Project Overview

As the touch-points of customers were increasing, the inter-dependency within various contact center roles was increasing and there was a widening of the focus of each role. Lack of capabilities to communicate the rich information through each interaction channel between CSRs led to role isolation, which led to the perception of a siloed service to the end customer. Services within contact center are getting isolated, and communication is a major problem, it's system's job to carry context when there is information shared between roles. The purpose of the system came to be to coordinate the handoff process through all the echelons of the Contact Center and facilitate the communication between different roles involved. This could be done by providing the overall context at each critical step with just the right amount of information.

High-Level Product Goals

There is a natural evolution of the role of CSR as the end customers were adopting multiple communication channels to interact with the brands for a greater overall experience. Market research revealed that the service trumps products as customer's top priority. Customers are expecting a unified experience and are valuing time more than ever. Appeasements and price matches do not cut it any more.

To cater to the needs of attaining “Actionable insights” to the CSRs, we were focused on multiple initiatives where system could open new avenues of positive and productive engagement with the end customers, for example:

• Surface data to enable better understanding of customer profile including past purchases, interactions to engage with the right tone.
• Access to prior customer interaction across channels, with proper context, updates to set the right tone for upcoming engagements.
• Addressing issues more immediately by creating automatic notifications and mitigating it proactively before customer contacts.

Design Level Goals

• Help CSRs understand the customer profile including past purchases, interactions to engage with the right tone.
• Help CSRs follow up on customer interactions and cases, while providing proper context.
• Enable pro-active measures by providing CSRs with actionable features and insights.
• Design a system that supports an OMNI CSR who can support customer interactions across channels.
• Design for CTI/ IVR integration to help CSRs response and resolution time.
• With the roles of CSRs changing, we want to provide a system that would require less training to ramp up to manage customer relationships.
• Design capabilities to support Social CSRs as their work volume was rapidly on the rise and their requirements were different from other support channels.

Initial Challenges

• In the last 4-5 years many channels were added to the customers and that increased the complexity exponentially.
• Customers are excited to have these different choices but are feeling disappointed because retailers are struggling to consolidate the traces of information together to provide personalized service.
• Call Center landscape was changing dramatically, and the users did not know what they need to handle. It started with just the stores and then online shopping was added.
• Scope of the project considered by PM/BA was huge and there were a lot of moving pieces where we did not have in-house expertise.

UX Process

From the get-go we were able to visit Call Centers and gain empathetic understanding of our end user. We made insightful observations on how the business operations in the Call centers are getting disrupted with advent of new technologies like CTI, IVR, Social listening etc. We got insights in the struggles of the end users while using our application in the complex eco-system of other application, and how this was adversely impacting the customer service. The shared understanding of the end user needs we attained as a team, paved the path to new learnings on how to make the lives of associates better.

We wanted to design an optimized, consumer-grade experience for Call Center Agents, Supervisors and Managers. We focused on the following key areas:

• CASE MANAGEMENT

Ability to create a case right from our application, ability to link the case with the customer transaction and automatically create cases for many business exceptions.

• CUSTOMER ANALYTICS

We have all this rich customer data sitting in the form of customer transactions. Ability to surface this data in the form of metrics and provide an overall customer profile which will help associates serve the customers better.

• SOCIAL LISTENING

Ability to capture those customer posts/tweets and link it to customer profile. Also, for the follow-ups, ability to quickly create a case and have that true 360-degree view.

• INTERACTIONS

Associates want the ability to quickly link the customer with their transactions when they start interacting. This is not just for phone but also for other channels as well.

After an initial humbling realization of the vastness of the CE space through field observations, we did competitive analysis of existing Case Management solutions, Social Listening tools, Chat/ Email Management solutions, Telephony Systems, etc. to get a better understanding of the domain and the market. We realized that none of the systems were able to provide the single unified experience that CSRs needed. With the transactional data residing in our OMS systems, we were well positioned to tie it all together for the CSRs. We had to figure out key use cases we were going after.

We created a map of what we already had in our customer engagement system and what are all the gaps we wanted to go for.

Once we were able to tie the gaps with our current system, we were able to revise the system design that was better for the use cases. That helped us create an enhanced site map of what we were planning to achieve.

We figured out some key scenarios and walked the CSRs and internal stakeholders through sitemap to validate various flows in the sitemap flow. Below shows an example of sitemap flow that we used in these meetings.

Service Design We went through this exercise to articulate and visualize the problems from the perspective of the customer. This helped us to better understand their motivations and behaviors. This was very exciting, and we created a service blueprint to show to the CSRs. It revealed the gaps in the service while CSRs were interacting with customers and these were primarily information gaps that posed a major barrier answering customer’s queries. We realized that the system can help them with customer analytics that can fulfill these gaps. Below is the service design blueprint we created for this project.

After getting a good sense of the service and primary needs, we took a deep dive into each feature. With the help of product manager and business analyst, we started doing a hypothesis mapping exercise. We tried to match the business goals to the end user goals.

We did a lot of whiteboarding to understand the use cases and come up with design ideas collaboratively.