Design Strategy
Contact Center Vision
Introduction
I was tasked with leading a team to revitalize a much-overlooked product within our admin portal: the Contact Center. As someone new to the contact center space, I knew I had to get a solid grasp on the current functionalities and identify areas for improvement. With my background in the complexities of calling, I had a sense of the key issues we needed to address. We also focused on understanding the needs of Contact Center admins who were using multiple services from us, known as multiservice admins. Our company was betting on the Contact Center as a critical part of its future, making it essential for us to simplify the administration of this important product for our users.
The Problem
Control Hub's inability to scale alongside complex offerings, coupled with inadequate upsell paths for CX offers, results in an awkward informaion architecture and duplicate principles. This creates a sub-par user experience for multi-product administrators.
Target User
We zeroed in on admins who are juggling both Calling and Contact Center tasks while using Control Hub and Partner Hub. It was important for us to understand their unique needs and challenges to shape our vision for the Contact Center, ensuring we create a smooth experience that fits right into their daily workflows.
Our Approach
I had my team take on this challenge with a three-pronged approach to gather as much information as we could and really understand the landscape:
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User Interviews: We talked directly to admins to hear about the real problems they face in their daily work.
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Competitive Analysis: We looked into how our product stacks up against others in the market to see where we fit in.
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Duplication Analysis: We identified overlaps across services, like between Calling and Contact Center, to streamline our offerings and reduce redundancy.
Key Stakeholders
I had my team take on this challenge with a three-pronged approach to gather as much information as we could and really understand the landscape:
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User Interviews: We talked directly to admins to hear about the real problems they face in their daily work.
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Competitive Analysis: We looked into how our product stacks up against others in the market to see where we fit in.
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Duplication Analysis: We identified overlaps across services, like between Calling and Contact Center, to streamline our offerings and reduce redundancy.
Findings
User Interviews
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We discovered that more users than we anticipated were managing both Calling and Contact Center, with 75% of the admins we spoke to handling both.
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User management emerged as the most disjointed area, with all seven participants highlighting this issue.
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Running reports is a top task for both partners and customers, but it takes a considerable amount of time to learn how to do it effectively.
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Interestingly, while Contact Center supervisors aren’t technically admins, they still need to manage various configurations.
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All participants were open to changes in the UI of Control Hub if it meant simplifying their workflows.
Competitive Analysis
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User Education: There’s a need to educate users about the different types of offers available, ensuring they fully understand what we provide.
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Control Hub's Potential: We found that Control Hub is well-positioned for success in the market.
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Reconciliation of Concepts: If we can streamline the overlapping concepts between Calling and Contact Center, we could really stand out and gain a competitive edge.
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New Categories: We identified “Routing” as a potential new higher-level category worth exploring further.
Duplication Analysis
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We found 24 configurations that were overlapping concepts. See accompanying graphic, to understand how we categorized these.
Next Steps
We held a workshop to identify the themes and pain points that our internal counterparts noticed. Since then, we’ve been actively working to influence the backlog, particularly focusing on de-duplicating concepts.
A major change we recognized was in the Information Architecture, which needed significant improvement. We’ve already made progress by pushing several design-led projects forward, including bringing users together, adding locations to the main area, and exploring how to integrate sites into the larger product.
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