Chordiant Process / Viewer Interface

1. Chordiant Process / Viewer Interface Case study in redesigning the user experience of Chordiant’s call center CRM product.

2. Company Overview • Enterprise CRM application company • Focus on large call center environment. • Based out of CA with dev. group in NH • Most front end application development in NH, back end server CA. • Started as a services company • Strong services mentality, struggling with becoming a true application developer. Mike Myles : Software Designer

3. Customer Service Advisor (CSA) • CSA was the primary front end application shipped with Chordiant’s Foundation Server product at the time I joined the company. • Out of the box CSA was never used for anything more than demos. • Very little value attributed to the shipped UI. Little more than a POC. • Existing UI did not map to real business use cases. • Development had very little knowledge of customer usage. • Product Management team was quite weak and had little expertise / high turnover at all levels. • All knowledge was with field teams, who had no time to communicate that information back to application engineering because they were swamped building custom implementations. • CSA performance was extremely slow. • Totally unacceptable page load times for call center market, on the order of tens of seconds. • Each deployment essentially a one off built by professional services. • This was a major bottleneck to delivering on time to customers and resulted in many support, training, documentation, and upgrade nightmares. • This model was a carry over from Chordiant’s service provider roots, so some did not see it as a major problem. Mike Myles : Software Designer

4. Need for Design • The application development organization (total of 15 people when I started) recognized they needed to build a more valuable offering if they wanted to survive. • There was an existing commitment to development process and product design, but Chordiant had very limited design resources in-house. (one former engineer and one former marketing manager in design roles, with the latter focused on Chordiant’s Europe based database marketing product) • Strong desire for contextual analysis, prototyping (paper & interactive), usability testing and the like, but no prior experience in those areas on the design team. • Given the size of the team, remote location of the application development group, and lack of interest in the existing offering they were working essentially off the radar. • Failure of the next CSA release likely meant shutdown of that development group, thus they were highly motivated to build something of value. Mike Myles : Software Designer

5. Existing CSA UI Design • MDI structure in a browser. • Each window had very low data density (only a handful of fields). • Each window had links to other views or actions that in turn opened in a new window. • Navigation system had little logical structure to it. • One customer could quickly have many windows open related to a single contact (phone, email…) • Customer management links added as a quick fix to window management problem. • Had to manually refresh windows to see updates made elsewhere. • Very slow!!! Mike Myles : Software Designer

6. Research Phase Objective: Build an out of the box Call Center application that addresses the core needs of most customers. To that end we… • Identified some customer success stories. • Visited sites to see what was built for each customer and how it was being used. (what worked & what didn’t?) • Observed and interviewed many end users of the product. (call center reps, supervisors, managers, & IT) • Evaluated information for common themes & goals . Mike Myles : Software Designer

7. Developed User Profiles (persona) Identified essential user types and wrote one page named descriptions for each one, such as… Henry: Expert Customer Service Representative • Age 32; AA in Business Administration. • Comfortable with the Internet and computer technology. • Been a CSR for 4 years. • Received 4 weeks classroom and 2 weeks on the job training. • Works with approximately 100 other CSRs, most with over 2 years experience. • Noisy environment – everyone talking on headsets all the time. • Calls automatically routed when available. • Handles escalation as well as front line calls. • Promotions and bonuses based on productivity metrics. • Etc… Mike Myles : Software Designer

8. Identified Requirements & Key Characteristics • Productivity is key!!! • Need phone system integration. • Need keyboard navigation. • Fast page loads essential. • Performance, performance, performance… #1 priority to compete in the call center market. • Design for experts • CSRs use this application all day everyday. They are all extensively trained. • High data density needed on all pages. • Show essential information when it’s of value / anticipate needs. • Interaction needs to be customer centric. • All data must remain current and in synch. • Support servicing multiple customers across several channels. • Support several tasks active at once for a single customer. • Need to start, work on, pause, restart and complete multiple tasks in any order. • Allow navigation between customer data and transactions at all times. • Support customer transfers from one CSR to another maintaining all active processes. Mike Myles : Software Designer

9. The Solution The Process / Viewer Interface (PVI) is a comprehensive customer view that allows for execution of multiple tasks in any order. A user can switch between different tasks and information views at any point, copy and paste information, and queue up new tasks as needed. The main components of the PVI are, • Customer window • Customer thumbnail • Process panel • Available process list • Current process list • Process work area • Processes • Data view tabs • Phone integration Interaction wins, • Single customer view. • State of last customer interaction is always maintained. • Processes are modeless (not locked out of the rest of the UI). • Processes can be queued up and addressed later. • Auto customer identification. • Easy transfer of cases to other agents. • Customer information automatically updated. • Full keyboard navigation. Mike Myles : Software Designer

10. Testing, Refinement & Development Overall what became the Call Center Advisor (CCA) project took just over a year to complete. In that time we executed several iterations of designs that were extensively evaluated with customers, target users and internal stake holders using paper prototypes, design reviews, html mockups, and other means. Findings were used to further refine the final design. In the end CCA was a phased release. The initial release incorporated phone integration and a revamp of the application navigation system into CSA. Phase two incorporated all the changes related to the customer view or PVI design. Acceptance by customers and the field implementation teams of CCA was immediate and phenomenally positive. It offered an out of the box UI that had all the major components most clients needed. This allowed teams to focus on customizing the available activities to meet each customer’s specific needs. Post CCA release focus shifted to building out activities for specific vertical markets such as credit card transaction disputes, collections and leads management – areas that are now the primary focus of Chordiant’s business. Mike Myles : Software Designer

11. Design Patent As the PVI design came together the team realized it could be generalized to work with other conceptual entities, not just customers. It was also apparent that this UI addresses a variety of common issues in a novel manner. Near the end of the design phase, as the design lead on the project I personally drafted a 16 page invention disclosure form for the PVI. That document was handed off to Mc Lane, Graf, Raulerson & Middleton, PA – a firm contracted by Chordiant to handle the patent application. The patent was applied for on August 12th, 2003, made it through the initial review phase with minor revisions and received final approval on February 17, 2005. US Patent Application Serial Number 10/639735 Filed: August 12, 2003 Process / Viewer Interface Abstract: A user interface for viewing reference data associated with a conceptual entity and for execution of one or more complex processes for manipulating the data includes a process panel having one or more on-screen objects for the execution of the complex processes and a process work area for displaying a state of selected complex processes. A data viewer includes a content pane for the display of the reference data and one or more on-screen objects for selectively displaying at least a portion of the reference data and the process panel and data viewer are framed within a common window. The process panel and data viewer are selectably viewable and occupy overlapping positions within the common window. Inventors: Darren M. Hewson Cleveland, GB J. Michael Myles Manchester, NH Michael J. Ruggieri JR. New Boston, NH James D. St. Jean Francestown, NH Mike Myles : Software Designer