After two years of rapid growth and bug fixing, SingleComm’s Omnichannel platform was in need of a unifying design to connect the previously separate voice and chat customer interaction products. I began the design unifying process by identifying shared elements and common patterns for each product.

SingleComm provided a solid telephony offering for over a decade but in a changing market they needed to grow. During initial research it was clear that the growth of alternate communication channels such as SMS and web chat were emerging as desired support channels for consumers and a multichannel platform would be an inadequate solution. A true Omnichannel platform would allow SingleComm to provide a fully integrated solution allowing customers to communicate with the business in the channel of their choosing.

As the sole user experience and user interface designer, I spearheaded the information gathering process, synthesizing of that information, and the final visual design.

I started the process by conducting stakeholder interviews to get an idea for the vision of the product and how it matched up against competitors. In addition to the vision, I was able to get an idea of the successful aspects of their current product and what they desired to improve.

After meeting with and interviewing multiple stakeholders, I turned my focus to the company's existing interaction platform. While the existing interface performed sufficiently, it was clear it would not be able to satisfy the vision of the stakeholders. They outlined a vision that encompassed the need to support multiple new interaction channels and increasing an agent's ability to positively resolve interactions.

The focus for this product iteration was creating a better experience for agents because happy and productive agents lead to satisfied customers. With that in mind, I focused on providing agents with easier access to the customer information they needed, direct access to common answers and FAQs, and the ability to work across multiple communication channels. These primary goals aimed to increase an agent’s ability to satisfactorily solve complaints and increase income potential by working across support channels.

Contact center facilitation is a well established industry with plenty of high-level competitors. While not quite a startup, SingleComm was introducing a brand new product into the market and needed to be careful to not overcommit resources. We used this competitor analysis to get an idea of the minimum viable product we needed to enter the market.

To supplement the knowledge I derived from the stakeholder interviews I utilized industry research reports and some published research pertaining to contact center management. This research provided valuable insights into new trends in the industry and the shifting needs of customers and their communication habits.

• The industry is embracing omnichannel solutions instead of multi-channel or single channel.
• Customers are expecting the agents to know "who they are" when making contact with a company.
• Consumers increasingly prefer text-based communication over voice communication.
• Agents need the tools and resources to solve customer complaints on first contact. Every customer transfer decreases customer satisfaction and likelihood they will switch products.
• A significant portion of agents desire increased training and coaching to increase skills.

Agents have a lot of interrelated tasks that they need to accomplish throughout an interaction. I started off by analyzing the relationship between these tasks and how they are used to accomplish a successful customer interaction.

After analyzing the research I discovered two primary use cases. These were the Support Guru who fields customer complaints and the Seller who engages in guided interactions to sell products and services.

Based on the discovered jobs to be done, I started breaking down each of those jobs into individual task flows. This helped me identify the areas where our new features would shine through such as accessing previous customer interactions across channels and utilizing FAQs or suggested answers to resolve customer complaints.

After iterating a few cycles on the sketches and getting sign off from stakeholders, I jumped into Adobe XD to create the hi-fidelity mockups. As this redesign was part of a large company rebranding, I was provided the liberty to develop a new color scheme and iconography. Once I finished translating the sketches into colorful mockups I created multiple flows using Invision (not available) to test out specific functionality with select agents and product managers.

Connecting with users (agents) proved to be a tremendous asset in pushing this product to its version 1.0 launch. Both direct user research and the inclusion of external research helped me get a great understanding of what was important. As a rapidly changing startup, having an anchor point helped keep the project focused. The one thing that did remain constant was the vision of ensuring that agents have a great experience so they can provide a great experience to consumers.

Next steps:

• Provide agents more tools and “workspace” to complete tasks
• Concepts to promote agent happiness and satisfaction
• Expanded coaching platform