The business of visualizing conversations
Improving the understanding of customer conversations
Contact center line managers need to efficiently navigate, sometimes lengthy, calls to find specific feedback interactions so they can take action to ensure a healthy customer experience. The conversation display is a visualization tool of a call recording that allows users to navigate a call, overlay sentiment and other call analytics, and pinpoint critical events visually.
I led design, managed research, and ultimately redesigned how our users interacted with conversations.
User interviews revealed that interacting with the conversation display was not intuitive. They didn’t understand they were looking at a single call and were not efficiently navigating the call using the existing solution. Customers were frequently listening to the recordings without leveraging the solution to jump ahead to identified hotspots.
In addition, the existing data enrichment (sentiment, tone, emotion analysis) was under-leveraged and not being scaled to the entire call. The majority of users weren’t making use of enrichments that offered shortcuts to important parts of sometimes very lengthy calls.
Finally, the current solution wasn’t adaptive to other possible enrichments—there was a “one size fits all” approach that didn’t work for the wide variety of organizations licensing the product.
As a learning resource the current solution lacks basic functionality that enables learning and application of its content. Adding highlights, taking notes, and bookmarking features are non-existent. Users digest and absorb in different ways, the ability to customize, curate, and personalize is lacking today.
Users are seeking unauthorized digital copies, creating a market for pirated content. Customers experience a long, unnecessary and outdated password security process. Download ability is fragile, hindering the access users are entitled to and does not support seamless cross-device access.
The current solution does not support easy access and distribution for our B2B customers, a giant missed opportunity. Finally, the current experience is not ADA, WCAG or Section 508* compliant.
PMI’s intellectual property spans content types, from books and magazines to videos and podcasts, their content is siloed across products and teams creating a disjointed user experience.
Because our customers had diverse needs—changing from industry to industry—we had to focus on building a flexible solution instead of an optimized solution.
When focusing on an adaptive solution, we ran the risk of overwhelming users. We approached the solution space with a strong principle of sensible defaults: deliver the insights we can up front but allow the user to deviate on their terms when necessary.
90% of the time leveraging consistent patterns will help in your product’s overall understandability. However, an inconsistent/novel experience is sometimes warranted if for interactions that are highly specialized.
With many different user types we knew we needed to create a flexible solution that would provide a personalized and customizable experience. We explored different structures for representing time, system enrichments, and customized user enrichments that would provide the right structure to a complex interaction.
We ultimately landed on a “conversation spine” that brought the visualization into a familiar pattern and allowing users to choose a series of configurable lanes enabled them to select the enrichment type and visualization method that worked best for their use case.
With many different user types we knew we needed to create a flexible solution that would provide a personalized and customizable experience. We explored different structures for representing time, system enrichments, and customized user enrichments that would provide the right structure to a complex interaction.
We ultimately landed on a “conversation spine” that brought the visualization into a familiar pattern and allowing users to choose a series of configurable lanes enabled them to select the enrichment type and visualization method that worked best for their use case.
With the completion of the redesign we saw a marked improvement in our telemetry and overall “happy buzzing” from our sales, marketing, and professional services colleagues. The sensible defaults allowed it to be easy for a novice yet the ability to customize the enrichments allowed anyone to define what their call recording “treasure map” was. This feature acts as a “crown jewel” capability—blending the product’s differentiator with a familiar user experience for anyone who messages on a smartphone.
