Cut customer support time in half by digitalizing the old bureaucratic approach.
Intro
A while ago (6 years ago), I was part of the redesign process for a fantastic company that aims to help people with criminal records integrate into society.
The problem was that people primarily relied on calling customer support to determine if they were eligible for the services provided and how much it costs.
Most of the audience consisted of people who were not tech-savvy and wanted to see if they were eligible for a specific service as quickly as possible.
My role was to help the product team (a small team of 5) to (re)design the onboarding process. As always, the main constraint was the timeline. When you’re new to a team and they didn’t gain your trust time is always a constraint.
The main metric we wanted to improve was the time to value. Put simply, time to value is the time it takes a new potential customer to experience value (or reach their first aha moment), which in our case was to check if their eligible or not.
Process
We started by mapping out our current flow for determining someone’s eligibility.
Basically, we mapped out the user flow for every possible usage scenario. This was the simplest way to align everyone on the expectations and core mechanics. And we had a lot of scenarios.
Then I proposed compressing everything in a more digestible format. We iterated on this diagram until we felt we are comfortable testing it with a few users.
Results
After we tested this with a handful of users we realized that our onboarding is very long, and there is a 100% chance that people will not complete it, so the main insight was that we have to save their progress as they move along and allow the customer support team to pick up where they have left, but overall we cut the support calls by 50% compared to what it was before.
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