zoe liao
The redesign of the Customer Portal is an opportunity to increase customer satisfaction, allow Five9 to match or surpass industry standards, and improve navigation between products. The Customer Portal offers our customers helpful resources and access into our many products.
We saw a huge opportunity to revamp and restructure the customer portal. Much like the rest of the telecommunications industry, Five9 offers antiquated products that requires a lot of manual processes.
We sent out a survey to understand how users felt about the customer portal. Overall, we discovered that there weren’t many frustrations with the existing portal; however, an update on the UI “would be nice” to boost customer satisfaction. Users also stated that getting into applications is their main goal when utilizing the portal. Lastly, the CRM page is crucial to our customers because it connects valuable customer information to the Agent Desktop tool (agent interface that communicates with their customers). However, users mentioned that they struggle with finding their adapter link, which is housed on the CRM page, due to the unintuitive experience.
Insights:
I conducted a deep dive of our existing flow to determine the drawbacks of existing designs and interface elements that needed to be improved upon in order to increase the effectiveness and success of the Customer Portal.
Consistency & Standard
Five9 products have inconsistent interfaces and experiences forcing users to learn new unnecessary interactions.
Help & Support
Easy access to help and support is essential in providing a better user experience, which our current portal does not offer.
We conducted an open card sorting exercise with customers to see how people from different industries would group. In our findings, we discovered that there were a lot of similarities with the user's sorting which helped our team refine the navigation.
After identifying the common categories we were able to decide where to place corresponding content. We pooled all our applications into one navigation which would be placed on the entry level, and added a profile page to allow users to make quick customizations to their personal settings. When operating complex call center software, users may face problems tuning the software to their business needs often requiring Five9 support. Consequently, we kept support and help center as its own primary level menu for easy access, resulting in a better user experience.
I led a design thinking workshop to help creatively solve for the customer portal with my design team. The goal of the workshop was to redesign the portal to look visually aesthetic and allow for easy access into important pages. I gave our team an hour to freestyle design without the design system in consideration to push our creativity. We came up with some interesting designs that I was able to implement in my final design.
The visual interface and experience for the Adapter page was not easy to utilize. Users have mentioned that they didn’t realize the title link triggers the accordion and reveals crucial adapter links. Once we analyzed the interaction design of the existing page, I began iterating on potential alternative design directions. Our main objective for the adapter page was to make the experience obvious and clear without surfacing too much content causing cognitive overload.
For the second piece of this project I iterated concepts for the profile and application page. Since we were also under tight time constraints the developer suggested that we reuse existing components and refrain from creating new components. We also faced other development constraints including search limitations within the applications page.
We A/B tested the prototypes with our users to determine which designs performed better. All the users were excited about the update with the UI and the quick access into each product. However, for the CRM page a lot of users still voiced concerns with the interaction because the display was confusing. As a result, we were able to narrow our design direction and decided go with a design more functional and easily understood over something very visually aesthetic.
We positioned the applications panel on entry because it is most frequently used within the customer portal. We decided to move forward with horizontal card components because they currently exist in our design system and we had to make sure we were meeting deadlines to deliver our MVP.
We made the CRM integration into accordions which is a clear and common pattern where users are able to find more information on specific adapters.
Users need to have the ability to change their password and security as well as add MFA. We reconstructed the interface to delight users experience.
We have still yet to receive the full data on customer satisfaction for the customer portal since beta was just released. At the moment we monitoring the impact.
Leading the design workshop helped expedite the design exploration process and allowed for a more creative output
Moving forward I would like to explore dark mode to help with eye strain that comes with prolonged screen time and personalization of the profile page such as a theme feature.