Customer Service Workflow: Processing a Press Release
Workflow is a platform that enables Content specialists to process press releases.
Goal
Workflow 2.0 is a platform that Cision’s Customer Service team (CCS) uses to process press releases. A highly manual workflow for its users, it caused our internal teams to spend a lot of time processing work that was error prone and inefficient. I joined the team to redesign this workflow, with the intent to improve user efficiency, reduce training time, leading to external customers receiving the best support when submitting a press release.
Our business goals:
Improve processing time by 70%
Reducing onboarding time for our internal specialists from an average of 3 months to 1 month
And to automate significant portions of the workflow.
Built in 2007, the product team has used the same software for over 15 years. Adding workflows, buttons, and tables to serve the teams evolving needs, this Frankensteined product has now become a burden to use.
Platform
Web application
Timeline
June 2022. Engineering build starting in December 2022. Pilot to begin use in late 2023 or early 2024
Role
Lead designer UI/UX
Process and Timelines
Initial research was completed by a researcher right before I joined the team. I had interviews from customers and our support team that outlined the many pain points in the existing process. I co-led workshops to create team alignment from the existing problems and needs within the flow. Workshops included members from product, engineering, and customer support. We outlined product requirements and the priority of each. After project milestones were outlined and prioritized I began to work on the MVP.
Identifying the project scope Month 1-3
When I joined the company I began ramping up on the project, and it’s user base. Watching user interviews and culling through research. I worked with another designer who was familiar with the project. I aided her in workshops and as she handed of the project of to me.
Design and validation of the MVP Month 3 - 4
After workshopping was complete I began work on the MVP. I created a wireframes to demonstrate the new user flow. I presented my first flow to product and leadership and then used that to conduct initial usability testing with our press release team. With continual iteration and design, I presented our MVP concept to the broader stakeholder team to get buy-in before the dev team began building.
Formation of the Dev team to begin the MVP Month 4
The developer team began working on the first iteration of the MVP in November. I split my working time between expanding design on the initial concept and, working with developers and product to have dev ready work for the engineering team.
Problem — Manually searching for a press release to work on
In the existing Order Queue, it was never clear which press release would be priority to work on. CCS could not simply take the next release in the queue. They needed to first understand if release in the queue was due to be distributed within the hour or within a few days, whether the customer type had fast service in their contract. CCS would spend a a few minutes trying to understand the next release to take.
The order queue knowns as the To-do list shares screenspace with the order view. This among other factors makes it dificult to find orders that need to be worked on first.
We needed to design a queue that automatically shows specialist the highest priority order first. Because part of this process remains manual, with specialist still needing to consider a few factors before selecting, we needed to add a way for specialists to filter and sort releases while providing insightful information on each release.
Filtering, sorting, showing late releases, and releases that have been picked up all help provide context to an order that wasn’t available before.
Problem — Highly manual flow, higher chance of user error
To-do List
In the current workflow the CCS team would open follow a set of steps to follow in terms of processing the release. For new CCS team members they would often open a doc with a to do list to make sure they didn’t forget the following items to review. Seasoned specialist would often have the list memorized. If the couldn’t complete the processing flow because they were waiting for approval or documents from the customer, they would then write a note in the order. We found adding a note to the order highly manual. Reviewing a separate to-do list was also time consuming as it caused specialists to shift between different applications. Having many steps to remember in a flow, also made for a higher chance of error.
To solve for these problems. We created a To-Do list panel. This panel surfaced the tasks that needed to be completed for each release, reducing what specialists need to remember and giving them the ability to have a guide. The completed and incomplete items also communicated to specialist what needed to be done, eliminating the need to manually write a note about this in the order. This feature would cut down processing time, and reduced user error.
Copying Account Notes to the To-do list
Another manual action
Problem — Unclear status of the press release
The status of the release has always been ambiguous. CCS would pick up an order begin working on it, and send a slack when that order had been completed or when they needed to reach out to the team for questions regarding the order. We wanted to make sure this was handled within the platform. We designed a set of statuses for each release, and each time.
****The To-do list that we designed created a high level view of what has and hasn’t been completed. However, if a problem with a press release would arise from the customer our team needed to “diagnose” the issue. This meant they needed to know what steps had been done and ideally when. They also need a section to add additional order notes that were smaller use cases that expanded beyond the to do list.
We created an activity section that allowed the user to input nuanced notes usually related to the order, and a way for other specialist to follow up on those items and the responsibility of the press release was not relied upon one specialist but by the department itself, meaning that any specialist would work on the order to get the order to distribution.
Problem — Overly Complicated UI
It goes without saying that the original flow had an overly complicated User Interface. Specialists had to dig for content when understanding the status of a release and what needed to be done.
(BEFORE) Incredibly dated and clunky, this screen is where specialists would leave notes on the order, in addtion to teams messages.
The left Panel provides a consistent section for specialists to “work from”. From here, they know what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and who has been working on it.
The right panel provides all the content needed to review and distriute a press release. It shows content uploaded from the user in a centralized place. All content hierarchy was tested by specialists to provide information in the order that makes most sense to the workflow.
Outcome
Overall we wanted to create a platform that simplified what has long been a manual and ambiguous workflow. We automated what we could, and focused on shfiting the mental model of our users so that we could support a new way of thinking about press releases and how to process them. The team began working on the MVP in November of 2022. Our initial goal was to have a usable product ready for our pilot users by the end of Q4 2023. Our stakeholders from the Customer Experience team, continued to influence our MVP timelines posing more features to be added before they desired usage. In conjunction, at the end of Q1 2024 Cision implemented another round of layoffs. This shift caused us to put the entire project on hold and shift to customer facing products. While it was challenging to feel like we had thrown away this work, the shift to a stronger customer facing strategy meant we could still solve for problems CCS had, but from the angle of how we support the customer. Thinking about the Customer’s flow first, and how they upload a press release has a 2nd hand impact on the role of CCS.
Challenges
A outdated platform can often lead to features designed in a way that support software limitations instead of user needs first.
Many people I interviewed and tested my wireframes were very much caught up in the way things have always been done, and the limitations that they faced. It’s as if the limits of the current software dictated how they worked. This made it tricky to concept test features that innovated and stepped away from their current mental model of the process. Some users embraced this change, others were skeptical.
Gaining buy-in from an anxious group of stakeholders.
The most stressful part of this project was presenting to stakeholders that had reached a limit of trust in the product team. This group of users worked in a high pressure role from higher-ups and had tight deadlines from customers to distribute releases quickly and without error. During stakeholder presentations and design share outs I found myself spending more time adding reassurance and defending design decisions in a way that we could regain trust.