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"You have fearlessly seized this seemingly unsolvable challenge"
- Sylvia Xu Connor, Senior UX Designer at Symbio
Symbio
Overview: Symbio has a complex product offering that spans many countries. When a customer needs support or to escalate an issue they refer to their contact and escalation cards however these are currently not fulfilling the needs of their growing customers and needs to be digitised and designed to take in the complexities.
Time Frame: 2.5 weeks
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Contribution:
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Project lead
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Stakeholder Engagement
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Project Management
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Project Strategy
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Research
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Interviews
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Usability Testing
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Project Delivery
These cards and the escalation process attached to them was complex and required a lot of research to understand how they were put together, how they worked and how they didn't work. Our initial research involved mapping out the multiple cards, how they intertwined and when and what internal processes interacted with them. This was followed by 12 interviews over two days.
4
initial internal Symbio stakeholders for interviews
14
final Symbio employees engaged
12
Symbio employees did 1:1 interviews
What's The Problem?
Our research led us through 3 iterations of our problem statement landing on our final statement:
Time-poor Symbio Customers choose to escalate their urgent issues without following the escalation matrix due to lack of clarity, unclear criteria and an over-abundance of information on contact cards. They need an easily navigable, clear and up to date contact card to ensure they are contacting the right person to resolve their problems efficiently.
"You have fearlessly seized this seemingly unsolvable challenge of redesigning our global escalation matrix and delivered an outcome that is applauded by all the key stakeholders. The robust user research to understand the crux of the problem and testing possible design ideas with real customers speak volumes to the final product design."
- Sylvia Xu Connor, Senior UX Designer at Symbio
Synthesised data showed clear pain points. These were:
- Paper based card resulting in the contacts often being years out of date causing much internal and external frustrations.
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- The volume of content, "I think there's a lot of information on this card which causes a lot of confusion".
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- Scalability is an issue internally, with there being “no SMART way to factor in customers who buy different products from different brands” - Sarah, Head of Marketing
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- Trust and relationship management, "the bigger the customer the more important trust becomes".
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identified the issue of customers printing the cards and them being out of date
8/12
said the escalation path needed to be clearer and that people skip it currently
100%
brought up the importance of trust, relationships and transparency
9/12
stressed the importance of simplicity saying the cards are too overwhelming
In this third phase of our project I worked with a small group to develop our HMW questions before stepping back to oversee the project management of the ideation workshop, MVP, user flows and information arcitechture. Although I supported the individuals involved and contributed ideas and guidance, the kudos for the work in this area really goes to others in the team.
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It was also in our development phase that we realised a solution for Greg could not be found to a good enough standard without providing an internal solution to ensure the cards were up to date. We therefore created two flows, a External Customer Facing solution and an Internal Symbio Updating solution.
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We conducted TEN usability tests over four days and had FIVE iterations in total.
Final High Fidelity Prototypes
The solution we came to was a contact and escalation portal where individual products and Symbio employees/roles could be attached to. This portal could be accessed via a link stored in the customer CRM system or any of the other places they are already storing their. There is likely to be an upcoming larger portal that this would fit perfectly into also.​
External/Customer
Internal/Symbio
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Printablity was addressed by ensuring an easy to use portal however for those who would still like to export the details the ability to do so remains however an alert would be emailed for whenever their is an update ensuring Greg always has the most up to date information.
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Clarity and Digestability was addressed by changing what information is immediately viewable. The information needed on the cards is all still available however much of this is hidden behind buttons or as pop ups as this information is not needed by everyone, every time.
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Scalability and Updatability was addressed via the internal side. Those with the authority to make changes can log in and go to the area of the business, product and contact to easily make changes. Pushing out the updates to the connected customer portals ensuring customers always have the most up to date contacts. It is easily scalable in that additional positions can be added as the team grows and additional countries added as they expand globally.
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Trust and Relationships was addressed by ensuring the contact cards and escalation process was clear, easy to follow and always accurate, the contact card and escalation portal provides another piece of the puzzle to solidify the trust Symbio's customers have in them as a company and service.
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Note: Due to the nature of the business I have not included a walk through of the final prototypes in my portfolio. Should you wish to see these please reach out.
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The Future
Short Term (3-6 months)
A full internal matrix mapped for all contacts and customers to connect the systems.
Internal service flows around ticketing and the cross over between escalation and ticketing
Cohessive design with the customer portal being produced.
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Medium Term (6-12 months)
- Produce KPI's and metrics around the number of escalations that skip protocol, customer satisfaction and customer feedback on contact card use to assess further need for iterations.
- Look at customer experience design around level one escalation to embed continuity and trust.
- Design and test a chatbot addition for live questions.
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Long Term (12-24 months)
- Integrate portal and internal ticketing platform for a better customer flow.
- Look to remove downloadable function as experience and trust grows in the online system.