Customer Service for Communications
Aligning our CX design vision to industry-specific cloud.
Introduction
In 2019 as part of the Customer Experience product team, I led a team of 3 designers and design how our Customer Service Experience would work for the Telecommunications industry, aligning our solution to our product design vision.
I worked closely with Project Management and Development defining the strategy of our product, getting insights from different research activities that let us attend the correct user needs and making an impact in the outcome of the experience.
Not too long ago this is how our CX products used to look like.
Background
The main strategy of our suite of NextGen products in CX was already defined while at the same time the promotion of a new design-led culture was successfully changing the way we worked. Our new design system was being built.
The business goal was to increase the market share of our CX suite from 6% to 15%. Also, one of our biggest competitors had recently acquired another company to target the Telco industry.
Some of the business goals I got early from stakeholders
Wireframe of the layout of our NextGen CRM envisioned one year earlier. At the beginning of the project we thought it would be a good idea to align our design to the defined layout.
Inside Sales Representatives works 100% remotely through a CRM that often is not integrated cross-functionally.
The Challenge
We needed to move quickly, working together with Product Managers and stakeholders to find what was the specific UX opportunities to succeed and go beyond of our main competitor. This was a totally new product, there was a rush of quickly building an MVP.
We started basing our solution on our main product (Inside Sales) and adapting it to the Telco industry, these are some of the early explorations and concepts.
This was the first concept aligned to the CRM layout showed above. Soon we found the limitations of this layout while trying to integrate more use cases to this approach.
Getting to know our user and their problem
No matter the limitations we had, I focused from an early stage to understand who was our user by doing online research, reading reports. Getting insights by interviewing Customer Service agents at the company. Performing competitive benchmarking. I understood who was our main user and discovered that all of out competitors had similar solutions.
“We need some dashboards, please rely on our expertise”
The main insight from this activity was that Customer Service agents were not only there for solving an issue, they were behind the phone ready to make an up-sell or cross-sell, and that often they didn’t had idea of what would be the best offer for an specific customer.
Some of the insights that helped us define thoroughly our vision.
We discovered our user had sales goals as well.
The Design
We continued learning about the restrictions we had by using this layout.
We build this prototype based on our insights, we started to move out from our first version, that was the MVP being developed.
Connecting the dots
After socializing our design, stress-test it we found that our NextGen version should be more sophisticated, attacking some of the insights we found from our research. It wasn’t a popular decision but I decided to push it forward as this was the direction we wanted for our NextGen apps. At the end, this concept was even used on marketing material.
I was surprised when I found this video on the internet promoting this approach.
We explored ways of making our design more extensible by incorporating a foldout in the UI.
Iterating
I joined the Financials UX team on 2021 and I could not continue working on the evolution of this design. But this is how it looks right now.
This is how the product looks today, aligned with the branding and using the designs system components.