To decrease the amount of VIP customers that threatened to leave if the call center management software wasn't redesigned.
Lead Product Designer, Product Manager, VP of Product Design, 5 Software Engineers, 2 Contract Engineers, Scrummaster, Product Owner, CTO.
brightness_1 LA Released
The Real Time analytics wallboard was too complex for a sales agent or service rep to read from a distance. Some more complaints included confusion of how to create a user, lack of mobile use, the difficulty of managing an agent's skills, and lack of customized options to tailor to their needs. these problems were identified from customer feedback brought in by NVM sales reps, NVM VP of product design, NVM engineers, NVM customer success managers, NVM PS and NVM CEO.
As a design team of 1 to start out, my tasks were to research user’s needs, design a new user experience, oversee that the user experience and design was implemented into the final product, and provide design iterations or research as needed. This was accomplished in daily SCRUMS with the 6 engineers, PO, PM, in London, check-in points 2x week, and simply a lot of emails, tracking work done in JIRA, Confluence and GTM video chats.
There were limitations of when I could interact with the team as I was in another time zone, decisions by the teams were often made without consulting user needs, and the simple issue of trying to be an agent of change to create the first design culture for Newvoicemedia.
There weren’t any personas or a deeper knowledge of human behavior beyond old information of software, technical roles of NVM admin, Supervisor, Nominee, Agent, and Wallboard. So I sought out deeper knowledge through creating an advisory board, consisting of 6 cross-departmental experts from customer support, professional services and customer success managers. Through remote video chats they helped me focus on a list of use cases then prioritize which are most important.
The supervisor was constantly putting out fires, having to make sure the calls are being directed to skilled agents in order for the customer to receive the best service in the shortest amount of time. There was a real need to peer into all the service calls coming into the center and, in some centers, what sales calls were going out. This was to make sure the customer was satisfied, which reflects well on the company.
After meeting with my advisory board, I moderated through remote video chat 10 interview sessions with 30+ customers reviewing their current issues with the Real Time wallboard. From this qualitative research I created a list of main use cases.
Then I reviewed the use cases with my advisory board to get confirmation and help prioritize which are the top 10 for MVP. I took my research notes, use cases, and created initial wireframes and visual designs. I ran these by my stakeholders first, made necessary changes, then gathered more feedback from our 30+ customers. Once we had a clear understanding of the supervisor's needs, it was time to introduce this research to the team.
The project kickoff took place offsite for 2 weeks in the CTO's house in Warsaw, Poland. It was here I led the team of engineers, Product Owner, Product Manager, and CTO in a learning workshop to share my research, concepts, and really get to understand the user's needs. We collaborated on a final set of wireframes I later reviewed with customers to confirm accuracy and that the engineers used to start the back-end code.
It was at this time we hired a Senior UI Designer to take the lead on creating the final, static visuals in Sketch and to handoff to developers via Zeplin.
After it was released to our Pilot Program led by the Product Manager, all user interviews showed us the dashboards had problems scaling, showed inaccurate data, and was impossible to release to the general public without redesigning configuration of the new widget data. Therefore the Pilot program was extended and it was released with monitored limited availability.
"If I didn't have Real Time Wallboards I'd be hurting. I just wish it was better to look at."
- Jessica, Operational Excellence Manager ~ WebPT
"It should be how I want to present my service decks. This is boring."
- Prakash, Service Assurance Manager ~ Vodafone
"Build it for production and speed, bulk uploading is very important."
- Todd, Operations Manager ~ Ultimate Software
Every internal stakeholder had a hard time seeing the value of what Real Time originally brought customers. The problem was never inaccuracy of analytics rather needing to be able to interact with the data in a more user-friendly and well designed UI. The Product Manager should've led the engineers to focus on parity with the API as a base before adding in more features and customizations.
