Internal Tools
Communications Platform
With a large scale re-platform and a completely new channel of communication, providing a better user experience while keeping things intuitive for call center employees was the goal.
Role
As the sole experience designer for this project, I worked closely with product, development, and contact center teams. My main goals were to understand the technical limitations of a brand new backend, evaluate existing tools, and make a large scale transition as smooth as possible for users.
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Initial design: March 2021 - August 2021
Initial launch: September 2021
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Latest release: October 2023
Outcomes
This platform reduced the overall number of tools employees needed to use from 6+ to one resulting in:
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Decreased wrap up time by 80%
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4% YOY increase in customer satisfaction (highest scores on record)
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Reduced transfer rates by 4%
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Reduced abandon rate by 4%
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Reduced repeat call rate by 2%
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Roughly 15 million customer interactions pass through this platform each year.​
Background
Initially, two different platforms were used by call center employees depending on whether they were handling calls or chats. At the time, most were handling both so it meant a lot of context switching between applications. On average, employees were using six different applications to handle conversations, look up product data, look up customer data, and find other resources.
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At the same time, I was working on another project to introduce a new way of selling/customer support through video which also meant that I needed to incorporate this into the overall platform.
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This gave me two focus areas
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Find a way to integrate and improve the disparate call and chat experiences
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Create a video calls experience to support a new sales channel
Approach
I started by gathering information about the existing platforms, what features they had, pain points, and technical limitations. I learned that the existing call platform lacked any customer information display, with only the phone number available, and the process of transferring calls was cumbersome, requiring manual entry of the full phone number for the recipient or destination. ​
I created an employee journey map that was layered into our existing customer journey map. Working closely with the product and development teams, we identified the specific steps that employees would need to take during a video shopping experience, and translated them into features in the employee interface.
We ran an initial pilot to test all of the functionality we had created in the base platform (Twilio) before starting a full integration into the larger, in-house, support platform.
Thanks to the in-house support platform, we now had access to different data that would usually take multiple applications to access. This allowed me to deliver on some of the wants and needs of the call center employees and reduce the number of tools needed from six to one.
Outcomes
​​Today, we have successfully scaled the platform to employees across the globe handling chat, voice, and video calls. Roughly 15 million customer interactions pass through this platform each year so whether customers are reaching out through the web, app, SMS, a maps app, or by phone, they will connect with an employee using this platform.
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This migration gave us access to many of helpful features and data stores that helped improve the overall workflow for users. Some of the major features include:
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Dedicated warm/cold transfer
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One click transfer to queues or employees
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Tons of customer information
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IVR and chatbot information from pre-conversation vetting
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Simplified order lookup
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We've been able to achieve:
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The most stable platform in company history with 0% downtime during the busy season since launch​
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Decreased wrap up time by 80%
-
Reduced the overall number of tools employees needed to use from 6+ to one
-
4% YOY increase in customer satisfaction (highest scores on record)
-
Reduced transfer rates by 4%
-
Reduced abandon rate by 4%
-
Reduced repeat call rate by 2%​​