Forty per cent of the time Telus’s frontline agents spent on a call went on searching through multiple back office systems to answer a single customer enquiry. Customers sat on hold while it happened, and the business wore the reputation cost.
The economics of that are brutal and simple. In Customer Experience, one second less average handle time is worth roughly $1M in annual cost savings.
Casa was the answer: one system for Care, Sales and Case Management for frontline team members. The goal was a unified “One Telus” experience across every product and service, built on a 360 view of the customer. Reduce handle time, call volume and transfers. Cut the eleven week agent training curve. Stop revenue leaking through the gaps between tools.
I led the digital transformation of the customer care portfolio, consolidating the tool estate rather than redesigning each system separately. That meant deciding at portfolio level what merged, what stayed and what was retired before any screen design began. Roadmap and prioritisation were shared with a partner product manager.
We designed for Christine, a mobility frontline care agent who takes around 162 calls a week. Her problem statement was the whole project in five lines: she is trying to answer her clients’ queries to the best of her knowledge, but she spends a lot of time looking for the right information, because she switches between several applications while listening and responding to the caller, which makes her feel exhausted and extremely frustrated.
The work ran in two phases. First, identify the usability issues, address the most critical, and solve for the ideal experience. Then deep customer empathy through agent sit-ins and interviews, stakeholder workshops to align on hypothesis and system dependencies, jobs to be done framed around the agent’s learning curve rather than the software’s feature list, an MVP release with live feedback capture, and iteration with small focused groups.
The jobs came down to three: learn, investigate, then communicate and sell.
Along the way COVID moved the ground under the project. Customers chose self serve in far greater numbers, and cross-channel collaboration increased, which pushed the future state vision towards a single cross-channel platform serving customers, agents and store reps from shared experience components.
Ask the right questions and sharpen the axe.
Customer needs have to be mapped not just to product needs but to the agent’s job and career needs as well.
Wait for the right time to pitch disruptive ideas.
Design is a team sport.
Systems thinking requires zoom in and zoom out, because the stories are interdependent.
Enterprise solutions projects are like marathons. You have to keep going.