Healthcare Manufacturing

Unplanned service call optimization

Insights & Takeaways

Even though there are tools and technologies, portals and apps do not result in the right outcomes in terms of call center volumes.
Mergers and aquisitions can end up dealing with a large portfolio or applications, inconsistant user experience and confusing interactions across different locales for the same functionality.
Human Centered Design as the driver to rationalization leads to a collaborative framework across various teams, understanding what users want and insights for functional and non functional requirements.
A heuristic evaluation helps ensure the univeral best practices have been implemented to create intuitive and easy to use interactions.
Heuristics are informed by how users expect to interact with various products based on cognitive factors such as visual perception, attention, memory, decision-making and so on. Violating design heuristics leads to decreased performance and lower quantitative usability or ease-of-use scores
Simplicity, Recognition. Consistency whether in navigation, colors, fonts, art direction, and tone all lend to a more visible brand, especially if all these elements are implemented across multiple platforms and across public or customer facing various sites and subsites.
Studies reports that operational improvements and behavioral-psychology initiatives raised customer-experience scores by atleast 10 points. Such initiatives allow a faster growth, brand awareness and profitability.

Overview

Even though there is a good understanding of the customers and there are tools like portals with the right central idea – as in bringing together various insights, data related to the customers under a single experience however it does not take a comprehensive and long term approach, thus leading to low adoption rates. It also did not result in reduction of call center volume. Usability issues were noted as leading to additional call center volumes. In certain areas it was determined that the outcomes were resulting in wrong dispatches and issues/incidents were not being resolved properly, sometimes leading to duplicate or redundant efforts. In the ecosystem of the service request, communication is a key challenge. Data insights can provide the customer the value of a predictive or conditional work. Call center employees need to be empowered with the right tools to provide a contextual and proper insight into customer activities. Terminologies, nuances for regional and locales, multiple systems etc. to avoid points of failure.

“Using design as a driver to reduce call center volume and optimization ensures a predictive, contextual, proactive and transparent effort to understand customer issues, operational status and engage more actively. Every percentage of effeciency in quality of service results in millions of dollars in savings, customer retention and adoption improvements.”

Challenge

Challenges were identified under 3 categories

1. Gaps in research
Lack of omni channel and unified journey
Reduced customer satisfaction
Lack of predictability for users
Product not aligned to business

2. Gaps in Translation
Reduced customer adoption
Drop offs, loss of trust
Excessive rework costs in maintenance and code rewrites

3. Gaps in Design & Implementation
Reduced customer experience
User fatigue, Lack of intuitiveness
Gradual reduction in use

Outcome

A human centered approach was followed to build a roadmap that covers all user Persona needs.
Mapped out current as-is process informed by contextual inquiries
Quantified each User Persona need.
Created a map of all User Persona needs, examining overlap and unique requests
Develop a roadmap for meeting critical User Persona needs in an omni-channel framework
Revamp user interface design to encompass design heuristics; evaluate new designs to ensure none of the heuristics are violated
Conduct task-based usability testing and quantify user performance, usability of designs, user preferences; test coded applications, not just clickable prototypes to assess performance
Track usability scores over iterations, watching for significant deviations in quantitative scores.

Days 1-30

Initiation, Stakeholder Interviews & Viability

Given the complex ecosystem, millions of site visitors and environment, a detailed plan was put in place to build a secure and scalable solution. Our experts worked with the solution enablement team, digital marketing, architects and platform managers to understand requirements and align on vision. A study was conducted to create a unified experience, single point of control for the overall brand enablement and delivering content as a service using a cross platform framework.

Days 31-60

Evaluation, Benchmarking & Feasbility

A current state assessment was performed on the overall user experience to identify pain points and areas for improvements. As the overall external facing sites and applications was 24, benchmarking was performed and usability scores obtained on key customer and government facing sites and applications. The design team worked with the marketing and platform team to clearly define corporate branding. The user experience layer was seperated for a single point of control from content.

Days 61-90

Design System, Prototypes and Proof of Concept

The unified user experience would be delivered through Personalized dashboards, Comprehensive and contextual view of the customer, Detailed insights into service call history, Maintenance or other incident schedules, Billing information, Contracts and other documents, Service planning, Traffic analysis, Collaborative Team - providing insights to all related and interested personas - direct or indirect.

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Experiential healthcare by design