18 Mar, 2024Understanding preventable demand on call centers
A journey into understanding how we might enable customers to set-up and manage their own recovery through MyACC.
Discovery
B2C
SaaS
Product Strategy
Overview
MyACC is an online SaaS product, used by individuals in New Zealand to manage various aspects of their accidental injury compensation claims. It’s essentially a digital platform that allows New Zealanders to manage their recovery journey and access information about their claims, all online. It is currently not fully open to the public, however has around 450,000 users currently.
Problem space
An internal review studied customer interactions with the call center. The report identified problematic stages in the injury recovery process and outlined the end-to-end journey for customers, from their first interaction with ACC through to recovery. The focus was on the reason customers were calling, whether they had an issue, whether it was resolved and whether the issue they presented could’ve been resolved through self-service.
As the Senior Digital Product Designer on the team I was tasked with identifying high friction areas throughout a customer’s journey and how we might tackle or resolve those issues through the MyACC product.
Impact
Identified and addressed critical gaps in core business and customer transition processes, highlighting grey areas and low-visibility operations for improvement through MyACC and frontline teams.
Improved cross-functional collaboration by embedding UX into strategic conversations, resulting in faster decision-making, more accurate scoping, and higher stakeholder confidence in delivery outcomes.
Influenced product roadmap priorities to focus on customer-driven features — ensuring delivery of solutions that drive meaningful user outcomes over purely business-led initiatives.
Positioned design as a strategic business driver within ACC, leading to greater investment in UX and the integration of design thinking into high-level planning and organisational transformation initiatives.
Role
Senior Digital Product Designer
Timeline
October 2023 - March 2024
Business Objectives
Highlight key pain-points within the MyACC product and notable areas for improvement
Design-led objectives
Understand previous research pieces to build a better holistic view of our customers
Highlight and understand core customer journeys across multiple channels
Refocus the roadmap on customer-centred outcomes
Embed user feedback and data in the product strategy
Approach & strategy
Mapping & resolving process gaps
Conducted deep-dive discovery on business processes and customer handoffs between frontline teams and product
Identified grey-areas and inefficiencies in customer transition points
Co-designed solutions with operations and service teams
To improve organisational visibility on customer experiences within ACC services.
Strategic UX integration
Embedded UX into early stage product planning and cross-team ceremonies
Introduced research-led scoping tools and alignment workshops
Accelerating decision-making and reduced misalignment in feature planning and delivery.
Customer-driven roadmap influence
Advocated for features rooted in behavioural insights and usage data
Reframed roadmap decisions to center on customer value, not internal assumptions
Provided wider business with actionable data
Highlighting improvement for end-to-end customer experience through data, insights and process mapping.
Elevating design at the organisational level
Built a case for increase UX investment and value through outcome reporting and stakeholder buy-in
Introduced design thinking into high-level planning and governance forums
UX became integral to digital strategy and transformation initiatives going forward.
Key project elements
Aligning to business strategy while tackling core problems
A new strategic plan was recently unveiled within the organisation, aimed at restructuring product focuses to proactively diminish the volume of customer service inquiries. Central to this initiative is the consolidation of efforts around three key objectives, fostering a more cohesive and targeted approach to enhancing customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Reduction in calls to the call center
The overall purpose of this work was to reduce preventable demand to the call center, this overall would be solved by the next two measures of success.
Providing clarity and understanding during customer processes
A large percentage of the preventable demand came in the form of a lack of understanding around our business processes and applying for supports, whether customers had to complete certain tasks, and what was happening behind the scenes at various hand-off points.
Improving navigation and way-finding
Another large section of preventable demand was customers trying to find information that we already provided, such as upcoming payments, registering their hours or completing blocked tasks. However the way the site is currently structured does not allow customers to do this intuitively.
Defining our problem space
The reports I had received had been completed in silos and were very heavily focused on presenting a range of issues along various aspects of the customers journey. However they all lacked product specific references, and key actionable outcomes.
What was the customer actually looking at or doing that triggered the need for contact, and how does that UI or customer interaction actually lead to someone contacting the call center over solving the problem themselves.
The key goal of my report was to pull over 6500 customer comments and combine it with product specific insights to build a better visual model around the customer pain points. So that as we moved into ideation workshops we would have an easy access resource with all key information needed to make big decisions.
A visual representation of where we were operating with this projectBringing stakeholders along the journey
An important part of this journey was to bring the stakeholder’s along the design process. I tackled this problem by running a series of context setting workshops to help set a common understanding of the current pain points, how our product enables them and in turn causes the customer to contact the call center. In this workshop, I emphasized putting everyone in a customer-centered mindset, especially for roles not directly involved with customers, by using persona mapping.
Empathy mapping with stakeholders to put everybody in our customers shoesOnce I had taken the stakeholders through the current customer experience and highlighted the common problems. The participants and I all went through an ideation workshop, with the aim of coming up with blue sky thinking solutions. I found it important to get people to expand on their ideas and not to be limited by current functionality. This was done through a series of crazy 8’s, sharing and building on other people’s ideas.
The workshops aimed to identify problems and suggest solutions by addressing big issues rather than always reverting to quick fixes.
An example of one participants Crazy 8's from the workshopInfluencing stakeholders to prioritise end-to-end experiences rather than single features
From the workshops, I collected many good ideas that could be sorted into 7 main goals or key features. Three were specific product issues, while four could be addressed by different teams simultaneously.
The value of the report was evident by the fact that I was able to effectively provide a feature roadmap that referenced priority levels directly based on customer feedback all while aligning with overarching business strategy and goals.
By combining this report and product roadmap with data analysis, I persuaded business leaders to pause and focus on solving the main issue rather than rushing into short-term solutions.
Feature relationship mapping based on workshop outputs — and how some might enable others to be builtAt the end of the workshops we had a group of stakeholders that were aligned on what the core problems were, how to solve those problems and what it would look like to tackle those problems.
This meant with a visual roadmap I was able to advocate for us to take the journey of large scale improvements while providing a solid forecast of which problems the feature would look to tackle.
Key learnings and reflections
This work was one of the first big discovery pieces for our digital products at ACC. We had typically operated as a reactive department as the products and teams existed before the creation of the Product Design Team. I had done a fair amount of catch up over the past few years at ACC and finally found the space and time to take a step back and look at a wider issue throughout the MyACC products.
This piece of work demonstrated the power of UX when positioned not as a service function, but as a strategic capability. By shifting perception, embedding design early, and aligning with business goals, we not only impacted the future roadmap of MyACC but pushed for a more agile, insight driven organisation.
During my time on this project I was able to flex some of my research and discovery muscles and drive a force for change operating at a higher strategic level than designers had previously been able to. I learnt a lot around condensing large amounts of information, data and insights and converting them into punchy metrics to help deliver change with bigger stakeholders within the business.
Business outcomes
Improved organisational visibility on customer experiences within ACC services
Accelerated decision-making and reduced misalignment in product road-mapping
Highlighted improvements for multi-channel customer journey through gap closure in transition processes
Faster scoping and buy-in due to UX involvement at a strategic level
Greater executive buy-in and backing for UX-led initiatives within ACC
UX embedded in governance, driving long-term organisational change
Further information
A lot of the information in this piece of work is customer focused or contains sensitive data. If you’d like to learn more about my process or any other parts of this project feel free to reach out. I always welcome a chat!