CALL CENTER PRODUCTIVITY PLATFORM
Saving Nordstrom’s credit organization millions of dollars per year – by building 30 seconds at a time.
Overview
The way Nordstrom documented and distributed important procedural, legal, and policy updates for use by their credit call center representatives was causing the company to lose money. The method chosen was through a website on a shared folder, created in Front Page 2004, with no search functionality, and topics organized alphabetically.
Credit reps often spent minutes with customers on hold while looking up the appropriate procedures for a given situation. This lead to the company needing to over-schedule call center reps, costing them money in lost productivity and increased onboarding time.
Goals
At the time I started this project, I was working for Nordstrom as a credit call center rep.
- Reduce time on task: I wanted to design a tool to allow me to do the most common tasks at my job quickly and easily.
- Improve overall efficiency: I spent the time between calls – usually no more than 30 seconds – to design and develop a web based application to improve my efficiency. I was focused on simple, intuitive UI and an easy-to-develop and maintain code base.
- Easy to build & scale: If the tool worked well for me, I wanted it to be scalable to my coworkers – not just in customer support, but also retention, legal, marketing, and communications.
Role
Project Manager / UX Designer / UI Designer / Developer / QA
Scope
7 Web apps
End-to-end UX & UI design
UX Research
UX Testing
QA Testing
Web Development
Timeline
April 2009 – April 2013
Tools
Pencil & Paper
Notepad (text editor)
Internet Explorer
Key Metrics
Working with my managers and call center directors, we identified and timed the most common call center call types and representative actions.
- Locating policy and procedural updates.
- Evaluating and deciding new credit card applications.
- Finding a phone number for another representative.
- Sending a request for a new card.
- Finding an e-mail address for another representative.
- Finding a link to a system to research past purchases.
- Launching a fraud investigation for new purchases.
Research Process
With the permission and oversite of management, I sat with different call center representatives and timed them as they completed the tasks identified in our metrics discussion, hundreds of times per task. These times were then averaged to give an average time for each task.
I reviewed each iteration with management for feedback, and sat with a selection of testers to watch as they used my tool to complete these tasks. I timed each task to get an average time for the revised workflow.
Where the impact of the new tool fell short of expectations, I revised it as necessary.
Design Process
Working in the 30 seconds I had between phone calls, I designed, developed, and tested the tool I created. The tools I used were limited to:
- Pencil and paper
- Notepad (text editor)
- Internet Explorer
The Pitch
Over the course over 4 years, I designed, developed, researched, iterated, and improved the tool working with a small batch of volunteer testers.
After 4 years, I was able to pitch the tool to our C-Level management to get buy-in to develop and deploy a robust version for our credit call center representatives and others within the organization.
The CEO greenlit the project, and I was promoted to the role of UX Engineer, charged with implementing my project company-wide.
Impact
The pitch and project were tremendously successful in cultural impact, measurable bottom line savings, and onboarding costs.
“Why aren’t we doing this already?”
This quote came directly from Nordstrom bank CEO Kevin Knight at the end of my pitch presentation.
The pitch and the project had the effect of uniting the credit organization around its first custom-design & development project.
$7 million/year in initial productivity savings
As we implemented this project across credit, retention, legal, marketing, fraud, communications, and marketing, we measured and time-on-task impact of the tool as it was implemented. We were able to prove a net cost savings of $7 million/year in the first year, with improving year-over-year returns as the business scaled.
Cost of New Hire Onboarding Reduced 75%
Our new system allowed us to simplify and streamline our onboarding process. We reduced a 2-week class that was forced to explore in-depth processes to a 3-day process exploring the use of the basic credit management UI and the tool I created.
Learnings
The project was the most formative experience of my life.
- Great designers can come from anywhere: While I had no formal training in UX, UI, or web development, my self-taught, self-driven education allowed me to create a high-impact product while working in unconventional ways.
- Practice and approach trump tools: Throughout the four years of work on the process, budget and security constraints kept me from using industry-standard design tools (or anything close to them.) Despite this, I was able to use the bare minimum tools to create systems that saved Nordstroms millions.
- A love of design & problem solving: Working on the project lead to me discover UX design, and a user-centered approach to problem-solving. This was a life-changing revelation that launched a 15-year career in UX design and leadership.