(I supported the early stages of design for this release)
"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 OC."
- PM for Omichannel
Supporting Agent & Admin
In order for an agent to make and receive phone calls, an admin must first acquire a valid phone number and set up channels to route calls to the right agents. This was a large effort tackled by our full team of designers. My work (highlighted below) spanned both admin and agent scenarios.
Admin: acquiring a phone number
To acquire a phone number, an admin must select from a set of desired features to determine their plan. My challenge here was distilling these features into a simple wizard while accounting for the unpredictable time it could take to process, then bridging the admin to their next step of adding this number to a workstream.*
*A workstream combines routing logic with AI bots and a host of other features to connect customers with the help they need.
In order to complete this process, the admin must set up a voice-specific channel using a phone number, then determine settings for hold music and the primary language. One problem I faced here was how to direct the admin to number acquisition if they hadn't completed that process.
Agent: making calls
Agents are now able to make calls now that a channel has been set up with a valid phone number. For this effort, I contributed the initial concepts for the softphone dialer and designed for how agents can report incoming spam numbers.
Evolving concepts for the dialer UI. The final design was largely influenced by the Teams dialer. Important consideration were UI feedback when dialing a valid number or a previously blocked number, and allowing agents to select the outbound number they would be calling from.
Reporting and blocking numbers
It's also important to allow agents to report incoming calls in the case of spam. I helped to design this process on both ends: an agent would first report the number, then an admin would review any reported numbers and either block or dismiss them.
Modifications had to be made to the call UI to clarify which participant was being reported. The admin side also had numerous challenges, namely how to handle a setting that allowed automatic blocking of numbers. This was a set-and-forget feature that would block numbers passing a certain threshold of reports. It needed to be prominent enough so admins would notice it during their first-run, but not so dominant that it would distract from the list once configured. I settled on placing it below a list with fixed height; it would remain above the fold, but would not be a primary focus on the page.
Research
I participated in several interactive sessions, taking the role of an agent or customer, where I helped participants complete various tasks around calling and monitoring. Our researcher monitored these tasks and interviewed the participants about their experience. These sessions produced valuable insights into how customer service agents and their supervisors operate.
Integrated calling with case information and consistent design is our competitive edge.
"Service Max and Salesforce are not integrated like this."
Supervisor reactively and proactively manage escalations
"If I’m involved. The case is not typical.“
"Service Max and Salesforce are not integrated like this."
Supervisor reactively and proactively manage escalations
"If I’m involved. The case is not typical.“
Chat-based consulting is common and important
"They’ll message the person first to make sure they’re available and knows what’s going on before transferring."
"They’ll message the person first to make sure they’re available and knows what’s going on before transferring."
Trial experience
Perhaps the largest effort beyond core features for Voice was designing a more enticing trial experience. We needed to sell people on the experience, and what better method than letting them try it out themselves?. The aim was to automatically create a new voice channel for admins with just a few clicks, which they use to immediately start making calls and trialing with their agents. I was involved in early stages of planning for this effort before the end of my contract.
Other things I worked on
I worked on several other tasks during my time with OC, but many of these do not fit neatly into any sort of narrative. Below are several examples of my additional design efforts.
Advanced workstream settings.
Concept for Supervisor call record.
Sound notifications for customer chat.
Takeaways
Working on Omnichannel was a crash course for me 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 within them. 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 effort it took to create this exciting new 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.
