Ally Noormohamed

My Role

I was a design lead on the TELUS Digital Platform Services team assigned to help the TELUS call center product team. I assembled a temporary team of two user researchers, a content strategist and another senior designer to help me with the work.

Problem

The call center product team needed help solving ongoing usability issues for call center agents, preventing them from achieving their business goals and KPIs, such as decreasing customer call volume and wait times and reducing agent training time.

Before I was assigned to help them, they had designed and built two new versions of the call center software by working with a design agency. Still, agents found both software hard to use.

A typical interaction design issue with the call center software was exposing all tasks and information on the user interface instead of prioritizing them based on task frequency, like most modern applications. In addition, information density made it difficult for agents to learn the software, resulting in about fifty percent dropping out during the training program.

Discovery

I started by interviewing stakeholders, including executives, people who trained agents on the software, development managers, business analysts and product managers.

I learned that everyone had different understanding, expectations, goals and ways of working on the software. They needed to understand proper processes, missing roles in their teams and why they couldn't achieve their business requirements.

Next, my team and I visited the call center to see how agents worked and interviewed them.

We learned that agents aspired to provide the best service to TELUS customers but struggled to work with over 35 individual software to do their job. In addition, they relied on an internal knowledge base to keep up-to-date on TELUS news, products, and services, but the information was disorganized, out-of-date, or updated too late. So they had to rely on each other during calls to help a customer. Every agent had a different level of computer expertise which wasn't considered in their hiring or training.

These issues affected customer call metrics which reflected poorly in agent performance evaluations.

To help the project team understand what we learned, my team and I set up a couple of participatory workshops to identify agent personas and another workshop for mapping their frequent tasks with the help of some agents. Also, we mapped which task scenario affected a business requirement.

I created a north star vision for the product team using the discovery insights and analysis of top call center products, including a UX roadmap for the design team's work and problems to solve.

Solution

I worked with the other senior designer, sketched some ideas, and created user flow diagrams, wireframes and prototypes for usability testing.

Finally, my team and I delivered these artifacts, including usability testing results, agent personas, journey maps, a content strategy, an iterative process framework and recommendations to hire permanent design, content and research roles for the product team.

Results

The call center product team hired two UX designers to continue our work using the CX/UX playbook. Unfortunately, I left TELUS shortly after this project and couldn't see the outcomes of the new team.