3 S’s to Customer-Centric Service Design for A Big Smile
It was around 2009 at EmblemHealth, where I had oversight of the Service Desk operation, a traditional help desk operation plagued by password resets consuming 30%+ of all contacts. This wasn’t unusual at the time, however when resources get scarcer and your goal is to improve the service, you find it necessary to tackle the beast. My team and I set out to find a solution that would do what we called “an automated password reset” via our IVR. Good research led us to selecting a great partner, Softel Communications. They were very excited to help us introduce a voice-recognition solution, built on the Microsoft Speech platform. We co-designed a solution that would use employee-registered credentials to enact a password reset or an account unlock 24x7 through the ACD options of our Service Desk menu.
The design was elegant. A portal with beautiful branding, instructing customers how to register; a communication campaign to tease and entice customers to use the system, and a voice-activated solution that took 3 steps and 30 seconds to reset a password or unlock an account. We added this option through their already familiar Service Desk hotline, and even had our Service Desk spend time to market the service to the users while on the calls they did receive.
The blind spot.
Failures refine you, they don't define you!
While he had thought that everything we’d designed would make for a smooth user experience, we failed to anticipate how much our customers really wanted nothing to do with instructions to “register” on a portal in order to use it. Even selling them on the ROI of that 1 minute registration investment didn’t manifest in traction. Try as we did, we could not initially achieve more than 5% adoption in the first year. Our simple wasn’t simple enough.
The opportunity to rethink things.
Easy does it!
A little less than a year from our launch, we had to plan a version upgrade. That’s when we did some real thinking. What if we could take registration out of the equation- would the customers then use it? We immediately started planning a way to pre-register 100% of the customer population, integrating our Softel IVR password tool to Peoplesoft, using existing personal information only the user would know along with their Active Directory login id. The customer could of course still register their own personal information online and override the default algorithm, however we know the majority wouldn’t care enough to do this.
Armed with a solution and the partnership with our vendor, we made it happen. We got 100% registration immediately, and had a daily job to upload new users and retire old ones to eliminate security risks.
The Results.
Simple is Sweet.
After changing the messaging on the ACD and sending new messaging to our customer community about the solution being ready for them to just use it now, we started to get steady increases in adoption. We marketed it as both fast and easy, only 45 second to reset or unlock their account, without having to wait on hold to speak to someone. It worked! It worked so well, that we had upwards of 60% adoption of the solution within 6 months and the customers loved it.
Lessons learned.
As “simple” as we had thought the solution executed, we failed to understand user behavioral preferences, and when we learned the hard way, we made it really simple, taking registration out of the equation. The fact that it worked consistently, and if they preferred to not speak their credentials, they had an option to key them into the phone made it a solid experience. It worked over 95% of the time and we had email confirmations sent on success and on failure for record keeping. Our team also made sure to circle back to help customers figure out what about the prompts were confusing to them so they could use the system with success in the future.
The test of time.
As time went on, many users came and went, and the system continued to operate as designed. A solutions integrator was onboarded around 2014 and started replacing every single application with their preferred suites. The only solution that remained standing was this simple, solid and scalable IVR password reset. You know how I know this is true? When I last dialed the Service Desk hotline from the outside in 2019, the ACD options still offered the password reset solution to customers, and all the prompts I had personally recorded were still intact. That’s a 10 year run. I’m proud to share this story. More importantly, I’m grateful that I learned a very important lesson about people, their needs, and what to factor in when designing a service; simple, solid and scale.
For more on these concepts, here are earlier articles along these themes.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sailing-securely-humans-age-old-password-problem-how-nora-osman/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/total-experience-beyond-noble-goal-key-successful-business-osman-1c/
