Designing to boost productivity

Context

Understanding the challenge

When analyzing customer service in companies, I found that although many offer service through various channels, the most important limitation for a sustainable omnichannel experience is the human factor. Knowing that interactions with people are the ones that add the most value to the experience, I identified three key actors with whom to address the dilemma:

I led and participated in an investigation that covered all of Spain, combining the review of previous investigations, remote interviews, and trips to customer service points where I can observe the day to day and carry out interviews and workshops with the teams.

The main learnings and findings of this research were the following:

1. The way of working is marked by the indications of headquarters and the local management.
2. Workplace digital products very often do not facilitate the tasks marked by the way of working.
3. When internal products or processes interfere with customer service, work teams project their frustration on their relationship with customers and supervisors.
4. Changes in internal products can be perceived as control or micromanagement strategies by the teams.

Design process

Relationship with customers

In the research we explored the way in which the different teams relate to customers, in addition to analyzing how much those practices aligned with the company's positioning strategy. We study each gap to understand why it happens and opportunities for correction.

This work allowed us to enrich the customer journey with an additional analysis of key moments of interaction with people, on which to propose specific actions.

Sorting the work

In parallel to the analysis of the relationship, we deepen in understanding what the day-to-day life of customer service teams is like. Through direct observation, tool analysis, interviews and surveys, we are able to model time usage along with the frictions of task execution.

Identifying opportunities and barriers

By analyzing the set of team behavior, work models and tools that aim to articulate this whole set of factors, we defined a series of barriers that hinder productivity and conditioned the success of the rest of the initiatives.

The breakdown of the variables that make up these barriers helps us to define a guide to good practices. Something we observe is that, on a recurring basis, the definition of product design processes is addressed separately. Among the circumstances that are usually excluded are: the dependencies between tasks and people, the recurrence of tasks and the ability to feedback between tasks.

1. Dependencies between tasks and people.
2. Recurrence of tasks, including your ability to anticipate.
3. Ability to feedback between tasks.

As part of this good practice guide, I decided to synthesize the learnings in a working framework for the design of productivity boost, which has been applied in real products, achieving significant improvements and allowing us to iterate and refine the framework.

Results