Redesign the Help and Support experience
“The implemented solution greatly improved user experience resulting in an approximately 40% of call reductions to the call centre and increased digital adoption allowing customers the choice to self-serve, get digital help via Bot, Chat or Messaging.”
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted confidential information in this case study.
All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of AGL.
Role
Lead UX Designer
Team
User Researcher, Content Strategist, Product Owner, Developers
Time Frame
16 Months
Tools
Butcher paper
Sticky Notes
Sketch
Invision
Conducted
Stakeholders’ workshops
User Research Synthesis
Affinity Diagram
Information Architecture
How might we make it easier for AGL customers to self-serve for help and support
and provide huge cost savings from the contact centre?
Problem
AGL customers are calling the call centres despite available online content that could solve their queries.
Solution
Provide an intuitive and easy to use central Help and Support experience for customers to adopt digital channels to self-serve.
In order to ensure the new, comprehensive Support Centre solution is helpful for our customers, we have strategically broken down the solution implementation into
4 main stages -
Stage 1
Re-educate the way customers are contacting AGL by introducing a new Contact Us experience.
Launched 3rd April 2019
Stage 2
Uplift and add help content to be helpful and easy to understand (language) for AGL customers.
Launched 9th September 2019
Stage 3
Re-design Search experience to improve trust and confidence for AGL customers.
Commence to launch in 28th February 2020
Stage 4
Design of AGL Support Centre for AGL customers to get help when and how they want it.
Design completed 13th December 2019
Build to start in March 2020
Design Principles
The following design principles have been set up specifically for Help & Support project to provide the team a guide to make critical design decisions and a manual for further development.
Make help useful & understandable
Keeping customer's difficulties and problems in mind while designing.
Make help simple & intuitive
Intentional design to address user’s tasks they are after.
Make help inclusive
Design for everyone - socially, culturally, learning levels, physically, etc.
The design principles have been crafted based on research (to identify the customers needs, product identity, business goals and functionality demand), brainstorm on design principles that fit Help & Support, iteration and alignment with stakeholders.
Search experience re-design Case Study
Search is paramount to the success of Help Centre as search forms a central part of the user experience to easily self-serve for help and support online. Even though research from UIE show that customers have a preference for search, none of them always go to search immediately — evidence suggesting that what customers say they do and what they actually do are very different. Despite that it is still beneficial from having both an easy-to-use search function and great navigational structure.
“I feel like I can never find what I’m looking for. It lags and the content isn’t highlighted for importance or relevance. Maybe that’s just me….”
Our goal for this project is to create a search engine that is
simple, fast and relevant. Empowering customers with the ability to find what they are looking for even when they are not using AGL terminology within their search query.
How might we improve search quality, reduce churn, reduce call drivers and chat issues?
Opportunities
The following step up opportunities were discovered through synthesising the critical issues related to Search research. Users' search queries varied greatly—with misspell words and using words that aren’t the same as AGL terminology. The Search results were not returning meaningful results which meant users could not find what they were looking for thus completing their task. We changed our vendor to Funnelback (Squiz) who uses machine learning and advanced algorithms to deliver relevant content from the different data sources.
Smarter search functionality
Creates trust and provides a better help experience for AGL customers.
Contextual search presenting better content
Optimising the results presenting to AGL customers.
Present directly into the experience
Search results preview to display in-situ of the experience allowing customers to remain the the experience journey and find respective content relevant to them.
Creating a seamless experience
Search functionality is paramount for Help Centre.
Design Process
UX Consideration:
When search has not been activated how will the default suggestions display for the customers?
Default suggestions to display content based on key call drivers, chat issues and search data.
Dynamic smart suggestions based on what customers has been doing on the website.
Voice experience for accessibility (and mobile experience).
Mobile versus Desktop Search experience.
Content Consideration:
Build synonyms or preferred keywords that funnelback can use to display search results.
Based on research, call drivers, chat and messaging transcripts including search data to create top 10 search recommended answers.
Search Blueprint
presenting the widget flow
During Search experience
The customer has the ability to activate speech-to-text search experience on website and mobile where the search results preview would display once query has been detected.
On activate search input field, quick links and popular searches (based on customers’ site path or key drivers, chat issues and search data) display for the customers.
When customers start typing (more than 3 letters) into the search input field, auto complete and predictive text functionality kicks in to complete search queries for them. This helps to reduce in misspell queries, reduce typing by 25% and provides contextual search presenting better search content for the customers.
If customers search on queries that fall within the Top 10 recommended answers it will present within the Search results preview displaying in-situ of the experience for the customers.
mobile experience
desktop experience
After Search experience
Search results page
The original “AGL search” and “Community search” tabs were removed. Every time a customer searched for something, the system would have to load up content on the other tab - an unnecessary effort for the system. Since we decided to display search results list calling out the different data source it is pulling from, there was no need for having tabs.
Mobile experience
desktop experience
Search Interaction
Mobile & desktop Experience
The search interaction is currently starting from the main navigation. When Help Centre is launched in 2020-2021, search interaction will be from both the main navigation and Help Centre.
Challenges
The migration from Sitecore to AEM is a big project (happening in the background) that will take awhile to complete so creating a search engine that can perform well in both Sitecore and AEM will be a challenge.
Learnings
Besides data, speaking to our customers (and observing how they are searching) help the process alot.
Conclusion
Feel free to speak to me further on my design process and experiences as this portion is a small part of the entire Help & Support Experience design.