped is one standard rather than a patchwork of two.
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03
Grounded in real research
Every design decision traced back to stakeholder workshops, current-state mapping, and the pain points support and kitchen teams named directly.
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