UX Design (Web) - Self-service Customer Portal

Overview

Before Aptive had a self-service customer portal, I began shadowing various call center reps in the company to observe their day to day work and the kinds of issues they helped Aptive customers with. Two of the most common issues were simple billing questions and scheduling concerns. The vast majority of these calls were also issues that most customers, if provided with self-service options, would prefer to resolve themselves. Examples included wanting to know what their account balance was, changing payment methods, and cancelling or rescheduling service appointments.

Working with our data team, I discovered that we had the ability to see how many calls came in for just billing and scheduling concerns. It turned out that every year nearly $18M in call center overhead was being used to resolve scheduling concerns and nearly $6M in billing concerns. It became pretty clear a self-service customer portal would great benefit both Aptive customers but also our call center budget. Additionally, having our own customer portal would provided many additional revenue opportunities. For example, we could provide customers with options to upgrade themselves to certain specialty pest services, offer limited time renewal opportunities, and offer additional services.

My solution

The first time I suggested to the organization that we build a self-service customer portal, the idea was surprisingly rejected. However, this was another reminder to me of the importance of properly framing the problem I was proposing a solution to. Later that year, our department kicked off their annual hackathon and I resurrected the idea - this time gathering specific data around our call volume and what kinds of calls our call center was receiving from customers. This helped better frame the problem instead of just proposing a solution like I had originally done. The customer portal idea won the hackathon and shortly after we formed a team to build my designs.

What we did