SERVICE NSW
Squishing bugs at scale
Ensure customers get the support they need, efficiently, using the channels available at Service NSW.
With the influx of app users, ServiceNSW has uncovered the need to provide dedicated support for the app. Overtime, this support system has become inundated with random requests and complaints that requires manual labour and has become a major blocker / pain-point for Frontline Support staff.
My involvement was to streamline the user experience to ensure customers get the right support, efficiently while orchestrating requests from users to the right channels.
Responsibility
- Design strategy
- Research including user testing planning & synth
- Product design (end to end)
- Engineer handover & testing
- Accessibility and component compliance
Customers might send a report through, however, most the feedback is not technical so we can not address their issues
FINAL DESIGN /
Report app issues
Following design iterations, several rounds of user testing and development reviews, this was the final offering as an alternative to Gumtree 1.0 “Star ratings”
How will it help with reporting and actioning app issues?
Provide users with options
With the upcoming release of “Report app issue”, existing “Share your feedback” and future state “Help centre”, the revised concierge screen is a welcome change to streamline support and put control back in the users hands.
Smart categories
Providing succinct categories, allows users to pick relevant options depending on the issue they are experiencing. Meaning there is less guess-work or a need for technical knowledge to find a cayegory that suits. These categories also help send the issue report to relevant data centres e.g. Tableau or Salesforce to be tacked and actioned accorignly, meaning less work to process manually.
Hard work made simple
Simple, easy to fill out forms was key in recieving more reports from users. Diagnostics are sent when users submit their report, this provides Service NSW with critical information to review and make a more educated assessment of the issue and take action more efficiently.
Confirmation
Customer service is critical at Service NSW, where we ensure to make all touch points meaningful. Confirmation of the transaction provides a summary of the report and details for further follow up if needed.
Using a process to serve us
As all issues reported are placed into categories, these same categories are available as filters in Tableau – saving time and effort. We no longer need to sort cards, or have affinity mapping sessions, all feedback appears pre-packaged and ready for teams to use. Added benefit for teams to review reports that are relevant for faster turnaround.
Future proofing
FAQ’s might be an upcoming feature and designing for future state, means a little more work now for less work for the future and a seamless experience for users.
How I got there…
PROBLEM DEFINITION /
The impact of inneficient support
Service NSW provides customers with multiple options to report bugs or issues via the app, resulting in a high level of processing to determine if they are a “fundamental” app issue or other service related issues (the mobile app team can not take action on or resolve). The causal effects include more incidents to process = more time to address issues = more expensive for NSW residents.
Amount of open incidents for SNSW Staff to manually address
Amount of open incidents that are over 2 months old (some might take 6 months to address)
Cost to NSW residents per quarter, for FrontLine staff to address open incidents
SOLVING THE PROBLEM /
Digging deep
Understanding the pain-points of our support staff and the end-user was key to surfacing how to provide support efficiently through the right channels.
Discovery
Reviewing data from multiple sources including the Service NSW research repository provided sufficient context to begin our discovery. Through this process, we uncovered multiple assumptions that we addressed through user moderated user testing (user testing summary available here).
Key insights from testing
Mapping solutions
Mapping some initial flows based on the information gathered was a good starting point to understand the complexity of the solution, the data structure / flows and customer journey. This was shared with engineers and evolved over time.
Customers find the process for raising a technical issue of the mobile app lengthy and difficult to report. We needed to develop a solution that could allow users to provide us with device information – however… the majority of customers are not tech savvy enough to obtain device or versioning information.
Design pivot
Alignment with other initiatives
In the meantime, I was also involved (with other designers on my team) with FAQ’s, which were knowledge articles curated and developed by our squad to provide customers with self-help tips to attempt to resolve issues themselves. Reaching out to over 20 participants in an unmoderated questionnaire, provided a basic layout of categories that could be produced to allow users to pick relatable issues. We would then provide knowledge articles to match.
Aligning with FAQ’s meant we could aim for category consistency.
Affinity mapping & process evaluation
Review of thousands of insights from users (generic feedback), provided insight into how we should orchestrate the data provided. Manually sorting through reports only delays the response time to address issues, meaning any iterations should consider providing a solution to filtering customer verbatim.
It was also evident, users send the app team non-app related issues that should be addressed by SNSW Frontline customer support and are not within the app team remit – sorting and addressing this feedback is also key.
Ideation refinement
Working with engineers and various stakeholders, we were able to present updated concepts, findings and make suggestions for proposed user flows across multiple workshops to resolve multiple pain-points for customers and service staff. Low-fidelity screens were used to express user flows and the transfer of information to different sources. Once the user-flows were finalised and approved by all stakeholders and teams involved, high-fidelity screens were developed for implementation.
Benefits of refined concept
- less complex data-flow structure
- access to multiple types of support
- relatable categories to reduce ambiguity
- light forms to collect issue information and send device diagnostics with 0% effort
- filtering of insights from users
users are basically testing the app for us, we just need a better way to orchestrate their feedback.
SUMMARY /
Key decisions
1.
Feeling empowered to take a step back and pivot on a solution (with the support of the cross-functional team) meant we could provide customers with the best experience possible
2.
Factor in future states (for upcoming initiatives) meant we could build a solution that was scalable
3.
Being relatively new to the app team, this initiative was built on developing relationships and working collaboratively