Self Serve Issue Reporting

In Brief

The Need: Design an issue and feedback reporting system to reduce strain on operations staff in a 10-week period.

Skills In This Case Study:

  • Experience Design
  • Visual Design
  • Customer Experience
  • Marcomms Tactics

The Result: A scrappy service that eases workload on operations and offers the user a low-friction reporting system. Further a full customer experience strategy that uses language learning models, automated triggers, as well as marketing channels to better service issues, forecast needs, and identify opportunities.

Refined Requirements

Through additional discussion with the product and engineering teams, joint requirements were added, including:

Reporting prompts, manual and automated screen capture, heuristics applied to ticket sorting, and persistent availability.

Additional requirements were added to better serve the customer:

Functions that worked in modals and side panels during product transition, content strategy to manage user emotional states, and a future ideal state plan.

Research

It was important to look backwards in order to look forward.

“We have great relationships with our users; our support team escalates issues really well.”

– Operations Team Lead

The research studied our operations processes, the practices of leading organizations and how they support them to inform future-state ideation to include data use/learning language models.

Three research foci helped fuel the experience design process.

Synthesis

Insights from Internal Research:

  • Current issue reporting is limited to voice and emails only.
  • Large service interruptions cause spikes in service calls.
  • Anything that reduces friction means users have more time to service deals.
  • Emotion management will be key to maintaining relationships.

Thought Leadership Insights:

  • Issue and feedback times, dates, regions, and user group information can be analyzed.
  • Combined with LLM/heuristics from user-entered ticket details, patterns can be established for issue categorization, knowledge gap identification, training gaps in sales staff, and feature needs.

Insights from External Research:

  • Issues, feedback, and updates should be kept near each other.
  • Reporting issues without logging in is a must.
  • Certain use cases may warrant direct communication between product and customers.
  • The theory of marketing working in conjunction with operations should be explored.

Ideation and Design

The MVP state of issue reporting gathers and sorts data while communicating with the dealer user through the process.

The issue reporting flow is shown in the slides below:

The MVP state of feedback reporting gathers and sorts data for analysis by operations and design teams.

The feedback reporting flow is shown in the slides below:

Looking Ahead: Ideal State Proposals

To match and surpass other SaaS platforms, general recommendations were made:

  • Apply AI to generate further analyze data to identify needs, gaps, and opportunities
  • Reduce friction across the board with emphasis on escalation
  • Integrate marketing communications for general announcements and feature updates.
  • Automate major incident announcements.
  • Introduce a reporting feature that is accessible without login.