Rebuilding a broken Customer Support (He

Main Cover_Rebuilding a broken Customer Support.jpg

Case Study

Rebuilding a broken Customer Support (Help Section)

Role /

Lead Designer
UX Researcher

Duration /

12 months

Year /

Dec '20 - Dec '21

Since its inception, the Help section had not witnessed much change. In Dec 2020, we decided on shifting from Zoho to Freshdesk (CRM tool - Customer Relationship Management). That’s when the help section came into the limelight - since we were going to make changes, it was decided that we would focus on the overall experience as well.

It's wasn't a continuous project. It involved a lot of hits and trials. We'd create something, and see if it worked. If it did, we'd keep it! If not, we would go back to the board. This went on for a year!

My Role

I was the lead designer on this project. I worked along with my project manager in the beginning, and later we were joined by two associate project managers. I worked on the research as well as the designing part. I interviewed customers, our CS (Customer Support) agents as well as the head of the CS team. I collaborated with project managers and along with them I briefed the developers. Later I was also a part of the quality assurance team. To sum it up, this project is one of my babies!

A loud shout out to my team 🥳. View their names here!

Context

Where were we at?

Small team of CS agents

We relied on a small internal team and an outsourced team headquartered at a different location.

High 'ticket to agent' ratio

Tickets/complaints were increasing by the day. Our agents were overworked & resolution time was high.

No in-app communication

We majorly relied on emails for communication.  Customers could raise a complaint through the app - but follow-ups were handled via email.

Broken UX

Ticket tracking system was needed, better resolution visibility, quick information etc

Research

User Study

We interviewed 36 people in the age group of 20 to 50 and we interviewed 5 customer service executives and their head

We learnt that customer patience was a valuable commodity. It depletes at every stage where they get unsatisfactory to no information

Level 1:  

When we spoke to customers we got a list of issues they faced.

We understood that the customer was frustrated because their expectations were not met.

Level 2: 

We categorised their issues into 4 major categories:  

1. THEY WANTED TO BE HEARD

For example, Customers would raise a ticket in the hope that they would get a callback. But even after several hours, they did not hear from us. As a result, they raised multiple tickets.  

3. THEY WANT THE RESOLUTION - QUICK 

We learnt that customer patience is a valuable commodity. It depletes at every stage where they get unsatisfactory to no information.   In issues especially related to money - customers naturally panicked. For example when money was deducted but the order was not placed or consult/lab test was not booked. Users would panic.  

2. THEY WANTED A RESOLUTION

We hire third-party delivery services. As a result, there is a certain point between order dispatched and order received where our systems have no information regarding the order. In such cases, the customers were asked to wait - which led to user frustration.  

4. THEY WANTED TO BE KEPT INFORMED

The problem was not the wait, the problem was waiting without an end in sight. For example: Once the customer raised a ticket - there was no update on the app. Everything was shared over emails and if you missed them - you wouldn’t get any information.
 

Why were we not able to meet customer expectations?

Agent
related issues

Tried to handle these

UX
related issues

Tried to handle these

Operation/logistics
related issues

Couldn't help these at our level

PROBLEM #1

Agent related issues

To fix the user experience we needed to improve our agent's experience

SOLUTION #1

Reduce no. of Duplicate Tickets & Effective Ticket Visibility

Reduce ticket per agent ratio - Save agent’s time
Ticket visibility - If customers saw that their tickets were in progress they would not Customers would often raise multiple tickets for the same issue - because they could not see their active ticket status. They thought because of some technical glitch their was either not raised or wasn’t being attended to.

Raise a ticket - and
wait for us to call you!

v.1

In the earliest designs, the customer would enter their email address, choose a relevant query, write their complaint, and click submit. Our agents would then contact them and try to solve their queries.

There was no way on the app for the customer to check on the status of their complaint. There was no trace of their ticket at all!

Due to lack of visibility, customers raised the same complaint over and over again.

Eventually:

Duplicate tickets increased and calling back became difficult
The list of queries became restrictive

Introducing
‘Whatsapp’ with us

v.2

To tackle the epidemic of duplicate tickets we

started sharing the ticket updates over WhatsApp.

We automated the process and introduced the Whatsapp chatbot. This reduced the agent intervention and brought us some relief.

We knew this was a temporary solution, till we made tickets visible on our app. But the reduction in the number of monthly tickets was a good sign.

(ii)

v.3

We started showing the ticket statuses on our app. Instead of taking the customer away from our platform (and towards Whatsapp), we kept them on our app.

 This helped us to quite an extent.

In-house ticket status update - and restoring customer patience!

Customers don’t like to wait! They either want to be telling their problem, learning what they can do or trying alternatives.

Waiting = People feel out of control = Frustration

So every time a customer came to the help section, and found that there had been no improvement - the frustration would build up.

To vent this frustration - we introduced the ‘Refresh button’ - every time it was clicked the order status would be refreshed - and the latest update time would show up - even if there was no change in the status the time changed - it gave the customer something to do - they took some action and now they could wait a little longer. Patience was restored.

The Final Revamp

v.4

Finally, after a lot of hits and trials, we were able to identify components that worked well for us. The refresh button did not produce significant change and hence was eventually dropped.

We tried to reduce the number of steps required to raise a ticket. We brought the recent orders on the homepage - so that in one click the customer was taken to the select issue page.  

Also, we switched from ‘ticket’ to ‘enquiries’ because it clearly explained all possible customer issues:
- Queries
- Requests
- Complaints

SOLUTION #2

Make ticket less text-heavy

Introduced categories and sub-categories that narrowed down the user’s issue - and saved the agent a lot of time. Also made tracking data and finding fault lines easier.
Allow user to get quick information in a self-help format

v.1

A few issues with the earliest designs: 

We showed only one level of category  
It was a small list and didn’t cover all scenarios 
The categories weren't based on the order status 
We didn’t know which order the customer was referring to - we showed them all scenarios which weren’t applicable to them 
Tickets we text-heavy 
As the customer had to explain everything in detail - which meant a lot of reading for the agent

Old design - Limited list of categories

Introduction of Categories & Sub-categories

v.2

We created a more extensive list of categories and further divided it into sub-categories

Refined the information that reached the agents

v.3

We introduced:

Order based issues list - so customers only saw issues relevant to them
KB or Knowledge base - often customers were only looking for an update. We brought that update to them in a few steps. As a result, there was a drop in tickets raised, and the agents were no longer burdened with KB queries.

The Final revamp:
Making information easily available

PROBLEM #I 2

UX related issues

Improving methods of raising an issue easier for the customer - so that customer queries are solved effectively and efficiently.
Making monitoring changes in ticket status easy.

SOLUTION #1

Expectation setting

Informing the user in advance what to expect. Reduces the probability of them getting worried and raising tickets.
Reduce number of steps it takes to raise a ticket

v.1

Out for Delivery -
Off the Radar

SOLUTION

This was the period when the product was out for delivery via a a thirdy party DSP (Delivery Service Provider). We had no information about the package - as a result: 

No updates - We could not give the customer any update during this period - led to user frustration 
No Cancellations - Customers cannot cancel their order during this period - they had to refuse the order when it reached them

Introduced courier tracking & eventually a ‘Cancel’ CTA:

Looking back it feels how could we have not had this in the first place.

We added this to the help section as well as the ‘My orders’ section

This severely affected orders that were:

Running late
Had breached TAT

Why is my medicine delivery taking so long?
The Apollo pharmacy is right around the corner

v.2

Pharmacy location expectation setting:

Major reasons for pharmacy location related issues:

Not all Apollo pharmacies were registered for online delivery
Some medicines came from central hubs located faraway or located in different cities.

Users didn’t know where their medicines were coming from. They couldn’t understand why it took so long if another Apollo pharmacy was located nearby.

SOLUTION

Introduced ‘your medicine is coming from’ feature:
But we weren’t able to implement it due to our operational constraints :(

v.3

The Final Revamp

Web Designs

Help Homepage

Previous Orders

Previous Enquiries

Ticket Chat screen

Impact

Increase in the adoption rate of in-house help solutions (ticket chat, etc) from 7% to 70%.

While earlier people preferred continuing conversations via email, they were now choosing to respond on the ticket chat on the app & website.

Research-based learnings

Human contact is important - a bot cannot help at all times. If there is no emotional connection - people become more ruthless.
Information without actionables = frustration
In case the actionable is to wait - it should be clearly mentioned
A need was identified - A separate system for priority medicines - extremely urgent - example insulin and diabetes meds - they need to reach the customer on time in any case

Shout out to my entire team that made this project possible 🥳

Product team: 

Bhagath
Jayaraju
Shivam
Pushpendra

Dev & QA team: 

Sivananda Pati

Nikita
Sushant
George
Ravikrishna
Ankush
Laxman
Naveen
Shubham Gaurav
Suraj Kumar
Om

Customer Support team: 

Archana ma’am (Head)
Chitralekha

Manisha

Bijoyshree
Bunny
Swapna
Robin

Help sec_Shout out to team

Case Study