Case study · Flagship

GM Global Service Platform

Unifying a dozen legacy systems into one platform for 19,750+ GM advisors and dealers serving millions of customers worldwide.

RoleLead Experience Architect
Timeline2022–2026
Scope100+ workflows
GM service platform overview
40% faster
Case resolution time vs the legacy baseline
+75%
Dealer case-handling efficiency, early data
19,750+
Advisors and dealers onboarded
12 → 1
Legacy systems unified
At a glance
The problem

Advisors juggled a dozen disconnected systems, acting as the human bridge between siloed customer, vehicle, and case data.

My role

Lead Experience Architect and the design owner across a multi-year program. Led Case 360, the guided workflows, and the dealer portal end to end; co-led discovery, IA, and the design principles.

The outcome

Shipped a zero-disruption migration off a 20-year-old legacy CRM to 19,750+ users.

Three key moves
1

Case 360, a unified workspace

One chronological place that ended the broken hand-off, so customers never repeat their story.

2

Embedded decision guidance Human-AI design

Recommended actions surfaced in context, with the reasoning shown so advisors trusted and learned from them.

3

Dealer portal, radical transparency

Closed the dealer black hole so dealers could open, track, and close complex cases in the open.

The breaking pointA 20-year-old CRM that could no longer evolve

A customer calls, anxious, sometimes mid-emergency, and the advisor who picks up is supposed to be the calm expert. Instead they are opening four browser tabs just to check whether the car is under warranty, asking the customer to repeat their story while a 20-year-old system loads. That was the daily reality for thousands of GM advisors, and it was a symptom of something deeper.

GM's homegrown CRM sat at the center of a dozen disconnected systems advisors had to juggle, and it had grown too brittle to evolve. Minor updates took months, and fragmented workflows quietly degraded both the employee and the customer experience. Between 2022 and 2026, I served as Lead Experience Architect to replace that legacy foundation with one platform. Today it powers millions of global customer interactions and is held up internally as a benchmark for "one team" delivery.

The problemTrapped in the build trap

The organization was caught in the build trap: shipping features and patches to look productive while the deeper, structural problems went unaddressed.

My roleThe design through-line across a multi-year program

I was the Lead Experience Architect on the transformation and, across its multi-year span, the design through-line while the team scaled and rotated. I led the design of the platform's core advisor experiences end to end: the case workspace, the guided workflows, and the dealer portal. On those tracks I also mentored and guided the designers doing the work. Alongside that, I helped shape the foundations the whole program rested on: the discovery research, the information architecture, and the five design principles. I partnered across the wider platform from discovery through global rollout.

The approachListen for what sits underneath the task

I anchored the work in the uncertainty, the desire to reassure, and the fear of losing trust that sits beneath every service call. Observation reveals what people cannot always articulate in an interview.

Observe and listen

26 interviews with stakeholders and advisors, 20+ hours of live call shadowing across three call centers, and full audits of tools, systems, and CTI environments.

Co-create

Workshops with supervisors, QA, knowledge management, and training. End-to-end mapping of 100+ workflows and sessions with advisors to design their ideal experience.

Validate

A two-week sprint rhythm: requirements in week one, working prototypes reviewed with advisors, business stakeholders, and engineering partners in early week two, then tweaked to final sign-off.

From insights to designThe advisors made the case sharper than any slide

"I have to tell the customer 'hang on' while I jump into another system."
"There is nothing worse than asking a customer to start their story over."
"Once a case goes to the dealer, it falls off the face of the earth."
"When someone is panicking, I don't have time to ask for their zip code."
"When I can actually help someone, that's when I love this job. When I can't, it wears on me."

I turned each of these into a "how might we," reframing the pain as an opportunity, then into five design principles aligned across product, operations, engineering, and design, framed around how we wanted the advisor to feel.

Know me
Empower me
Value my time
Earn my trust
Bring me joy

What we deliveredThree experiences I owned end to end

Case 360, a unified workspace

Earn my trust

I designed Case 360 as one chronological workspace that pulled every channel and tool into a single place. The case record became a living narrative, so the advisor stayed in flow and the customer never had to repeat their story. This is where I killed the alt-tab tax that fragmented every interaction.

Case 360 workspace
Human-AI design

Embedded decision guidance

Value my time

Inside that workspace, I designed guided workflows: standardized resolution paths that surfaced the recommended next action in context, built on OmniStudio. The hard design problem was trust. Advisors will not follow a recommendation they cannot understand, and they will not learn from a black box. So I designed the guidance to show its reasoning: why this step, which policy applied, what comes next. That turned a rules engine into something advisors trusted and learned from, the way a senior colleague mentors a new hire.

The recommended next step, with its reasoning
Why this stepthe vehicle is under warranty
Which policyservice coverage policy applies
What comes nextschedule a dealer inspection
Do this next.reasoning hidden

The fast path showed only the lid. I made the guidance open up and show its reasoning, because advisors will not trust a black box.

Embedded guided workflow

Dealer portal, radical transparency

Earn my trust

I designed the dealer portal to extend the platform to dealers, not just internal advisors. Dealers could open complex cases with the right context, track downstream ownership, and receive outcomes directly. It closed the loop that used to be a black hole. Dealers got transparency, and repeat follow-ups dropped.

Dealer portal
Across the wider platform

The same five principles shaped the experiences the broader team built alongside mine: a Customer and Vehicle 360 that ended the 90-second lookup at call start, a role-based advisor homepage that replaced a reactive start-of-day search with a clear next step, and context-aware emergency and location tools that brought structure to high-stress moments.

The hard callI refused to hide the logic

Decision under constraint

The fastest version of the guided workflows would have just told advisors what to do next: recommend the action, hide the logic, ship a clean screen. Product and engineering had fair reasons to want that, less to build and fewer pixels on an already dense workspace. I pushed the other way and held that the guidance had to show its reasoning, why this step, which policy applied, what came next, even though I had to defend the decision more than once.

Advisors will not follow a recommendation they cannot understand, and they will never learn from a black box. A rules engine that hides its logic saves a few clicks and loses the exact thing the platform was built to earn: trust.

ImpactEnterprise delivery at scale

19,750+
Advisors and dealers onboarded
180+
Features deployed across multiple service initiatives
Zero
Operational disruption migrating off a 20-year-old legacy CRM
40% faster
Case resolution time, average on the new platform against the legacy baseline.
+75%
Dealer case-handling efficiency in early dealership data.

Neither number came from fewer clicks alone. By giving advisors the right intelligence at the right moment, we shifted them from administrative data-hunting to high-value problem solving. The 90-second lookup disappeared, the alt-tab tax disappeared, and the mental fatigue that came with both went with it.

He owned the UX strategy for the most demanding work-streams end to end, and I never once had to worry about his delivery.

— Subhayan Deb, who directly managed Ghazi on this program

ReflectionAt this scale, it is still about people

The outcome I value most was trust, between our team, the advisors, and the dealers who use this every day.

Enterprise UX succeeds when systems are built not only for efficiency but for confidence, transparency, and collaboration. At this scale, experience architecture is ultimately about people.

"Amazing work... deeply understanding and honoring the business ask... passion to get it right... excellent feedback from leadership and advisors." Sarah Beaudry, GM Stakeholder Approval Note
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