Engage 360
Enhancing Customer Insights: Developing a Unified customer Application for Microsoft
Who is our customer?
Project Journey: Enhancing customer insights became crucial during the pandemic as companies had to pivot quickly. With people changing jobs or leaving the workforce, we lost track of who our customers were and what services they had ordered. We had ten different applications handling customer information, but none communicated with each other, leading to fragmented data and inefficiencies.
The Project: Our goal was to integrate these tools to provide businesses with valuable insights into their customers, track sales, and monitor the effectiveness of various plans. The application leverages AI and machine learning to offer real-time analytics and predict future customer needs, helping businesses make informed decisions. Its user-friendly interface ensures easy navigation, allowing users to quickly access the information they need. This application is designed to enhance customer relationship management, helping businesses build stronger connections with their customers and drive growth.
My Role: I was responsible for creating low-fidelity layouts and building a rough prototype for role-based user dashboards early in the process. This prototype allowed users to access predetermined information based on their role and the clients they manage. We revised these layouts and developed higher-fidelity versions to get feedback from Leadership, the UX Team, and PPMs. We were able to make some assumptions since we had information from 10 existing applications to take layouts from. I also worked on variations of header graphics and visual styles to incorporate into the layouts. Our User Research Team identified some pitfalls and immediate needs that challenged our initial architectural assumptions, which we addressed through continuous iteration and feedback.
“The challenge of creating something new is that it disrupts the careers and lives of the many teams already invested in existing products. This journey will be bumpy.”
This information could fill many documents (and it has) on the complexity of this and the project and it is still in testing before it is launched on all of the customers. So I will try to jump into the tasks I was specifically given and how we tried to work through those items.
I will skip a lot of the months of work and try to get to the work that may or may not be of interest to a viewer of this site. We found that there was a lot of similar tracking items in all 10 of the applications - So that took us to months and months of discussions about Entities.
That lead to months and months of discussions about Entity Models.
While that conversation was ongoing, we began examining page layouts and testing role-based user dashboards. The idea is that not every user would have access to all information on every client, depending on their level or job description. I built a rough prototype that allows each user to access predetermined information based on their role and the clients they manage. Our User Research Team identified some pitfalls and immediate needs that challenged our initial architectural assumptions.
UX Flow study after UX and Research - If you want to too see more of them they are available. Studies mostly focused on the different roles and what they need to do their jobs.
Prototyping
With existing applications we were able to make some mock-ups for testing on an initial pass to try out how a combination of all of these different features could be combines into one app. This helped with our feedback from existing team users and buy-in from higher level management.
Insights and AI additions.
As the early versions of Chat GPT started to circulate through our applications we started to look into helping with suggestions of accounts or issues that AI could find surface to help with each role.
As the technology changed we transitioned from a chatbot to adding in Copilot with lots of experiments
The new Learn platform could be integrated as well to extend training of all of our employees.
Visual Treatments and Toolkits
new icons for all the different entities