Care Discussions

Enabling customer service agents to help each other
Internship Project @SprinklrProblem DiscoveryUX Design

00 / PROJECT DETAILS

Duration
8 weeks
Team
The Sprinklr Product Design Team
Role
Need-finding, Conceptualisation, Research and Design
Problem

Sprinklr makes software for customer service. It's used by customer service agents to respond to customers. User research showed that agents wanted the ability to work together on cases but the product had no feature to support this.

Solution

I designed a feature that would allow agents to reach out to other members of their team and get the information they need to quickly resolve cases.

01 / CONTEXT SETTING

Customer care agents use Sprinklr's 'Agent Console' to respond to customer issues.

My job was to improve the agent experience.

    02 / MY contribution

    I made 2 key contributions

    The Discussions feature allows agents to assist each other on cases.

    03 / PROCESS overview

    04 / PROBLEM DISCOVERY THROUGH RESEARCH

    The brief given to me was open ended so I took the initiative to do my own problem discovery exercise through primary research.

    1. Creating a Research Plan

    • Goal: To identify agents’ pain-points while they used the agent console
    • Method: Semi-structured Interviews over the phone and in person
    • Sample (total 18 interviews):
    • User Interviews: 4 junior customer care agents (<12 months of experience), 3 senior agents (>12 months of experience)
    • Stakeholder (expert) Interviews: 11 Designers and Product Managers

    2. Articulating Findings

    I compiled my findings into a user journey map...

    3. Key Takeaways

    05 / DESIGN REQUIREMENTS

    How might we enable agents to assist each other seamlessly?

    Other design requirements based on research:

    • Agents were busy and thus the solution could not distract them from their actual work.
    • Agents also needed to keep records of all the work they did on cases
    • The assistance needed to be FAST, since agents had to quickly reply to customers.

    06 / TESTING INITIAL CONCEPTS

    Since the feature needed to enable communication, it had to be a chat or conversation thread. The first design decision for me was to decide 'Where to put this feature within the existing Agent Console?'.

    I sketched 3 different concepts, located in different places and got feedback from the agents I had interviewed earlier.

    Concept

    Feedback

    Not tied to the context of the case

    The slide-out window is not visually associated with the case as the case related information is within the 2nd and 3rd columns of the screen.

    Too distracting

    Having the chat located in the same place as the chat with the customer disrupted agents' main workflow.

    Appropriately located

    Placing the conversation thread within the case related tabs on the right tied it to the case's context and wasn't distracting from the chat.

    Additional Feature Requests from Agents

    As I was testing these concepts with agents, they requested some other features:

    07 / Final Design

    1. The Discussions feature resides in the case related information on the right.

    This is where agents can start a discussion about a case to get help.

    2. Chat window for receiving messages from agents asking for help

    Based on the feedback from agents, I figured out where they wanted to seek assistance. However the question about exactly where will agents receive requests for help? was still to be answered.

    I designed a pop-up for receiving messages for help from other agents. This pop-up floats over the entire console and is outside the context of the helper agent's cases.

    3. Voice calling other agents

    I designed a call feature that allowed agents to reach out quickly to members of a discussion. After the call, the recording would be saved in the chat for future reference.

    4. Addings flags to draw attention to issues during communication

    As agents would send the cases they were struggling, alongside messages asking for help, there had to be a way to quickly highlight relevant details for the receiver of the message. Flagging messages enables clearer and faster communication.

    08 / IMPACT AND LEARNINGS

    Impact

    • Collaboration for agents was an unknown need which I uncovered and advocated for as a priority feature.
    • The next version of this design was incorporated as a collaboration feature not just in the agent console but across Sprinklr products.
    • I was able to present this design to the CTO of Sprinklr who offered extremely positive feedback.

    Learnings

    • Less is more: Adding features without distracting agents from their regular workflows was the hardest part.

    • Designing collaborative platforms is tricky since it involves defining social relationships on a digital platform.
    • Every UI decision has infinite possibilities and following existing UI patterns helps make things more usable.

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