Customer service tooling
Context
Zoa's customer service tool was designed to enhance the lives of energy specialists, who handle calls, problems, emails, and daily issues faced by the public in the energy sector.
The problem space
At Zoa, there was an urgent need to develop an agent customer service tool and the timeline was tight. We quickly realised that to create a viable solution, we had to break down the design process into three key sections: Billing, Fuel (Gas and/or Electricity), and Electric Vehicle (EV) management.
Process
In the name of speed we decided to pinpoint the top three reasons customers might require assistance in each category by collaborating with former agents, energy specialists, and leveraging past business analytics, Armed with these insights, we embarked on a cycle of concepting and wireframing to address these specific customer journeys. This served as a solid starting point upon which we could build and expand further along the product roadmap.
We found that typically customers were contacting their energy provider about:- Bill shock, a bill being much higher then expected- Assistance with meter reading submissions, a task recommended to be completed every 3-4 months- Vehicles not charging as expected, outside of off-peak hours
The tool is broken down into 3 spaces based on what we learnt about an agents workflow:Step 1: Verify identity Step 2: Diagnose issueStep 3: Resolve issue Alongside this workflow we tackled the top 9 workflows for an energy specialist day to day as an MSS. Designing for an agent in customer service was a totally unique experience for me, typically an agent can use anywhere from 3-10 tools in order to support their customers, our goal was to create 1 tool to rule them all. Some key insights we learnt alongside this journey were:
- Utalise space and flexiability of the design. Agents work on large screens and need to see as much information in a single view with as few clicks as possible (and don't be affraid of 12pt size!).
- Agents are superusers in their space. They need hotkeys, quick pastes, hover states and welcome additional functionality hidden under a right click.
- Agents typically don't like a white background, they are using this single tool for hours everyday and too much brightness can strain their eyes
The impact
We designed a customer agent tool that prioritises and agents time and highlights issues and problems for them, as well as recommending next actions for agents to take streamlining their workflow.
