Creation of the Agent Assist bot for American Specialty Health
UX Research, UX Design Internship, UX Strategy
This case study details the process of making the internal app's chatbot that will better assist customer service agents while they are supporting members on calls at American Specialty Health. The intention is to improve call times and agent attrition rates.
Brief: The UX Design team was asked to empathize with call center employees as they help members with phone calls, emails, and chats.
Problem: The problem is that agents were reaching out to different resources outside of ASHcore (the customer relationship management system where agents log all their calls and interactions with members) to get members’ questions answered. We wanted to reduce agents’ average handling time for them to support more members and also lower the attrition rate of agents.
Solution: Help agents feel more confident answering members by designing a chatbot to support the agents.
Deliverables: Survey, Affinity Map, User Persona, Wireframes, Shareholder Feedback Sessions, Interactive Prototype
Timeline: 6 weeks/ 3 sprints
Team: 2 UX Designers and 1 Product Owner
Process: Double Diamond- Discover, Define, Design, Deliver
Discovery:
We began by discovering what agents needed while assisting members on the line.
Interviews:
How did agents deal with difficult questions while on the line with members?
We interviewed 7 customer service agents with a range of experiences from 1 month to 13 years.
Here are some of the questions that our team wanted to find out from the call center agents-
- “what do you do when you need help answering a member’s question?”
- “What are your challenges as a call center agent?”
- “What is the most time-consuming problem that you get every day?”
We learned that they are currently using an information base called Sharepoint as a resource to search for answers, an agent-assist phone line to call for help, and Microsoft Teams to reach out to colleagues.
One agent reported that while she used both Teams and the agent-assist line- she knew that it took more time for someone to pick up the phone on the line and that she could get a quicker answer via messaging coworkers in Teams.
Survey + Takeaways:
After discussing goals and tactics with shareholders, we sent out a survey to find out how helpful the current tools are in helping the agents during member calls.
Though Sharepoint, the information base outside of ASHCore, is used every day- agents feel it is too time-consuming to go through all of the information to get what you’re looking for while assisting members. One agent said that the “info is not where you expect you would find it.”
Looking at the chart you can tell that agents felt most comfortable contacting other colleagues through Teams with 82 percent of use within a month.
The agent assist line had mixed results in helpfulness. Agents were often still redirected to the knowledge base Sharepoint.
One agent said: “Sometimes they just direct me to work instructions and that does not help when I am already confused and unsure of what I just read.”
Based on these results we concluded that getting an answer can take a long time and there needs to be a quicker way to get an answer while an agent is on the line with a member.
Define (the problem):
Next, we gathered notes from our interviews and grouped them under categories to better understand our problem.
Our affinity map showed us different areas that the customer service agents would need help with in their day-to-day tasks. It became clear that phone calls ran longer and overwhelmed agents when they did not know how to help the member and had to go into the information base, Sharepoint, to look for answers.
so we asked-
“how might we make agents feel more confident while on calls?”
Enter Helpful Harper
We created the persona “Helpful Harper” in order to help us focus on solving for our target audience. It’s an amalgamation of the customer service fitness agents that we interviewed and received responses from, from the survey. In this case, Helpful Harper is in her mid-twenties, she’s been working at ASH for around 3 years and she is proud of her ability to help members with their needs.
It’s important for her to feel confident helping members effectively and quickly and she needs to have fast, effective support from ASH to help her do that.
Currently, she uses Sharepoint, the assist line, and Microsoft Teams to help her with more complicated members' questions.
Design of the Chatbot:
We created the “Agent Assist Chatbot” to help Harper find answers more quickly.
We took inspiration for the chatbot from the chatbot that was already in place on ASH’s external sites.
We wanted the bot to take up minimal space and created an icon that lives in the right-hand corner of ASHCore.
The products that ASH offers have varying answers depending on the product, so in order to assist agents with their questions, we created an option of product before they ask their questions.
The bot stays with page changes within ASHCore, and is able to move between different internal applications.
The designer dev handoff is currently under way and we have been working very closely with the third-party software Genesys to build out our chat bot.
Next Steps and Learnings:
I have been leading continuous discovery meetings with shareholders and leaders of the customer service fitness teams at American Specialty Health biweekly in order to nurture a relationship with the customer care team leaders and develop a better understanding of their teams’ needs.
Together we have been working on an opportunity solution tree that highlights problems as opportunities and allows for multi-solution brainstorming to occur and to view the problem as a need that can be solved in a multitude of ways.
Thank you! And feel free to reach out with any questions :)
