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Customer Journey

Rethinking the customer experience for Agents

Project Overview

How it started

The Avaya Workspaces updated their browser-based contact center application to enhance the user experience and ensure consistency across the company's products. However, negative customer feedback indicated that the tool might not be optimized for efficient work. Therefore, our UX team conducted usability testing to understand user workflow needs and pain points, with updates to improve agent efficiency and productivity through an intuitive, user-friendly interface aligned with agents' and supervisors' requirements for an enhanced overall customer experience.

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Challenge:

Streamlining Agent Workflow and Customizing Views for Business Owners

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During a customer interaction, agents often need to access multiple applications, resulting in screen-switching, delays, and longer wait times. Agents must also add notes during an interaction and view historical information that they can sort and filter by date, time, department, and products. Additionally, business owners would like to customize the application view for different agent groups, ensuring that sales agents are not presented with technical support data.

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Solution:

A Unified Interface with Custom Views

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To improve agent workflow and reduce wait times, our solution will provide a single, unified interface that enables agents to access all necessary applications and data in one place. We will incorporate note-taking functionality within this interface, allowing agents to document customer interactions easily.

To help agents quickly locate and filter historical information, we will include sorting and filtering options based on date, time, department, and products. To address business owners' needs for customization, we will offer custom views that can be tailored to different agent groups, ensuring that each agent is presented with only the relevant information for their role.

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Our unified interface with custom views will streamline agent workflow, reduce wait times, and improve overall customer experience.

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Project Scope

CCaaS Web Application

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Tools

  • Figma

  • Adobe XD and  Illustrator

  • Miro

  • Maze

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Role

  • UX Designer

  • UX Research

  • Accessibility

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Team

  • Lead UX Designer

  • Jr. UX Designer

  • UX Researcher

  • CJ Team

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Responsibilities

  • Usability Testing

  • Market Research

  • Competitive Analysis

  • UX Workshop

  • Personas

  • Customer Journey

  • User stories

  • Lo-fi and Hi-fi UI

  • Prototypes

  • Accessibility Evaluation

Problem Statement

"The current tools provided to Call Center agents may not be sufficient to support efficient work, access to necessary information, and the delivery of outstanding customer service."

Market and Competitor Analysis

I conducted a competitive analysis of several applications that directly compete with our product. Specifically, I compared the features and functionality related to customer history and details, aiming to identify areas for improvement and understand how agents can better understand our customers' journey and relationship with our products.

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Interesting Ideas

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  • Timeline of events for each call or interaction

  • Customer activity log with description, date, and time

  • Segments or insights to help agents understand each customer's profile and needs

  • Targeted campaigns based on customer data

  • Channels used to contact the company

  • Analytics to track customer behavior and agent performance

  • Custom events based on industry or customer type (e.g., insurance quotation)

  • Details of each interaction, including interaction type, description, and agent name

  • Web browsing details to help agents understand each customer's journey

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Personas

Understand the users

In a UX workshop, three personas (Agent, Supervisor, and Administrator) were finalized and analyzed through various strategies, including customer interviews, persona working sessions, researching job descriptions, documenting roles and responsibilities, participating in courses, and attending competitor presentations. The goal was to understand the needs and motivations of each persona, identify pain points and opportunities, and incorporate best practices into the product.

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Business Needs Analysis

To align the project with Avaya's goals and objectives, targeted interviews were conducted with key stakeholders to gain insight into their priorities and challenges. After analyzing the feedback and comparing it with market research and competitive analysis, critical priorities for the project were identified, including historical information access, note adding ability, and timeline data viewing for agents. To stay competitive, the project aimed to provide new features by utilizing existing technology from current Avaya products.

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Technology Analysis

The feasibility of the design solution was ensured by collaborating with the Architect and development team to understand technical capabilities and limitations, and conducting a technical feasibility study. However, limited resources and outdated infrastructure posed challenges to implementing all required features. The technical team was tasked with finding solutions such as upgrades and API integrations to support design vision, while the product management team ensured design goals were met.

Summary of limitations and technical issues

  • No mechanism to consolidate, search or merge different communication types into a single customer record, causing a lack of continuity across channels

  • Contact Center application and Customer Journey API function as separate, disconnected systems, resulting in a need for information sharing between them

  • Numerous applications that could be valuable to agents, including AI tools, but no means of transferring this information to the APIs

  • No provision for agents to save or view notes in the system.

Prepare a summary to discuss the vision

I prepared a summary based on UX research, project goals, and priorities to discuss the vision and priorities with the senior management and product team. We used this summary to develop a roadmap for the project.

The Vision

Continuing with the design vision, the Customer Journey is a comprehensive representation of your customer's complete journey across your business. It provides a 360-degree view of the customer's journey across your entire business, enabling agents to make informed decisions for a positive outcome.
 

Every time a customer interacts with your call center, a touchpoint is added to their Customer Journey.

 

With the help of Customer Journey, agents can quickly answer essential questions such as:
 

  • Who the customer is?

  • When they contacted the call center last?

  • Why they are contacting us today or before?

  • Where they are calling from?

  • What can be done to help?

 

And most importantly…

  • How are they feeling?
     

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The Customer Journey empowers the agents to answer these questions, irrespective of the channel chosen by the customers. Whether a customer starts with an email, follows up with a web chat, or ultimately talks to an agent, their history follows them, and at any stage of the journey, the agent has access to the customer's entire history. This helps the agents understand the customer's journey and better equip them to fulfill the customer's expectations.

User needs and research

Once I had a clear understanding of the problems and current situation, I began to shift my focus to the needs of the users. To help guide my research and build a UX design plan, I utilized the quantitative data provided by our researcher. From there, I created detailed user flows and customer journeys to visualize the design and ensure it met the needs of our users.

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Ideate

Once the problems and current situation were understood, it was time to begin envisioning the design. I had the freedom to work on the designs without concern for technological constraints and imagine what we might need in 2-5 years to remain competitive. After each design iteration, I met with the "CJ Team" to receive feedback on the design. This provided an excellent opportunity for the team to recognize the importance of this tool, reorganize priorities and resources, and start to consider the technical challenges involved.

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Design Option 1

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Design ideas

  1. Personalized customer details for the agent, such as business address, preferred channel, and customer photos.

  2. Insights or keywords based on IVR data or AI to provide additional context and information.

  3. Filters by date, topic, and sub-topic to help narrow down high volumes of content.

  4. Horizontal timeline that displays customized touchpoints and events.

  5. Expanded day view showing all interactions or activities per day.

  6. An area to view future interactions.

  7. The ability for agents to view details of each touchpoint.

  8. Custom event colors and icons for better organization and visibility.

Challenges and Compromises

  • Unable to collect certain customer details, which may need to be removed from the design.

  • Creating an Admin Setting component to allow customers to personalize and choose what data is used for insights.

  • Need to provide specific insights/outcomes for each interaction to be more useful.

  • Connection with a third-party application is needed to collect AI information.

  • Unable to collect information on certain "topics."

  • Filters may need to be improved with additional options such as search and agent.

  • A single timeline may become too busy with many events or interactions.

  • Accessibility concerns need to be addressed to ensure usability for all users.

  • Continuously opening detail areas could also be an accessibility issue.

Iterate, iterate, iterate...

I reviewed stakeholder feedback and design review notes to identify necessary design changes. Based on this information, I worked on several ideas, including:

  • Creating a horizontal timeline for improved visualization

  • Allocating more space for interaction details

  • Adding the ability to categorize swimlanes

  • Exploring the possibility of considering CJ as a separate application.

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Design concepts

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  1. Filters have been refined to assist agents in sorting through large volumes of content and presenting the most relevant results.

  2. A customer timeline has been created to provide context for the customer's entire history, but it is not actionable.

  3. The viewport highlights a specific section of the timeline, and the "Selected Timeline" view displays events related to it.

  4. The "Selected Timeline" enables agents to focus on a subset of customer data to comprehend the reason for the current contact.

  5. Swimlanes show categories of interactions that the agent has had with the customer.

  6. Journey Details provide details of each interaction in the "Selected Timeline," with the Active Interaction Card on top by default, followed by Historical interactions.

  7. The Sentiment indicator displays the customer's current emotional state, enabling agents to communicate effectively and achieve positive outcomes. Agents should be empathetic and understanding when dealing with unhappy customers.

  8. Next Steps provide guidance on what the agent should do next.

 

Challenges and Compromises
 

The design contains an excess of details that may overpower the agent and create difficulties in concentrating on the vital information.

Final UX Design

After analyzing all the data presented above, we have identified three primary areas in our original design that could potentially be improved:

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  1. Customer Timeline: The timeline section provides a visual depiction of the customer's complete history with our company, with touchpoints on the timeline representing their interactions and channels. The "Selected Timeline" view provides an expanded perspective of the chosen timeline, with a swimlane option enabling agents and supervisors to focus on specific interaction categories. This aids in the understanding of the current department and enables access to further areas for customer assistance.

  2. Interaction Details: Each card presents a summary of information related to the interaction, including the channel and the customer's path. Agents can view or listen to transcripts and outcome tags, which provide support during the customer's journey. The latest session is positioned at the top of the stack.

  3. Details and Notes: Notes capture details and comments from other agents or supervisors regarding this customer interaction.

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Final Design MVP

The initial release of our Customer Journey widget included a sufficient number of features to meet the needs of early adopters and collect feedback for future development.

 

These features included:

  • Customer Timeline

  • Selected Timeline

  • Basic Interaction Details (including transcripts)

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Due to budget and resource limitations, we had to make choices about which features to add. We prioritized the most crucial user needs and concentrated on fundamental features, resulting in a design that still offers a positive user experience, even though not all features were able to be incorporated.

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Benefits of the current design include:

  • The agent has the ability to view past and future interactions

  • The agent can access transcripts of previous interactions

 

We are continuously improving the design and adding new features based on feedback from users and stakeholders. Some of the additional features currently being worked on are:

  • Customer Journey settings

  • Business Outcome tracking

  • Adding/viewing notes

  • Incorporating IVR data

  • Ability to filter the timeline.

Next Steps

Throughout the project, the CJ Team constantly ideated and designed new features to be incorporated into each sprint. The following features were developed and implemented:

  • Business Outcomes

  • View and comment on Agent notes

  • Supervisor features: View, edit and delete comments

  • Advanced Notes

Business Outcome

An outcome helps your agents know how each interaction ended. It provides insights into what your customer is interested in.
 

  • Agents can add notes specific to this interaction.

  • Agents can add notes or comments to historical interactions

  • Agents can tag a supervisor or another agent in a comment.

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Add Agent notes

In this project, my goal was to enhance knowledge sharing and risk mitigation within the customer support team. To achieve this, I developed a feature allowing agents to take detailed call notes, including the context of the interaction, potential risks, and future steps to be taken. I made sure that the notes could be linked to a specific interaction to enable easy access to relevant information.

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To address privacy concerns, I added the option for agents to mark their notes as private or public. Additionally, I included a feature for tracking customer sentiment throughout the interaction, providing valuable insights into the customer experience.

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Overall, my work on this project helped improve the support team's efficiency and ability to provide comprehensive support, enhancing the overall customer journey.

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