Designing Enterprise Tools for Omnichannel CX

In the previous article we had talked about what omnichannel CX means for us at Airtel. We also spoke about how each agent at a call center and store is pivotal in ensuring a great CX and also stressed on the fact their jobs are not at all easy.

Designing Enterprise products can be quite a challenging task.

To design any good product we have to understand the end users’ daily lives, the environment they work in, the processes they need to follow and observe how they solve customer problems. We discussed these in our previous article when we spoke about Rubina, one of our call center advisors.

Now lets dive into how we designed a tool that now helps Rubina :)

What were the problems that we were solving for?

When our customers call Airtel customer service (121), our advisors need to follow certain protocols and processes in order to solve their problems. For example:

• They are given a series of instructions to follow and the type of questions they need to ask depending on a customer’s problem.
• They need to follow various courtesy protocols like greeting a customer and welcoming them to the Airtel Brand.
• They need to follow processes for complaint escalation, frauds, various issues relating to network problems, billing etc.
• They also need different tools that can help them follow all these protocols and processes.

To begin understanding these processes, we visited various call centers across the country to know the advisors’ current ways of working, pain points and opportunity areas for us. We uncovered the following :

• There was no one single tool which could handle customer queries from all of our businesses. Advisors had to switch between multiple portals / CRMs (Customer Relationship Management systems) to gather information about the customer’s current orders and complaints.
• There was no easy way for an advisor to access a previous conversation that the customer might have had with another advisor for the same case. An advisor had to switch tools to access this.
• Navigating between multiple data heavy tools also increased the cognitive load on our advisors.

An advisor quote — “I have to navigate between multiple tools to retrieve different sets of information to provide a solution”

All these impediments led to an increase in the cognitive load on advisors which led to an increase in the Average Handling Time (AHT) per customer call and frustration for impatient customers. Airtel prides itself in being customer focused, so there were improvements that were needed here.

All these findings led to the creation of a new Service Portal to assist our customers’ problems.

This is a tool where the advisors can see all connections of a customer (Postpaid, Broadband, DTH etc.) in a single view with an experience that focuses on ease of use and on providing faster solutions to the customers.

The new tool focuses on reducing cognitive load as much as possible on our advisors by showing only relevant information and focuses on tasks that immediately matter.

Key features of the new Service Portal

The Dashboard

The dashboard comprises of the 3 important sections and is crucial in providing a complete customer overview to the advisor.

1. Customer Overview
2. Complaints and orders.
3. A customer profile section that shows the interaction history of the customer with Airtel.

Customer overview — The advisors could now see all the critical information of the customers’ connections in the customer overview tile right on top of the dashboard.

The customer overview tile

• Quick actions like enabling ‘Do not Disturb’ can be performed right upfront .
• Status of key benefits for OTT services and their corresponding actions are now visible in the Systems Check card.
• The advisor can now prompt the customer to activate the Airtel Thanks App to help them solve problems on their own can now be done quickly with a single click.

Complaints and Orders — If there is a complaint (service request) or an active customer order, it gets displayed in the table. If there are no active service requests or orders then the table does not show in the dashboard.

Service Request / Order Table

Alerts — An ‘alerts’ section was introduced on the top to inform a customer of a certain outage in service perhaps due to maintenance or any other form of disruption in any of the Airtel services.

Upfront notifications for easy customer resolution

Interaction history — The service agent could now view all the previous interactions the customer has had with the company in the last one week. This would be visible on the left, below the customer profile details.

Interaction history

Multiple connections visibility — More importantly, all the customers’ connections are visible to the agent right above the overview tile and there are shortcuts to quickly navigate to other connections.

The Dropdown shows all the other connections that the customer has.

The Service Portal is not just a customer dashboard but a complete overview of a customer profile that shows various aspects of a customer’s profile like payments, billing, plan, order details etc.

An example of a Payments page.

Impact of the new design

All these features and ‘actions to perform’ were earlier available on different legacy tools and the new Service Portal has reduced complexity in handling multiple screens which has led to simplified customer handling wherein now just one advisor can handle multiple calls related to different Airtel products and services.

This also reduces the need to transfer calls which is something that customers don’t like.

As of now more than 10,000 advisors like Rubina are using the Service Portal across call centers and stores. With the launch of this new tool the overall Average Handling Time for a customer has also reduced by 10–15 %.

The Service Portal has enabled a 50% reduction in time to onboard new businesses, pages and journeys by eliminating hard coded journeys because of modular UI templates.

There is a lot of work that goes on behind creating complex enterprise tools:

• In depth user research
• Documentation that enables all cross functional teams to come together
• Multiple design iterations and cross functional design reviews
• Feedback mechanisms and user testing
• Agility of delivery based on prioritisation of user and business needs.
• Building an extensive library of design components that enable us to deliver faster.

We shall touch upon these topics later.