Customer Needs Playbook
Creating a user-centered content plan for Card Operations.
Customer service costs increase as more associates are required to complete tasks
When a Capital One Bank customer wants to accomplish a task, sometimes they need the help of a call center associate.
The Card line of business was looking to reduce the average time to complete these tasks (about 7 minutes) to reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction.
Customer service had too much content to sort through
Agents had to sort through more than 200 case types to properly classify the customer problem.
I was tasked with creating a human-readable information architecture to increase classification accuracy and improve the associate experience while reducing costs.
I researched the call center associate experience and the existing taxonomy
Stakeholder interviews and shadowing call center agents during calls.
Analyzed data on all case types and case frequency
Content inventory of case types
Created and conducted two card sort exercises for front-line associates (bank tellers, and call center associates) and back-office associates who process the cases.
Weekly two-hour working sessions with cross-functional partners to review, gather input, and advance the work
There were too many case categories causing confusion and delays
The research revealed other opportunities and a major insight: Case types were an unnecessary abstraction of customer needs and the root cause of the operational inefficiencies.
Other facets of the content prevented clarity:
High volume of generic case types (aka catch-alls)
Case type naming conventions are abstract and not human-readable
Case types have subtypes to add specificity, but subtypes lack consistent taxonomy and standardization
Miscategorization also caused operations inefficiencies:
If data is missing, back office associates must follow up with front office through email
If the case type is miscategorized, back office associates must send the case to a different team
The process needed to be reframed around customer need
The attempts to organize customer calls into categories caused too many problems to be retained. Card sort exercise research showed that the simplest solution was to reframe around specific customer need.
Customer needs:
-Are specific (no need for catch-alls)
-Tell us why the customer actually is contacting us
-Ensure frontline and back-office speak a common language
-Makes it easier for front-line associates to capture all of the relevant data from customer
-Map 1:1 to back-office associate workflows
-Only require sensitive data when necessary
-Allow for sensitive data to be tokenized and secured
We created the Customer Needs Playbook to migrate case types
We created a Customer Needs Playbook to migrate 200+ case types from legacy tools to modern platforms. The playbook made it easy for all workflows to be based on customer needs, which mapped to back- and front-line associate language and experience.
We prototyped, pressure tested, and iterated on the playbook, then ran multiple workshops to teach our partners how to use it.
The Customer Needs Playbook is now being used to track and document both the front-line and back-office workflows as well as informing the design of the new associate platform.
Make it stand out.
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Dream it.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
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Build it.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
