Summary
For BillFloat, I designed an internal-facing customer service portal that allowed representatives to look up borrowers’ issues within a single interface, rather than across disparate applications. With this tool, representatives could help borrowers deal with issues with their loans. We launched with support for BillFloat's two existing line-of-credit solutions, but we designed to be scalable beyond the initial two, as the company was actively pursuing the creation of new products.
Over the course of about three months, I conducted research and created wireframes for an internal support tool. My remote colleague completed the visual designs.
The Case for a Custom Support Tool
BillFloat had just launched a second loan product and was opening call centers abroad to handle the increased load on customer service. These new representatives needed access to accurate data at all times, without requiring any hand-holding from engineering. At the time, support information had to be looked up in multiple places, depending on the loan product a borrower had used. The support tool for the company's first product, the eponymous BillFloat, was custom built and not scalable. The second support tool was a customized implementation of a CRM, which was overly complicated and ill-suited to the use cases. The customer service team preferred to start fresh, rather than build on top of either existing support application.
For the primary users, customer service agents, we listed out tasks and highlighted key ones
From those tasks, I outlined the customer service flow
Internal-Facing User-Centered Design
First, I interviewed and observed customer service staff in the San Francisco office as they answered calls and emails. I broke down their workflows, starting with a robust customer lookup, and noting what information was key in answering the customers’ problems and complaints. Based on our interviews, we created designs in wireframe form; throughout the design process, my product manager and I spoke with the main stakeholder, the head of customer service, to validate these designs. After a number of iterations, we were able to start handing off screens to our visual designer, who ensured that the internal application matched our existing design vocabulary.
Lookup is key for any service representative, so searching for customer records is the lead screen
There may be more than one matching record for a successful search. Sometimes, these records are the same person and need to be merged. Other times, they may be people with similar names. There is always the option to search again.
In the visual design, the search result is prioritized above the ability to conduct another search. Multiple result types are shown here.
Results
Customer Assist’s core functionality allowed representatives to look up customers by email, phone number, or first and last names. Our solution included a tabbed interface for users to view users’ data at a high level, giving the status of previous unknowns, such as their profile completion and providing a single place to see important statuses, like payments on time (or not). The new unified design for the product view, particularly the summarized call-outs in the overview, made it easier for representatives to find information across different products.
In the wireframes, I proposed features that customer service reps needed, including a list of all loan activity for a given customer.
Some of the vocabulary in the application changed, but through visual design, the underlying structure remained constant
On the overview page, a representative can easily see if a customer has any easy-to-solve problems.
Additionally, the representative can see what types of loans the customer has, as well as the status of those loans.