Know Your Guest
Leveraging Customer Profiles for Enhanced Service Intelligence
August 2020- Oct 2020
Leveraging design thinking, crafted an experiential journey that transcends mere functionality, elevating it to a level where user empowerment converges seamlessly with organizational objectives.
My Role:
In my capacity as the UX Lead, I orchestrate a holistic approach encompassing experience strategy, prototyping, requirements discovery, visual design, and information architecture, harmonizing these elements to architect cohesive, user-centric digital solutions.
My Partners:
Product Owner, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), Engineering Team, Business Stakeholders, OVT Team (Risk and Compliance)
Problem Statement:
With the onset of the pandemic, Target witnessed an exponential growth in online orders with a corresponding surge in customer queries. However, this also resulted in a sharp uptick in related complexities like the number of cases marked as ‘fraud’.
The challenge was to better serve customers in an increasingly digital world, while dealing with growing complexities. The north star metric still remained satisfactory resolution of customer queries in the shortest possible time.
The Objective:
Reducing the average handling time for customer queries by 5%
The formula to calculate average handling time is as follows.
Average Handling Time = (Talk time + Total hold time + After-call work)/Total number of calls handled
Calling and chat support is expensive and a focus area for continuous cost optimisation.The retail industry's average AHT is 5.4 minutes or 324 seconds. Target’s AHT was 620 seconds which translated to $4.43 per query. With more than 4 million queries each month, a reduction of just 5% in AHT would generate millions of dollars in annual savings ($10mn+).
The Result
Reduction in average handling time for customer queries by 8%+ in the first quarter
Our solution was launched to users at the beginning of Nov 2020 Quarter-end SUS (System Usability Score) on a base of 2000+ responses saw a never before jump of 11 percentage points. For business, this translated to saving Target an estimated $4,500,000 in just 90 days.
Leveraging practical empathy helped me understand and address both users' and business stakeholders' needs and concerns effectively.
Once the pandemic began, most offline customers moved to online, leading to business growth in online retail. This shift also brought in new challenges and complexities in serving customers. One of the issues highlighted by business was a rapid rise in cases of online retail fraud, as some customers exploited the company's generous return and refund policy
These issues and complexities resulted in an increase in the average handling time (AHT) for agents addressing customer queries. Business policy did not allow for quick fixes like flagging or suspending customer accounts (for issues like fraud).
To ensure the success of our project, we devised a method to uncover, record and harmonize the requirements of users, business objectives, and compliance standards. We championed a user-centred design approach, illustrating that prioritising users doesn't necessitate neglecting internal needs. This method led us to refine the traditional design process to better accommodate these diverse considerations.
Design Process:
Discovery & Empathy:
As I began working, some of the key questions that I found asking myself were
What are the business OKRs?
Why are the current process flows no longer adequate?
What can be a new definition of fraud?
What aids decision-making in a high-stress time-critical situation?
To get answers to the above, I completed a set of activities which involved
Extensive meetings with service centre agents and their team lead
Researching patterns and projections in other Target applications
Getting an overview of what constitutes fraud detection and handling
Consuming call logs of service centres and analysing issue handling
User Personas
Who am I designing the solution for?
User Journey
Handling a Customer Inquiry: A Call Center Agent, wants to efficiently handle customer inquiries so that one can provide accurate and timely resolutions while ensuring customer satisfaction.
Research Outcome
Early findings:
Covid induced a 3x surge in online orders
Queries per day increased by 5x
The training timeline for new agents was reduced by 50%
Each call costs $4.43 and each chat costs $2.29
AHT had increased from 640s in Jan 2020 to 820s in Mar 2021
Leading to a reframing of urgent and important questions
What could be done to compensate for compressed training time?
Why this sudden increase in AHT?
What is needed to help address customer queries?
How can we aid agents in faster and better decision-making?
The main learning was that achieving the objective (of reduction in AHT) would necessitate an approach that combines
multi-stakeholder management
trade-offs
alignment of different points of view
Concept Model
Ideation & Prototyping:
It was clear that agents often look for additional information to serve customers better. The two most looked-for pieces of information were
The customer’s purchase history
The customer’s preferred store location
Therefore, to enable agents to resolve customer queries faster they needed to understand the customer’s relationship with Target in a simplified and easy manner. To fulfil this need, the agents needed information.
Therefore, three tasks were laid out as the next steps regarding this information :
WHAT to access
WHERE to access
HOW to access
The WHAT:
Based on these insight and data analysis, four critical parameters were identified which define a customer’s needs and their relationship with Target:
This enabled creation a 360-degree view of the Customer, helping in
Proactive Issue Resolution: Insights from customer profiles enable agents to anticipate problems and address issues before these escalate, enhancing customer satisfaction.
Efficient Time Management: Access to relevant information at their fingertips reduces the time agents spend gathering context, allowing them to focus on resolving queries promptly.
Empowered Decision-Making: Data-driven insights empower agents to make informed decisions and offer relevant solutions, even in complex scenarios.
Enhanced Customer Engagement: By demonstrating a deep understanding of customers' needs and preferences, agents can build stronger rapport and foster loyalty.
The WHERE:
Once the four parameters were set, the next task was to identify the space where access to the information related to these parameters could be provided easily to an agent.
Following the natural progression of information, the space selected was the account detail page. The current Account Detail page looks like this:
This page was being used only as a navigational page, with the average time spent on this page being only 5 seconds. Going forward, this page would host the information needed by the agents
The HOW:
We started with the current flow of how agents were accessing this information:
Since this page was often a window between the agent and the order detail page, an addition to the current flow was proposed:
This addition would allow agents faster access to the information related to the critical parameters. Using this new flow, a doorway was designed in the universal header so that agents can access this doorway from any page. The new design looked like this:
Iteration 1 presents a legacy design that maintains continuity with the existing account detail page. It features sections dedicated to guest details, sales summary, last guest concession, loyalty engagement, fulfilment services, and account event history.
In Iteration 2, a modern design approach is adopted, extending seamlessly from edge to edge of the screen. The content is meticulously organized for enhanced clarity and comprehension. Sections include Guest Details, Sales Summary, Guest Profile, Guest Detail, Net Purchase, Goodwill Concession, Number of Orders, Returns, Last Guest Concession, Loyalty Engagement, Fulfillment Services, and Account Event History.
Business Reviews & Approvals
The new design was presented to the business teams for review and approval based on financial feasibility and outcomes. This took some time as multiple teams and owners on the business side were aligned on the need and impact of this initiative to secure their buy-in and final approvals.
User Testing
As per the protocol at Target, this was executed in the following manner:
Selecting and training a select set of users on the new flow
Educating the cohort on the need for changes
Roll out to test cohort in Sep 2020
Gathering feedback on the new design and flow
Roll out to all users (agents) on Oct 7th 2020
Monitoring the feedback and impact on the AHT,
Positive responses from the users (qualitative)
5-15% dip in the AHT for the test cohort
We witnessed positive feedback in the Q3 SUS survey which was a great win for the product team.
Compliance Approvals
Basis user testing results, the revised design and flows were shared with the compliance department for final approval for code deployment. Since we had ensured that our design changes did not violate any Target policies/guidelines, the compliance approval came through without the need for a single review or objection.
Reflections
When it came to the final solution, it appeared simplistic. After all, it was an additional button in the universal header allowing access to a set of information on a page that was already available. The page needed a reconfiguration of the information displayed.
That being said, the best solutions are often just that: simple yet effective.
The complexity of research, insights, understanding, stakeholder alignment and user testing that went into making this solution a reality are hidden and continue to remain hidden from the everyday users of the solution and from the remarkable impact that the solution produced (and continues to produce):
Business savings of $2mn+ per month
Sustained high SUS scores from users (agents)
High CSAT scores every quarter
Lower frauds even with a rising online/offline order ratio
We listened to users and discovered the need for faster and more efficient access to information as the key to solving the problem. This is what enabled us to build an elegant, practical, and successful solution within the tight constraints of business requirements, Target’s policies, and feasible design options.
Yammer Buzz: Agents Excited About New Project!
The project rollout stirred up excitement among agents, sparking lively and positive discussions on Yammer (is a place where an organization's leadership can post updates, requests for feedback, announcements, and more).
