A Customer Service Management Platform Improving Agents and Company Growth
Product Brief
This project was a joint effort between 3 UX Designers to produce an effortless and intuitive tool for customer service management (CSM), and team leaders. The CSM Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, called IntelDesk, is comprised of three prioritized functions for agents and team leaders to collaborate:
Ticketing Management
KPI Dashboard
Knowledge Base Hub
My main focus was creating the performance analytics dashboard, with two distinct views for agents and team leaders to collaborate and grow.
Timeline
2 Months
Deliverable
End-to-end Software as a Service (SaaS) Prototype
Problems to Solve
How can agents view and make progress on their company's performance goals?
How can team leaders manage performance goals for agents to benefit customers and company?
Discovery
User Interviews
The user interviews was conducted with three customer service agents and five team leaders. For research goals on analytics dashboard needs, questions for agents were geared toward learning their biggest learning-curves to using a new CSM platform and familiarity with company's standards. While team leaders focus was on the components missing from their current tools, that will enhance their ability to lead.
affinity Mapping - Main Findings of User's Reponses
Competitive Analysis
Based on the user interviews, we view if the solution to challenges mentioned had been addressed in direct or non-direct competitors. This is the Analogous Inspiration method used as part of the ideation discussion with the team to ensure no overlays. Exploring competitors gaps and discovering opportunities, such as new competitive AI features was our goal.
Design
Agent's Journey
In order to coordinate the designs between three designers, the team agreed on having the agent's first touch point after logging into the platform to be their personal performance analytics dashboard. After refining the agent's experience across the platform as a team, I finalized the agent's experience with their performance analytics to be within the scope of viewing performance and managing their own goal progress. The goal is small learning curves for agents.
All agents will begin work on the platform with their personal performance analytics view, which comprised of the agent's overall score and their company's prioritized performance metrics. When needed, the user can collaborate with their team leaders to design personal goals under desired metrics.
Agents can expand their goals widget into a separate page for goals management and interaction. The UI design for the goals detail window was crucial for agents to quickly understand the goal's objective, duration, and progress. What follows is the goal enhancements components to aid in the agent's success, such as an AI suggestion based on learning the company's successful behaviors and helpful comments from team leaders.
Team Leader's Journey
Team leaders journey throughout the platform is similar to the agents in terms of tickets and knowledge base management, while their main focus are in the performance analytics dashboards. Team leaders have an overall view of agent's performance and their goals progress. However, team leaders have an additional responsibility of analyzing the company's overall performance and communicate their expectations based on real data.
Team leaders can potentially have full access to the company wide performance metrics and focused goals of each agents, organized by their department. The Goals page has a filter function to aid in finding the right team and members in order to view their progress. However, the company has an option of limit team leader's views.
The company page, limited to team leaders only, provide the analytic data that represents the quality of the company's customer service performance. The comprehensive view aim to aid team leaders in communicating their concerns or expectations to agents' behaviors. Hence, a Broadcast window can be accessible from the main navigation bar at any location of the platform for team leaders to broadcast urgent reminders or advanced notices.
Additional communication components of the platform for team leaders is the reports building page. Leads can either export an existing chart or build charts with the help of an AI assistant that will create charts based on input prompts and accessible CSM data. The UI design for the reports page resembles presentation slides in preparation for team leads to present or share their findings.
Test and Finalize
User Testing
There are two separate testing experience for agents and team leads. Each users are given three different tasks to observe, rate, and comment on their experience.
Agent's task involving only KPI dashboard: Set up a personal goal
Team leader tasks involving only KPI dashboard:
View an agent's performance and leave a comment on a goal
View the company performance charts and send a broadcast message
Create and export a report chart
Users completed most tasks on-time while expressing their likes and dislikes. I focused on the criticisms and suggestions the users mentioned for product revisions.
Implement Feedback
❌ BEFORE
The access to goals management took a while for agents to discover due to the busy amount of information on the personal performance analytics page. The pop up window makes it less clear on which function they are suppose to focus on.
✅ AFTER
I reprioritized the agent's personal performance analytics page to only focus on the company's main metrics and immediate access to their goals management. To match the flow, the platform layouts will have less pop up windows and more side peaks from the right.
❌ BEFORE
The team leader's complaint on the view of agent's performance was similar to the agent's experience. The excessive windows gave an illusion of tabs or size adjustments.
✅ AFTER
The performance page will have a more advanced search UI to locate specific agents or teams in an effort to share the view with goals management. The agent's performance view will also be a side peak coming from the right.
❌ BEFORE
Team leaders and agents both voiced a sentiment that goals are not a good representation of performance when made and managed by agents. Discussions with users and my other team members concluded that goals should be made by leaders based on company's data and have expressed notice to agents.
✅ AFTER
The "create a new goal" function has been relocated from the agent's view to the team leader's view only. The goals created can be assigned to multiple agents and team leaders will be able to view goal progress for each agents.
❌ BEFORE
Most users are impressed with the reports creation and export page as it allow an extra customization of data without the need of external tools. Besides minor UI suggestions, a user express the need to save and organize created reports for future reference.
✅ AFTER
Inspired by the Knowledge Base portion of the CSM platform, a reports organization page was created as the homepage for the "Reports" tab. New reports can be saved for future revisions and external reports can be imported for reference.
Final Product
The resulting CMS platform scheduling app offers a seamless user experience, allowing agents and team leaders to provide effective customer service management and garner company growth. After finalizing the UI design and texts, it was a collaborative effort to create unique visual branding for the product, which was added to the final prototype.
Solutions to Problems
How can agents view and make progress on their company's performance goals?
Simplified view of company’s prioritized performance metrics
Organized interaction of agent’s goals with enhancement factors
How can team leaders manage performance goals for agents to benefit customers and company?
Accessible view of agents and company performance metrics to aid goals ideation
Communication and data export functions to strengthen transparency
What I can improve on…
How users can be more involved in their goals management that will be consistent with team leader's expectations.
Reminders or warning features on goals close to due date.
Include more features for reports building, editing, and sharing with other team leaders.
Company performance analytics customization features.
