For my final year capstone project, I worked on Salesforce Chat, a tool used by sales representatives to communicate with customers who raise a request on Dell's e-commerce platform chat window. Dell Technologies sponsored this project. This project showcases a brief of the research. It illustrates the designs done to improve the experience of the chat agents who used Salesforce Dell Connect to communicate with the customers. Some parts of the projects are denied access or masked, abiding by the confidentiality of the project.
DESIGN PROCESS
What was my approach?
Designing a sales service portal is complicated as it involves an extensive sales ecosystem, understanding the stakeholders and their tasks, and the importance and hierarchy of information in processing customer and sales requests. I broke down this complex design process into phases that first catered to understanding the product, users, and technology, then went ahead to build solutions to enhance the experience of the tool.
RESEARCH GOALS
What are we trying to analyse?
Conducting research for a tool used by a large ecosystem and used for multiple activities by the stakeholders can be confusing as it is very likely for anyone to get lost in this pool of information.
For better clarity of the research goals and the niche I was designing for, I categorized my research into sections that would help answer the question: what was I trying to analyze in this research?
01
Experience Analysis
Understand the ease of use, data visualization, desirability, accessibility, optimization
02
System Analysis
Understand the structure of the product in terms of page navigation, recognition, error prevention
03
Interface Analysis
Design system, system consistency, system communication, components
04
Technology Analysis
Privacy, technology factors, company goals, target audience, plan of action
USER PROFILE
Who are the users?
Sales representatives
SFDC usage:
15 - 20 chats per day, 5 -6hrs/ day
Responsibilities:
Provide customer support, initiate and process sales
Tools used:
Bio
Consumer product knowledge experts and customer experience specialists. The primary focus is to sell, retain and support customers via chat.
Personality
Needs to be extremely curious and empathetic, have customer service skills, persuasive conversational skills, multi-tasking, and excellent emotional control.
Goals
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Meet their daily, weekly, and quarterly individual and team targets.
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Provide accurate information and solutions to customer queries.
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Quote and process orders for customers accurately and quickly.
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Follow up with customers on pending questions and quotes.
Frustrations
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Multi-tasking and context-shifting to support multiple customers.
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Duplicate information in excel manually to track daily activities.
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Lack of automated tools for efficient productivity tracking and reporting.
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Insufficient auto-capture customer information for context and providing proactive solutions
COGNITIVE EVALUATION
Cognitive load is the mental load associated with the amount of information displayed on an interface and navigation across pages to complete the tasks at hand. Methods defined by design experts, such as the Nielsen Normal group, are used to find this cognitive load. I used two ways to evaluate the current design and the user's experience with the tool.
Hierarchial Task Analysis
It defines the hierarchy of the goals and tasks associated with a task flow.
Heuristic evaluation
It evaluates the design of the user interface and its compliance with the users.
What did I find?
Mapping the results from the cognitive assessment test to the purpose of the tool, I observed a gap between the tasks performed by the users, the information displayed on the interface, and the process of navigation through the pages required to complete a given job.
Navigation
Navigating through pages to edit data involved too many steps.
Accessibility
Accessing frequently used features was complex and increased reliance on external tools.
Presentation
Data presented on the interface was not organised based on usage priority.
