Overview
Saudi Telecommunication Company is the Saudi digital enabler of telecommunications services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and among the operators in the Middle East.
I was assigned to lead the redesigning of a legacy customer agent portal used by both retail and customer service agents. The portal's complexity and role-specific sections made it cumbersome for customer agents to perform their tasks efficiently. The aim was to provide instant access to critical information to agents, providing customised and accurate service to customers. With the right knowledge at their fingertips, agents can spend less time swiveling between tools and more time helping the customers.
My Role
UX design, UI design, Product strategy
Team
2 UX designers, Business Analyst, Development team
Duration
5 months
Why was this important?
By enhancing the Siebel legacy portal, the organization can offer immediate access to crucial information for their 10,000 agents, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and business growth.
The old version (The image is blurred due to privacy of the content
What business value would it provide?
This can result in faster resolution of customer queries, reduced wait times, and a higher volume of queries handled, all of which can contribute to the company's overall efficiency.
The outcome
Process
Timeline
The timeline includes the different phases of work done over a period. Keeping in mind the development efforts and the incremental change to shift the old system to a new environment we also had to devise a strategy as to which flows would have the first change
Setting the context
Siebel and Tawasol: A customer service agent portal used by retailers as well as customer service agents to access various tools and resources needed to support and assist customers.
Creating Service Request
Creating service request, resolving them at different levels assigning and owning the SRs
Viewing Customer Details
Having a complete view of the customer details like the numbers, they own, the order history, loyalty point details and much more
Order to Completion Journey
The back office agents and retail agents have access to ordering phones and additional Value Added Services for the customer.
Collaborating with the key players
We embarked on unique journeys to engage our clients, seeking valuable connections with key stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs). This approach allowed us to gain first-hand insights into the ground realities, providing us with a glimpse of the actual experiences and challenges faced.
Contextual Inquiry and informal interviews
Understands process users’ responsibilities and the challenges associated with their day-to-day activities. Due to language constraints, we conducted interviews in Arabic.
Understanding the current system with SME’s
We arranged multiple knowledge transfer sessions with the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current portal and the ticket changes that are received by the backend team.
What we found
Heavy legacy portal
Due to slow access to customer information and support resources, agents experience increased downtime when responding to customer inquiries, resulting in delays.
Lack of complete customer details visibility.
The current portal lacks easy access to essential customer information, making it difficult for agents to assist customers quickly.
Standardized user experience for O2C
Inconsistent user experience between order to completion screens and other portal flows due to gradual development on existing Siebel systems.
Search Discoverability
The current search gave the user all the options available based on the number or name and the user had to sort through the information
Roles and Responsibilities
During the knowledge training sessions, we identified several roles and responsibilities within the system, but our focus was on targeting the users who could make the biggest impact. Therefore, we prioritized the key roles and responsibilities that were most significant for achieving our goals
Restructured user flow to align all the stakeholders
As we were building onto a previous system and could not completely migrate the system in one go we created user flows along with the engineering team to understand which of the flows would be migrated to the new AEM Pega system. We also created a service blueprint to understand the complete system and it's needs
Ideation
We created initial concepts and wireframes to test it and out and show it to our SMEs to get feedback to understand what works and what doesn't work. Based on their feedback we created a few more designs to share with the rest of the stakeholders and the development team to see what's feasible in the current timeline. We also ideated on how the screens would look in Arabic as a lot of agents spoke and used the Arabic version of the system.
Solution
Customer 360
A comprehensive breakdown of customer information, allowing simultaneous viewing of details for different customer numbers. With prioritized and categorized quick-view formats, agents can make informed decisions facilitating Quick and Easy Customer Data Retrieval for Agents.
Creating SR and assigning
Identify where forms and requirements collect data that aren’t used or needed for the process to work and creating a dynamic step by step SR request process.
Building an effective and universal search
Search is one of the first main functionalities used by customer agents. The aim was to build an experience that lets the sent quickly scan through the search results and to reduce wait time.
Streamlining the Order 2 Cash Flow
Streamlined the end-to-end Order-to-Cash (O2C) journey within Siebel, ensuring consistency for front office agents. By eliminating the need for multiple applications, we consolidated the fragmented process, making it seamless to create requests and orders for customers in a single, unified portal. This transformation was crucial in enhancing efficiency and providing a cohesive experience throughout the O2C journey.
Key Performance Indicators
- Average handling time for a call reduced from approximately 3 minutes to approx. 2.20 minutes for simple requests
- A significant decrease in Service Request created as they were resolved through trouble shooting first and if not resolved on call then an SR was created
- The website load time decreased by 36% as the screens were created based on role-specific and the fields were dynamic.
User testing
- Right before we got a chance to conduct informal interviews we
created a set of wireframes/iteration based on our understanding and the initial information provided o us by the stakeholders involved in the process.
- We re-iterated those designs after collaborating with the key stakeholders and would like to put them to test again.
Learnings and Challenges
- Being in an Arabic-speaking country I had to learn as to how their systems are designed and specifically come up with examples that they could relate to.
- This was one of the first project where we constantly iterated even before conducting Interviews. It taught me to understand the systems independently and test and fail early.
- One of the main learning was understanding their culture and adapting to their working style.