TL;DR
💪 Increase chats as the primary channel by 17% (23.5k sessions/day) and lower FRT.
💪 Reduce churn by 8% in 1st year and improve customer service level.
💪 Create/implement 1st design system library for Soluto products (20 designers, 80 developers).
💪 Enable remote work via mobile app for 13k users as first-ever IT gigs platform.
💪 Simple navigation for a feature-rich mobile-first platform.
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Background
Asurion's service offers customers technical support for various issues through ad hoc phone or messaging conversations with IT experts. Soluto, now part of Asurion's R&D department, recognized the potential for a new platform to provide customers with the tech support they need while offering IT experts a flexible work environment.
The Challenge/goal
Design an IT mobile-first app that allows users to provide technical support to customers and earn money in the process.
Research
We conducted interviews and surveys to understand market opportunities and user needs for our IT platform. This research informed our development process and helped us achieve our business objectives.
Business objectives
📌 Increase financial efficiency and profitability by removing the liability of call centers and reducing expenses such as rent, bills, and equipment.
📌 Enhance customer experience and provide better tech support services for clients as a white label of the biggest carriers in the US by implementing a new screening process based on knowledge, rather than the geographic location of Tech Experts.
📌 Improve employee satisfaction and retention by offering new rewards, schedules, workplace flexibility, and development opportunities for growth as an Expert.
As a designer on the core team for "Anywhere Expert", I had the opportunity to work on the MVP of the product as well as its long-term goals and vision. This allowed me to think ahead and envision what the service could become in the future.
Design MVP objectives
Market Penetration via Mobile-First Approach
To cater to the growing demand for mobile accessibility, we aimed to create a seamless mobile experience for users looking to earn money on the go. Existing platforms and tech tools were limiting this possibility as they were primarily designed for desktop displays. Our challenge was to provide a robust and user-friendly mobile interface that offered improved and new tools, such as multiple async chats, video and phone VoIP calls, OS live simulation, and screen share, to ensure excellent service to end-users.
Intuitive Remote Work Interface for Experts
Given that the Experts don't undergo a 6-week formal class training, the interface should be straightforward and easy to use.
Globalization
The design should accommodate potential language translations in the future.
Hypothesis
We believe that replacing the existing tech support call centers with IT gigs platform mobile app will help to improve customers' satisfaction rate and lowering the company's current costs on tech support. We will know we are successful when we will increase # of sessions per expert without lowering their service satisfaction scoring.
What would success look like?
We defined success and the # of sessions per expert with 5 stars rating per shift.
Execution
Unified chat interface
The platform provides a unified chat interface that displays both current and past conversations with customers, eliminating the need for Experts to ask repetitive questions and enabling them to quickly understand and address customer problems.
Optimizing for low ‘first response time’
Experts can quickly assign themselves to new items by responding to the customer and starting a new conversation. This efficient design-centered approach streamlines the process and reduces the time spent picking up new items.
Enable live voice & videos without navigating outside the chat view
As an enhanced feature above and beyond chat messaging, we have incorporated the capability for Experts to conduct live sessions with their customers using VoIP technology. This enables the Experts to provide first-class service by concurrently sending text, articles, canned responses, and actions.
Messaging and voice call session
Live screen share
A live screen share tool allows Experts to access and annotate a customer's device, requiring sensitive permissions reserved for necessary cases only. The tool offers several benefits, such as improving efficiency in issue diagnosis and resolution without physical meetings. Additionally, it is cost-effective and offers advantages for both customers and Experts with ongoing sessions.
Enhancing Support with Expert Teamwork
If an Expert encounters a situation where they require assistance in resolving a customer's issue, or if the problem involves a carrier-related matter that some Experts are prohibited from addressing due to legal constraints, they can involve another Expert in the discussion. This additional assistance does not negatively impact the customer's experience or compromise the quality of service provided.
Feedback & second iterations
After launching our app and conducting tests with real Experts, we received valuable feedback through interviews and data analysis. One of the significant challenges identified was the issue of assigning conversations to Experts.
Eliminating Expert Collision with UX Optimization
One of the primary issues we face is the collision that occurs when multiple Experts are assigned the same item due to the current experience and unresolved technical issues in the backend. This creates confusion and hampers the effectiveness of our system, leading to delays in resolving customer inquiries and lowering the conversation scoring for many experts.
Collision in assigning a single item by more than one Expert
The solution
Our aim was to ensure a seamless flow for assigning conversations without the need for an extra step such as an "assign" button. To achieve this, we carefully mapped out all possible scenarios that may occur during the assignment process, taking into account our backend technology. As a result, we developed a logic that enables only the assigned Expert to send messages to the timeline while disabling the typing area for other Experts, thereby preventing them from sending their own messages.
Left - failed to assign; right - assign successfully
MVP results
The mobile-first approach helped us reduce a lot of cognitive loads most IT apps withhold and helped us create an easy and intuitive experience for our users and by that allowing them to give better service to their customers. Later, we also added a web app version for desktops to give more options to our users.
Analytics & data summary
🛟 The app lowered the first-time response (FRT) and increased the end-user satisfaction rate.
🚀 Chats (a-sync messaging) increased by 17%, with 23.5k sessions a day.
🏆 The app helped with lowering churn by 8% in 1st year and improving customer service level.
🙋🏻 We onboarded 13k Experts and eliminated on-site training, warehouses, and equipment for the old ones. Some old experts became full-time employees in the new system for carrier-related matters that require additional legal training.
