When I first began to work for Candor Health I was given the role of Senior Experience Designer instead of a specific UX title because there just was no money in the start-up for a UX designer and a Multimedia designer, and this role encompassed both. I was told the major reason for my hire was to help them to resolve what they thought were design issues in their product in getting customers to complete sign-up for the service we offered.
During my onboarding I made notes as to where I might be able to find information from users about our product, and noted we had Google analytics that was not set-up to track users through the product because of HIPPA compliance requirements, but that we did have a Customer Support Center with four different support operators.
Because there was no tracking analysis and we didn’t have money to do product testing outside of our own employees, the only option to figure out what problems users were having that were creating barriers to sign-up was to study the information directly from the Customer Service Department. I had never worked with a Customer Service Department before, and this type of field research was new to me. I was completely out of my element.
I began by asking their team if I could shadow them while they worked, and I did so to both familiarize myself with their process and to find out how they stored the incoming data from customers so I could use it for analysis. The Customer Support Team was excited to have me job shadow them and learn about what they did, and they were eager to share direct insights they had observed from customers to begin to point me in the right direction.
During my shadowing I was able to see where they input customer comments, concerns, questions about our product, and from there I was able to request this information —and helped them scrub it of user identifiers— so I could begin to sort through the comments and affinitize the cases into larger user stories.
The outcome of this process, sitting with the Customer Support team and determining where I could gain more direct customer information to help build a better product, was a collection of insights that led me to suggest changing the sign-up flow for our product. To change and reframe the user flows for sign-up and resulted in the development team agreeing to re-write the product architecture fundamentally in order to support our customer. This was a huge shift, but upon implementation increased customer sign-up by more than 20% and reduced Customer Support Calls drastically.
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