After-sales technical support has always been a big part of the product offering for our client Markel Food Group. With more than thousands of technicians traveling to different client sites every day, it has been challenging for them to manage the workflow and ensure the highest efficiency.
To improve the situation, we identified some key issues in the workflow and designed a mobile SaaS solution that enables technicians to pre-diagnose client-reported tickets, which could tangibly reduce the time needed to complete a job.
DOMAIN RESEARCH
Identify focus area where improvement could bring the most value to business
Designing an enterprise solution requires us to first quickly understand how the industry works and the key stakeholders involved. We approached this by conducting Market Research and Stakeholder Mapping.
With the research, we learned that one of the biggest management challenges of our client comes from its customer success team. This team is extremely important because it has a high impact on brand reputation. We decide to further explore improvement opportunities in this area and identified some key problems in the current workflow.
PROBLEM
Customer support technicians often have to travel back and forth to client sites due to limited prior information about the tickets
With little prior information, technicians often have no idea what tools to bring with them for a client site visit. However, after they visit the client site and learned enough information to decide on the tools, they have to leave the client site in order to grab the correct tools needed to address the issue. It takes them longer to finish their job and clients have to wait longer to have their machine fixed.
RESEARCH
Understand the root cause of the problem
Unfortunately, our team did not have the resource to interview technicians from our client company. To move forward with the research, we decided to interview an analogous group: technicians who work at property management companies around the school. We think they might run into similar problems as technicians from our client because they also need to frequently visit tenants’ places for troubleshooting. Based on 6 user interviews, we learned the following insights:
These insights guided us to define our design opportunity:
How might we enable technicians to efficiently obtain ticket information and expert knowledge for trouble-shooting?
IDEATION
Parallel prototyping for quick Idea generation and integration
Parallel prototyping allowed our team to quickly generate ideas and discuss them with each other. We then voted the top ideas from the original sketches and put them together into one integrated solution.
PROTOTYPE
Mid-Fi prototyping to gain feedbacks on user flow and key concepts
ITERATION
We made design iterations to further improve the details on interactions
FINAL DESIGN
Pre-tzel: a mobile application that helps traveling technicians to manage and pre-diagnose their incoming service tickets
Why mobile?
Easy Access during Travel
Technicians often travel from site to site. Being able to access ticket information and log update into the system helps them manage the workflow.
How to improve knowledge transfer?
Leveraging Data for Tool Recommendations
Selecting tools can be complicated and required lots of domain knowledge. The solution reduces the cognitive load of technicians by offering tool recommendations that are supported by relevant data from all the history cases.
How to close information gap?
Ticket Pinning Feature for Efficient Communication
By using the pin, technician can ask context based question to clients, enabling both side to know which specific part of the machine they are referring to, making remote communication efficient.
