Customer 360
Project Duration: 6 months
Role: IXD and UX Designer
Problem
Customers have little to no visibility on support tickets. Users end up communicating with support teams through phone call or email communication, making it hard to track ticket status.
Opportunity
Create a self-service interface where customers can create and track support tickets with ease and guide all support communication through the new portal to help streamline the ticket management process.
Background
The 40-person project team was comprised of Salesforce specialists, digital technology, and respective product owners from Power and Controls, Mission Systems, and the heritage UTAS Customer Response Center.
UX Research
I participated in key research activities, such as drafting interview discussion guides, conducting stakeholder interviews, journey mapping and workshop activities, analyzing findings from a 500 participant survey, and conducting 1 hour 1-1 interviews with customers.
From our interviews, some of the key takeaways include:
Customers need quick responses and prefer using direct contacts for communication.
Customers need the right information at a glance to make quick decisions and prioritize efforts.
Customers prioritize features clarifying time, part location, & status related to their case.
Design Process
From a design perspective, it was important for us to create a seamless experience for our users — Since we were working with Salesforce on this project as well as our time constraints, the designs were limited to the capabilities of the out-of-the-box components. The first iterations incorporated features that were very user driven and focused, including features like a knowledge base, however we were unable to implement them due to lack of development resources. Instead, we had to think creatively about how we can still create a user-centric experience, while also working within the confinements of our project budget and resourcing.
Final Designs
There are two main user flows that the Customer 360 experience entails: case management, and creating a ticket for a case. Something we noticed was that our end users tend to get frustrated transitioning off of old habits. Many end users would usually resort to calling a person they know and trust to help them escalate a case or to get status information. As a mission of this project, we wanted to try to make the experience as easy as possible for folks to transition all of their case management to this platform to make sure that everything goes through one channel of communication.
Customer 360 Landing Page
With that, the home landing page has the key information available in one screen. Starting at the top navigation bar, customers can either Request a Case, or manage their cases in the My Cases view. Below, there is a search bar to guide users towards an existing frequently asked questions page. The the bottom left, you will find the most recent open cases as well as their status indicated with a semantic colored circle on the right hand side. Lastly on the right-hand side you will find the support section, where users can create a ticket, as well as have contact information available to call the support line
Requesting a Case
After speaking to our end users, one of their concern points was that they have lots of different cases and that the existing way of inputing this information was what felt like a never ending form. I made the form a little more easy to digest by having a step by step indicator along the left side of the screen. This way, even if there are many steps, it makes the experience by making the user aware of the general type of information they will need to provide when filling out the form. There is also a semantic color shown to show progression through the form. By having a small detail such as this, end users are more wiling to complete the form.
Case Management
One of the biggest struggles for customers is the difficult interface and experience managing multiple cases at a time. It would often take extended amounts of time digging around as well as a lot of manual effort, leading to time lost. We wanted to make sure the new experience would focus on ease and accessibility to information, making it readily available for viewing for status reporting, as well as for making it easier to update or cancel a case.
On the landing page, we wanted to make sure all of the important information was available with just a quick glance. The header includes all important status indicators of a case, followed by the main sections of the case itself. We organized the key information under tabs: Detail, Messages, Attachments and Timeline. With this layout, we’ve created a seamless integration of information and communication.
Final Product
Although these were the final designs, the final product does look different as it was developed in Salesforce Experience Cloud (SXC). After 6 months of implementing Customer 360, our end users reported back to us sharing that their ticketing and case management process has been significantly improved. Streamlining their queue of case tickets and minimizing phone calls to associates has made tracking cases and closing tickets much more efficient. Additionally, the some of the features of designs I created in this project have been reused for other management systems in the company as they were proven to be very successful for our customers.