Understanding preventable demand on call centers
A journey into understanding how we might enable customers to set-up and manage their own recovery through MyACC.
18 Mar, 2024
Project overview
An internal review studied customer interactions with the call center. It identified problematic stages in the injury recovery process and outlined the end to end journey for customers. The focus was on the customer portal for managing peripheral supports during recovery.
As the Senior Digital Product Designer on the team I was tasked with identifying high friction areas throughout our product.
Objective
To identify how we might empower customers to set up, manage and feel confident with their own recovery journeys.
Approach & deliverables
For this part of the project, I focused on exploration, using two earlier reports and our feedback tool. My goal was to create a single concise report detailing key findings, patterns, and possible issues that could then be referenced each time the team built a new feature.
Collaboration
This project was in collaboration with:
Product teamBusiness stakeholder groupDepartment leadership
Aligning to business strategy while tackling core problems
A new strategic plan was recently unveiled within the organisation, aimed at restructuring product focuses to proactively diminish the volume of customer service inquiries. Central to this initiative is the consolidation of efforts around three key objectives, fostering a more cohesive and targeted approach to enhancing customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Reduction in calls to the call center
The overall purpose of this work was to reduce preventable demand to the call center, this overall would be solved by the next two measures of success.
Providing clarity and understanding during customer processes
A large percentage of the preventable demand came in the form of a lack of understanding around our business processes and applying for supports, whether customers had to complete certain tasks, and what was happening behind the scenes at various hand-off points.
Improving navigation and way-finding
Another large section of preventable demand was customers trying to find information that we already provided, such as upcoming payments, registering their hours or completing blocked tasks. However the way the site is currently structured does not allow customers to do this intuitively.
Defining our problem space
The reports I had received had been completed in silos and were very heavily focused on presenting a range of issues along various aspects of the customers journey. However they all lacked product specific references, and key actionable outcomes.
What was the customer actually looking at or doing that triggered the need for contact, and how does that UI or customer interaction actually lead to someone contacting the call center over solving the problem themselves.
The key goal of my report was to pull over 6500 customer comments and combine it with product specific insights to build a better visual model around the customer pain points. So that as we moved into ideation workshops we would have an easy access resource with all key information needed to make big decisions.
Bringing stakeholders along the journey
An important part of this journey was to bring the stakeholder’s along the design process. I tackled this problem by running a series of context setting workshops to help set a common understanding of the current pain points, how our product enables them and in turn causes the customer to contact the call center. In this workshop, I emphasized putting everyone in a customer-centered mindset, especially for roles not directly involved with customers, by using persona mapping.
Once I had taken the stakeholders through the current customer experience and highlighted the common problems. The participants and I all went through an ideation workshop, with the aim of coming up with blue sky thinking solutions. I found it important to get people to expand on their ideas and not to be limited by current functionality. This was done through a series of crazy 8’s, sharing and building on other people’s ideas.
The workshops aimed to identify problems and suggest solutions by addressing big issues rather than always reverting to quick fixes.
Influencing stakeholders to prioritise end-to-end experiences rather than single features
From the workshops, I collected many good ideas that could be sorted into 7 main goals or key features. Three were specific product issues, while four could be addressed by different teams simultaneously.
The value of the report was evident by the fact that I was able to effectively provide a feature roadmap that referenced priority levels directly based on customer feedback all while aligning with overarching business strategy and goals.
By combining this report and product roadmap with data analysis, I persuaded business leaders to pause and focus on solving the main issue rather than rushing into short-term solutions.
At the end of the workshops we had a group of stakeholders that were aligned on what the core problems were, how to solve those problems and what it would look like to tackle those problems.
This meant with a visual roadmap I was able to advocate for us to take the journey of large scale improvements while providing a solid forecast of which problems the feature would look to tackle.
Outcomes
The work done in this report and surrounding product strategy has convinced the business to tackle bigger problems. As such the project is currently looking at the first big solution.
Closing thoughts
Overall, this project really allowed me to step out of my comfort zone and tackle a really large piece of discovery which was typically not readily available within our organisation. I also learnt a lot around the skills necessary to really sell stakeholders why they should care about solving core problems.