How can we help call centre agents communicate with clients efficiently and effectively?
Improve the agent’s workflow to send communication to TELUS customers and other subsidiary company (i.e. Kodoo) customers.
Responsibilities
User Research
Prototype
Usability Testing
Design QA
Duration
3 months
First Let’s Talk to Users
I have interviewed 5 agents and watch how they interact with their applications, and here are top insights:
Traceability issues: Agents use two different applications that are used to send communications (email, SMS or mail). These applications don’t sync the communication history that been sent to the customers.
Navigational issues: Agents have difficulty navigating through the email application such as finding the appropriate pages that contains the email templates.
Repeated rework: The current email templates are very lengthy and outdated, so the agents have to reword these emails to make it more concise and suitable to the conversation that they had with the customer.
In Ideal World
I have listed out-of-scope recommendations for stakeholders and have positioned them of how they would be helpful incrementally for agents and exponentially for TELUS and their customers’ experience.
Leveraging contextual information to help agents get appropriate content such as type of call (sales, IT, billing, etc.) or agent’s specialization.
Single source of all customer communication history for faster context.
Responsive application that can accommodate the agent’s workflow.
But realistically…here is what we can do:
Show a summary of communication content beforehand for faster sorting.
Use information architecture and labels from other application that agents found helpful for familiarity and faster navigation.
Task flows as alignment tools
I have created task flows and their alternative flows. These flows helped both stakeholders to see the best paths for the agents, and development team to determine what is technically feasible from back-end perspective.
Let’s Put It To The Test
Once the task flows were established, prototype was created with TELUS design system to showcase main flows and test it with 5 agents.
The Reality Check
The prototype was put to the test with 5 agents varying in their specialization (IT, sales, etc.) and tech-savviness.
There were 1 high issue, and 2 moderate issues.
High: an issue that prevents the user from completing the task at all.
Moderate: an issue that causes some difficulty, but the user can ultimately complete the task.
High issue
Agents don’t know if the template is clickable or doesn’t know where to click to select the template.
Solution:
The table design with underline link has replaced the shadowed component, since the agents had no difficulty in interacting with it in the customer list.
Moderate issues
Agent was confused about number beside type of communication (e.g. Email (5)) and thought it was the unread emails from the customer.
Agent was confused about the meaning of “modules” and thought the sub-templates under the topic would be displayed immediately.
Solution:
The results of templates are explicitly shown paired with topic.
The “tooltip” provide clarity about modules that the sub-templates can be selected after choosing the main email template and sub-templates are displayed underneath.
The final product ✨
After addressing these issues, I have refined the product and aligned with development for design QA.
What I Learned 💡
Advocate for research: Position research as risk aversion, assumption testing about our users and product.
Walkthrough your design process: Educate your team and stakeholders about your process with onboarding deck, to ensure coherence and alignment.
Dream big but prioritize: Pitch in the ideal state to the engineering team and product manager, and negotiated with them of which features are necessary and which are nice-to-have.