Reimagining a call center application to better serve our members

Project Description

iTCC is an internal application that Inovalon call center representatives use to schedule medical assessments with members. The product team engaged the design team to help redesign and reimagine the decade plus old application. The goal was to increase efficiency leading to scheduling more assessments in less time.

Challenges

As with many older applications, features have been added over time without considering the overall user experience. A technical and design challenge to be considered was the application moving to a new development framework in Angular, where I was building new components for an initial design system.

My approach

Reimagining and redesigning

In redesigning any application that has not been touched in some time, I needed to spend time validating that previous decisions are still consistent with the user needs. 

Conducting User Research

Even though this is an internal app and the users are Inovalon employees, they are still users. The Customer Service management, product, and development have integral voices, but the users of the application need to be able to validate and invalidate assumptions.

Designing for a new framework

In moving to the new Angular framework, I needed to partner with a separate engineering resource to help build newly designed components, which increased the meetings to align on technical feasibility. 

My process

Clarify the problem

Both product and customer care leadership said the current tabbed approach from the iTCC application was problematic because it required agents to go to a different tab for ever action.

Product team's initial wireframes worked to combine many of the actions in one member profile page. We partnered to clarify initial wireframes and provided feedback. We then created current vs updated user journey to understand any changes. 

Create various mockup and prototype iterations

After various discussions, I helped to align the team on initial builds with the agent (our user) being able to:

• Search for a Member

• Access and edit the Member Profile including updating a primary care physician (PCP) to protected health information (PHI)

• Complete an intervention action (e.g. when a representative schedules an appointment with a patient)

The majority of actions would happen within the Member Profile. This eliminates the need to go to various locations to complete tasks. The mockup and prototypes created were iterative with various updates. As such, I kept them at lower fidelity so that the initial mockups would not be too polished. For example, search went though various iterations (see below) of how we would render previous calls made by agents. After aligning with the teams, I created prototypes that we could test with users.

Conducting User Research

I had heard from product and customer care leadership, but I was missing the voice of the user. In partnership with both teams, we conducted usability testing of our prototypes with 6 customer care agents who use iTCC on a daily basis. 

We walked through various tasks to help glean usability and clarity.

Building insights from the research

I synthesized the data and created insights in the Dovetail app. Below are a few examples:

All users liked that the updated Member Profile had the majority of what they needed on one page.

All users preferred the “all in one’ approach of having items on one page in the profile over the current tabular format in iTCC. Other than minor tweaks, they thought the content was well organized and took into account the most important actions for them to take.

The majority of users thought the Member Search matched their workflow.

The majority of users completed the search with little issue and thought the flow made sense. There was an issue with being able to find Advanced Search in two instances. They also liked that the results were limited to a more actionable number.

Users found the Caregiver consent flow unclear.

The majority of users found the terminology of “caregiver consent” confusing as they had not encountered it in the past. Some thought caregiver consent should appear associated with PHI consent. They had trouble differentiating the two “consents” and the majority had limited experience with this action in their work.

The insights confirmed some of the product and customer care leadership's assumptions, but also drove changes to the Member Profile and other pages. Some changes included:

• Removing the term "caregiver" and renaming to "consent to sharing PHI"

• Combining Member Information with PHI consent as this better served how agents edited

• Adding County to the Address, which reflected a requested need from agents

Impact and continued work

Impact

Within 30 days, the call center was breaking previous records for scheduled visits. Within 90 days, call center scheduled assessments had tripled.

Moving to consultative role

The application, now called Apollo, continues to be improved and I have moved to a consultative role with the product team and engineering. Product team members are using the Marvel prototyping tool to build mockups and I meet with them and the engineering team on an ongoing basis to ensure the experience continues to be optimized for the user.