My Experience

Improving Customer Service

Mapping and researching the Contact Center environment

👇 Skip the preamble and jump straight to the case study:

Across my career I’ve had the opportunity to observe and study several different Customer Service and Contact Center environments. Through Service Design and UX research techniques, I’ve made impactful improvements in key customer-metrics like handle time (HT) and first call resolution (FCR), even offsetting truck rolls.

- 📈 300% lift
  in agent engagement
- 📹 15+
  Context Inquiries
- 🗺️ Blueprints
  CSR Journeys

Most recently, while Director of Product Design at Ozmo, a support platform for carriers like Verizon, AT&T, and Rogers, I spent a lot of time in contact centers watching agents and customers, developing a Service-level perspective on the typical environment, tools and day-to-day.

An onsite context inquiry with a CSR agent taking calls

Before Ozmo, I led a Service Design project for a company - E470 - who approached my team at Exadel for help achieving more efficiency with their Image Processing Department’s current Software Toolset.

View the E470 project in detail →

💼 Case:

One of Ozmo’s products was predominantly a Telecom troubleshooting tool that sat in front of Customer Service Representatives in Contact Centers and helped them navigate tech issues with a customer.

⚠️ The problem:

Ozmo needed to expand its market footprint beyond the Telecom industry, however, the product offerings were highly tuned towards tech support in that specific vertical.

One logical adjacent vertical was Broadband-IoT, yet it was unknown what capabilities were necessary for supporting that space. To better understand the potential vertical, I led a Discovery effort including competitive and market analysis, user interviews and context inquiries.

🛠️ Process:

I was fortunate to have access to some actual Broadband agents through our existing customers - like Rogers and Telus who had other divisions of business not yet supported.
The goal here was to examine their typical calls and support routines, knowing they didn’t yet have access to Ozmo - searching for potential gaps in our offering in order to become marketable.

Sitting with a CSR agent onsite during a user interview

As my team and I listened to broadband agent users in frequent 1-1 user research initiatives, we amassed a layered perspective of their environments, challenges and needs.

Research revealed that agents in the broadband space are more often troubleshooting the customer’s physical space - things like unplugging routers, suggesting placement changes for improved signal and even asking customers what lights are in fact on or blinking.

I identified that a video capability was the needed improvement for market viability and set a goal for a simple solution.

Considering how CSR users are already cognitively burdened by the assortment of tools at their disposal, along with prescribed workflows and a frustrated customer, I collaboratively discussed the insights with Product and Engineering. I aligned the team on a browser based solution that would make use of the customer’s mobile camera, which could avoid forcing the customer to download an app, and promised faster engineering lift. I jumped into design and prototyped an initial concept for Engineering to quickly pursue researching the right technology for the solution. Leveraging an Amazon based video streaming service called Chime, the team quickly brought the feature to life.

Short demo video of Remote Video

View the Remote Video project in detail →

Across our countless interviews and research with CSR agents, it was evident that clearly guiding a customer to the right next place and activity was tough. Research led to the introduction of some simple annotation capabilities and an OCR text capture - enabling an agent to draw on the screen and literally point out things to the customer in their shared video stream, and quickly capture model numbers and other identifying information without even asking the customer to try and read it.

Within Remote Video, agents can markup the video and capture text - shown on the right.

✅ Results:

Through all this research, user interviews, and competitive analysis, I led the cross-functional implementation of a lightweight browser-based solution resulting in a 300% increase in agent engagement, rising to 30K sessions weekly. CSR agents were now able to see into customer's environments using their mobile phone's camera, opening up the Broadband market to Ozmo.

The Remote Video capability was one of many enhancements, improvements and new features I led to launch, although a larger impact than most leading to a totally new business vertical.

Here’s another example of one research-driven concept where automation and intelligence could potentially be leveraged to lighten the load for CSR agents. It all focused on a task nearly every agent in every call center is asked to complete at the end of every call - Call Notes.

Short concept video of Call History

Logically, I knew I wasn’t going to approach a concept that attempted to subvert Call Note features and capabilities already present in their CRM systems - but more asking the question, how could we successfully and beneficially inject Ozmo into their Call Notes process? I came up with Call History - which focused on a simple idea of capturing a convenient history of what the agent did while inside the Ozmo product. Even making sessions easily available for placement into their CRM notes with links back into Ozmo for the next agent. This history could also function as a supplement to a feature already in the product - where agents could send resources to the customer.

💼 Case Studies

🛠️ Projects & Products