REIMAGINING THE CONTACT CENTER EXPERIENCE
Leading a team of designers to completely reimagine the way the contact center works, enabling more meaningful connections with customers, and reducing cognitive workload.
The Problem
A global financial services corporation had struggled to manage their customer service because of a convoluted and overburdened call center. Every day their contact center associates had to navigate across multiple systems with varying degrees of success, vastly differing experiences, and often encountering conflicting information. This suboptimal environment was leading to:
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Higher call handle times
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One in ten calls requiring escalation
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40% annual turnover rate of center associates;
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11 weeks to train replacement associates;
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Relied on a system with over 130 products, many of them dated and heavily intertwined with other platforms and systems
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Overwhelmed associates with over 80 calls a day, often from customers facing financial hardship due to the pandemic.
The Solution
My team had 10 weeks to reimagine Envisioning’s customer care system to improve efficiency, employee retention, and customer satisfaction. Working with a digital strategist and an enterprise architect, I lead a creative team to develop a visionary prototype for a new call center with a roadmap and technical architecture to quickly implement the plan.
My Role
As the design lead on this project, I was responsible for managing a team of creative professionals. This included a creative director, three UX designers, one visual designer, and two design interns. My role was to define and implement the design process, manage design governance and strategy, and oversee the UX and visual design work. I also managed the research program to ensure that all design decisions were informed by evidence and user feedback. This was a challenging but rewarding experience, as I was able to bring my team's visions to life and create a product that was both innovative and user-friendly.
The Approach
I led the creative team to conduct design thinking workshops and user interviews to build a common understanding of the issues and to uncover how the 130 tools worked together. I constructed the workshops in a way that enabled the associates and business stakeholders to rapidly iterate and get excited about the future vision. In one workshop alone we gathered 242 sentiments and 38 magic wand ideas!
Summary of Research Outputs
Sample Persona
Sample User Journey based on outputs from workshops and user interviews
Design
We then embarked in a series of design sprints that would articulate the journey of what a reimagined desktop experience for contact center agents looked like. From an experience design perspective, we centered ourselves around the following design principles:
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Simplify the workspace
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Modular approach
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Provide a guided path
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Lead with smart defaults
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Balancing productivity and wellness
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Prioritize flexibility
Bringing this to life, we proposed an intelligent solution that leveraged the customer’s profile information and intent gathered from the IVR to propose the appropriate bundling of tools that would resolve the issue. We also understood from our user interviews and design thinking workshops that stress would always be a factor, and while we couldn’t change the fact that managing frustrated customers would always be part of the role, we could change the stress of having to navigate through multiple tools and read through endless amounts of data. We introduced concepts such as screensavers and ‘time outs’ to take a quick meditation or mental reset.
Sample UX Wireframe
Sample Visual Design - Lightmode
Sample Visual Design - Darkmode
My Contributions
During our design phase I was actively involved in elevating the quality of the creative output and ensuring our ideas were in lockstep with our strategy and tech partners. I was thrilled to be a part of mentoring three junior designers, one of which earned a well deserved promotion to Senior Consultant. Towards the end of our concepting phase, I shaped a design team to carry the idea forward into detailed design and build, resulting in a $4M project and a multi-year partnership with one of our high value clients.
Key Activities/Outputs
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Created research plan and supporting materials to manage client expectations
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Provided structure and story arc for synthesizing and reading back research insights
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Created design sprint plans
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Led design reviews with key stakeholders and client leadership presentations
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Created design team shape and scope for subsequent design phase
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Oversaw and managed design team deliverables