HelpDesk
Redesign of a customer support application to optimize user flows and reduce call handling times
situation
As UX specialist i was asked to redesign the helpdesk application. Each operator has a big customer support department that caters to the player queries. The customer support agents work on data intensive applications to retrieve relevant information to be able to resolve player queries quickly and effectively. The old application was not optimized to how the users worked and so a new information architecture was thought out for the new application.
About Helpdesk
The Helpdesk application has player data from the casino such as personal information, betting patterns, transaction history, player rewards granted like loyalty points, bonuses and free games, lots of notes created by agents in resolving player queries and more. Each agent works to resolve queries from multiple players at the same time. The goal of the application is to make the user's task as efficient as possible.
task
My job was to understand user flows of call handling and design the app to optimize the call handling time.
action
I sat with end-users for 3 days to observe how they worked and identify issues they faced with using the application. It involved taking notes on what queries they received from players, what they did to resolve the queries, how they interacted with the applications, any unique ways they devised to multi-task through the various applications to reach optimal level of efficiency, any duplication of effort that i could identify, work-arounds, support, artifacts, etc.
Observations revealed that the data was not consolidated for a task but all over the place. It took time to remember where everything was and retrieve it.
There was a lot of copy pasting by the user while creating notes which led to duplication of effort.
There were 3 rows of tabs and that led to very little space remaining to show player info above the scroll.
Data was not recent in many cases and the users had to open another application to look for the past 24 hours data.
Other observations included that user worked on multiple applications to resolve a query. They placed these apps on the desktop to achieve maximum optimization.
They used finger memory to alt-tab between the apps.
They used sticky notes for infrequent protocols, contact numbers of other departments, etc.
Redesign
Dashboard caters to primary queries
On analysis of all this data it was revealed that in all of the busy-ness there were mainly 5 types of queries that the agents received from the players.
I designed the app around these 5 types of queries so that for 80% of calls, the user could retrieve data quickly and successfully to resolve queries. The remaining 20% info was found in inner pages because it was infrequently accessed.
The modular design also catered to the performance load time of the app by not going for a very high resource intensive solution.
In addition, the app focused on providing snippets of information that was essential to making an informed decision.
Some of the actions were streamlined to provide a consolidated finding to minimize the need to retrieve data from multiple places.
Visual summary of information were introduced for quicker decision making.
Result
On my subsequent meet with end-users, I was notified that the average call handling time went down. They found the new UI more user friendly.
