A seamless voice-based customer service platform for your business.
"Even with the rise of digital channels and self-service, telephony remains a critical channel.... We see a major opportunity to bring a differentiated offering to the market. By integrating with Azure Communications Service and extending our current assets, we can offer a telephony solution directly within Dynamics..."  
- PM for OmniChannel
Problem
OmniChannel only supports chat-based methods while many of our competitors have introduced solutions for voice. Without an equivalent, OmniChannel risks not meeting the needs of customers, thus losing business to competitors.
Goals
– Create a new voice platform for customer service. 
– Admins should be able to enable voice features, acquire phone numbers, and configure queues for their agents.
– Allow agents to make and receive customer phone calls in the existing OmniChannel UI.
– Agents should be able to block spam numbers. 
– Let supervisors monitor call history and transcripts to evaluate agent performance. 
Solving for multiple roles
OmniChannel spans many personas: admins, agents, supervisors, and customers. Due to the wide scope and urgency, a full team of designers was assigned to Voice. Our team exchanged work fluidly, often jumping between tasks as our capacity fluctuated.  
Acquiring a phone number
The first step toward configuring a voice channel is acquiring a phone number. This requires multiple complex steps and can take an indeterminate amount of time to process. 
My solution was to distill these steps into a simple wizard, an established pattern in OmniChannel, so admins could be walked through the complexities step-by-step.
*A workstream combines routing with AI bots and a host of other features to connect customers with the help they need. 
Routing phone numbers
To complete this process, admins must set up a voice-specific channel using their new phone number, then determine settings for hold music and primary language. 
Once again, I designed a wizard to walk admins through this process. 
Agents: making calls
The next requirement was to design a softphone dialer so agents could make and receive phone calls using the voice channel set up by their admin. 
Final dialer UI
Reporting and blocking numbers
An important consideration was allowing agents to report incoming spam calls. I helped to design this process on both ends: an agent would first report the number, and then an admin would review the reported numbers to determine if they should be blocked. 
This process would be laborious for the admin if they had to review a large volume of reported numbers. To save time for admins, I designed a setting to automatically block reported numbers. This set-and-forget feature would automatically block numbers passing a certain threshold of reports.
Admin: turning on auto-block
Other tasks
I worked on several other solutions for supervisors and customers. I have included previews below as these do not fit neatly into a story. 
Advanced workstream settings.
Advanced workstream settings.
Concept for Supervisor call record.
Concept for Supervisor call record.
Sound notifications for customer chat.
Sound notifications for customer chat.
UX research
I participated in several interactive research sessions, taking the role of an agent helping customers complete various tasks related to calling and monitoring. Our UX researcher monitored these sessions and surveyed participants about their experience. 
High-level takeaways:
– The core agent active call experience is intuitive and easy to use. All types of participants spoke highly of the overall experience.
– An integrated calling feature is our competitive edge.
– Consulting and call transfer are clear in concept, but not fully aligned with the user mental model.
Retrospective
Working on OmniChannel was a crash course in the customer service space. Voice was an urgent mission with a tight deadline and high expectations. I had to rapidly adapt to complex new systems while designing user-friendly solutions. It's more notable that all of this happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, so 100% of my experience was remote.
My contributions represented only a small portion of the efforts required to create this competitive suite of features. I have to give a massive thanks to all the UX designers, PMs, engineers, researchers, and content designers who made this launch a success. Although I left the team before Voice went public, I was very excited to see the official press release while knowing that my efforts helped lay its foundation. 

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