The problem
The National Trust have a call centre with operators taking telephone calls from people, managing online chat sessions and dealing with e-mail enquiries. All activity from this gets logged in a document called Voice of the Supporter. Many hours are spent dealing with recurring issues on the app and website and there is a desire to minimise this to allow operators to deal with genuine problems or to help users through revenue generating activity. An issue that comes up time and time again is the synchronisation between data in the app and data in My National Trust – an online dashboard allowing users to manage their relationship with the Trust. One piece of functionality in particular is where we allow users to add a property to a list or properties that they would like to visit or properties that they have already visited. The data on the app and the data on the website were never connected and this was a very common complaint among the 5 million members and countless non members who use the website 4 or 5 million times a month.
The solution
Part of my job is to work with product owners to identify enhancements that can be made that will have an impact on costs or revenue. Items get added to the backlog based on their impact and/or the frequency they appear in documents like Voice of the Supporter. The issue of favouriting properties was marked as something that we needed to address just based on the sheer amount of time that was spent dealing with complaints and enquiries about it.
My job was to come up with a consistent solution for the web and the app. For this, I built a high fidelity prototype in Axure and conducted rounds of remote unmoderated testing to ensure that users could intuitively interact with what is a relatively small piece of functionality.
Just for fun, you can visit the following URL and perform a couple of tasks to see the prototype in action:
– https://2jdopf.axshare.com/#id=zkcyi6&p=heelis – opens in a new tab
– Task one: Add Heelis to your list of places you’d like to visit
– Task two: Move Heelis to your list of places that you’ve visited
Hopefully, you’ll have clicked on the heart, chosen the correct option and seen the heart swap from an outline to filled and then to filled with a tick.
The outcome
This has completely stopped this complaint from coming up on calls, in emails and on the live chat on the site. The saving in logging and processing these complaints is many hours per month. There is no cost saving but it allows operators to deal with a greater number genuine problems, thus improving service for other users.