Client: Lenovo

Role: UI/UX Designer & Analyst

Project Type: Customer Response Management System

Hardware: PC

Platform: Microsoft Dynamics

Most of us only know about customer call centers as the place we call when our stuff stops working. They’re slow, frustrating, and give you the run-around when all you want is to talk to someone who can help. At Lenovo, I got the chance to see behind the veil of how call centers function and took a stab at creating a system that would help agents be the best they can be: to help customers get the help they needed.

This is my story of deconstructing what it means to be a call center application and designing the CRM application ‘Carbon’ for Lenovo as an answer.

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have removed & altered any confidential information in this portfolio entry.

My Role

This project took place between October 2017 and July 2018, launching in the summer as the first CRM solution in DCG and to set the stage for two larger ones to follow. I worked on this project as a Customer Experience Designer and Analyst for Lenovo, working in tandem with an internal development team and a joint development team at Microsoft.

I was the single go-to design and UX hub for the project, responsible for the research at the beginning of the project and laying the entire groundwork for the skeleton of the project in a ‘master map’ that defined every functional and human checkpoint and interaction from start to finish. I worked with the management team to set standards and KPIs for how the UI would be evaluated and judged at each phase of development, and was also tasked with guiding the configuration team of their creation of each application page. I optimized forms made icons to my heart’s content as well.

The Challenge

Guiding a Team to Create a Multi-Channel Application

When the project began, Lenovo had an interim program in place to field calls and replicate the basic functionality that they had previously been outsourcing. In a move to internalize and improve the performance of their call centers, a team was assembled to create an optimized, functional, streamlined call center experience.

Right out of the gate we had a problem, though: it seemed nobody actually had a clear picture of what we were building. The project was established as ‘multi-channel’, which meant that key foal managers and developers were in charge of individual customer contact points: phone, email, online forums, etc. But there was no voice or vision joining them, and in that I saw a big problem.

The development team from Microsoft had to start to create a project from a blank template and their understanding of the project was as patchwork as our team, so I stepped in and asked the project owner for permission to start creating a true end-to-end flow for the entire project before we got too far into development. As requirements were established in each focal stream, I gathered the vision and goal of each part of the team and joined it together in a full view from 1,000 feet up.

The Approach

Immersion in the Call Center Experience

My own lack of knowledge about the function of call centers meant I had to understand the user base and the expectations and functional reality of the domain- and fast. Working with the team leads, I gained access to Lenovo’s international team of call center agents and managers and began to assess their pain points and established personas and journeys for each part of the master map.

Throughout the project I conducted continuing research to aid in my understanding of the true story that each agent and customer had: the variety of needs from one country to another were as varied as the needs from customer product to product.

Research

Diving into the Discourse

For a greater understanding of how to best guide the developers on configuring the Dynamics tool that would make the base of Carbon’s UI, I spent much of my time buried in the complaints sections of call center forums. Rooting past the obvious hyperbole, I was able to map out not only the places where customers were most likely to leave dissatisfied, but where to shore up the abilities of the agents within the program to better meet the demands of their customers.

Process Implementation

Theorycraft in Practice

Insights from my research with customers, agents, and in the field informed a large number of the early choices made by the team in how to scope, develop, and assess the steadily growing project Carbon. With a goal of bettering the experience for all involved, the evolving design of the program itself meant that as new insights arose they needed to be implemented in the larger program systematically. It fell on me to track down and disseminate any new findings and route the team into the best possible route for every wave of development.

As Carbon neared its first release, I looked at what would make for an improved experience for all and turned it into a series of metrics and KPIs for assessment by the business. These included loading and response times, clarity of action, optimal access to information, and non-standard action testing by agents.

Development Clarity

Functional Articulation

A large portion of what made our team work as well as we did was the enabled communication that I was empowered to facilitate. Everyone being on the same page was essential for the sprawling and developmentally isolated teams, and so I created standard information packages from my research, mapping out everything from routing logic to customer user flows that would inform basic wireframes of the UI.

The Impact

Aiding & Delivering on the Call Center Process

Carbon’s construction is based off of well-laid foundations, and it became the most stable and successfully developed CRM out of the company, going so far as to be nominated for numerous internal awards.

The core of the design that I laid out was keeping the clarity of action as well-pruned as possible, meaning a streamlined series of actions by an agent could get the average customer what they needed in record time. That, of course, makes everyone happier. I fought against visual bloat, unnecessary graphics and visualized data that no-one would use, and kept Carbon a lean program to be developed as efficiently as possible by groups of people working across the globe from one another.

Carbon has gone on to fully replace the externally hired companies that used to run DCG’s call centers and now manages and facilitates thousands of calls and troubleshooting across a wide array of channels globally, in a multitude of languages. The groundwork placed by carbon has helped the entire sector grow substantially, and helped transform DCG into a more stable and self-sufficient entity after its launch.