Overview
In my role as the manager and design lead for the Digital Expertise pillar, our primary focus was to enhance help experiences both within and outside our product ecosystem. With insights from prior research sessions we identified a recurring challenge for our Expert network: the arduous task of accessing pertinent information and completing daily tasks to serve customers was a significant bottleneck, leading to prolonged service times.
Despite the presence of our help panel capability as an entry point for experts to search for support, its utilization remained disappointingly low, hovering around a mere 20%. In response, my project manager and I committed ourselves to a comprehensive exploration of the Expert help journey. Our aim? To streamline processes and uncover avenues for revolutionizing how our experts access support. Our vision extends towards the implementation of a more intuitive, proactive help system, poised to mitigate operational costs while empowering our experts with seamless access to the assistance they require.
Impact
Disambiguated an untapped problem space and delivered a 1-3 year strategy that exposed the current hurdles for Expert support and identified capabilities to achieve faster help experiences
Designed a help system that is flexible, scalable and intuitive, in turn unlocking opportunity for a 'digital expert' to support evolving business needs
Worked across ~8 Expert support teams to uncover process inefficiencies and streamline content management
Gained leadership buy-in to deliver capabilities to support DIY Expert help that enhanced business needs through effective storytelling grounded in user insights
Early insights
Vision
Transform the help panel to be the one source of truth for trusted information that provides contextual and personalized in-product help, enabling our Experts to reduce time spent to complete tasks and get trusted answers by 50%.
Previously, there was no one team that focused on end-to-end help needs for Experts, so we needed to gain a better understanding for the holistic experience of help in-and-out of product in an Experts day-to-day and engaged in research studies, interviews, and industry insights.
RESEARCH METHOD & OUTCOME
ROUND TABLES & INTERVIEWS
Experts resorted to alternative methods because:
There were too many tools and finding what they needed was not fast enough to meet SLA’s
They wanted to search and apply what they read to “specific situations”
They did not have confidence in DIY due to limitations in the help panel
Additionally, there were different types of help they needed that the help panel was not designed to support:
📖 Researching a topic outside of their expertise
⚠️ Trouble shooting and navigating the products
🗣️ Intuit processes and job aides to serve the customer
INTERNAL AUDITS
There were ~8 teams contributing to Expert support needs and no framework for content creation
COMPETITIVE BENCHMARKING
Our help system lacked basic features and capabilities, compared to other sites an Expert may use, that made a search experience intuitive and fast
Narrowing our focus
By focusing on fixing the Content gaps and restructuring the way Content is presented, Experts will find the answers quickly - AND it provides a foundation for the capabilities to create a Digital Expertise for Experts.
By rethinking the way “Help” shows up to our Experts before they actually search, we can build confidence by suggesting contextual answers and content based on what “Experts like them…” or “Customers that you’re helping..” are asking or looking at in a way to shift from reactively providing help (e.g. via Search) to proactively guiding the customer.
By enhancing the existing model to incorporate domain expert queries we can begin to accomodate for situation-related questions, rather than just product-related, which addresses the specific needs domain experts use the help panel for & the way they ask questions, resulting in answering the questions while building an understanding for when to escalate to a Lead or Manager
We gathered a group of cross-functional stakeholders to present the findings and bring the team on a journey to create a vision for what a 1-3 year strategy would look like using design methodologies to align the team
Defining use cases
Returning Expert
Turbotax LIVE
needs to relearn the platform
is novice at customer service
spends time researching customer questions out of her expertise
Switching domains
Tax Assistant
transferring domains and not feeling confident in processes
feels responsible for clients livelihoods, wants to make sure she is accurate in her documentation
references her call guide often when serving the client so she doesn’t miss a step
Managing a team
Pod Lead
coaches ~45 Experts daily
fields questions from Experts and doesn't have time to complete her own job duties outside of supporting Experts
Exploring the opportunity space
I facilitated a workshop with cross-functional stakeholders across the business. We gathered use cases these teams have witnessed opportunities for the platform and brainstormed solutions grounded in themes observed during interviews.
recognizing form factor/contextual to the search
If it works, don’t replace it
speed to result
contextualization
quick results
scannability
Search results snippets
Product related questions
Rephrasing for better results
Article highlighted from snippet
utilities
personalization
THEMES TO DRIVE WORKSHOPS:
Need for speed
Focus on getting our Experts the answers they need (in 1 click or less) in order to more quickly and efficiently help our customers
Easing “intuit”
Focus on making it easy for our new Experts or Experts learning a new domain to onboard and get comfortable helping our customers; including adopting and using our self-help capabilities so they can focus on showcasing their expertise Day 1 on the job
In content we don’t trust
Focus on providing our Experts the assurance to trust the content they are seeing; vs defaulting to always having to ask another Expert or Lead "who they trust"
Relaying the vision
To highlight our insights and explorations, I developed a system for the help panel that is both intuitive and scalable to various needs. I crafted storylines based on user needs and identified friction points in the current flow, presenting these alongside prototypes of an enhanced experience in order to gain buy-in from the business and our partners.
Learning Platform Tools
Returning Expert
She’s on the phone with a client and needs to collect their tax documents in order to begin the return but she forgets how to collect the documents via IEP
Following Processes & Standards
Switching Domains
She is about to take a call and needs to review the Call Guide and Job Aides to reference the process, ensure she’s following Intuit standards and collects all the right data from the customer. While on the phone with the customer she will need to answer any questions they may have including tax-related situations, which she is unfamiliar with.
Building an Expert Help Repository
Freeing Up Leads
Managers are fielding questions from Experts in Slack. A manager receives a similar question they previously answered for another Expert.
Experience enhancement examples
Content snippets
Articles are designed to make adoption of processes and features more seamless and easy to understand by breaking it down into where, what, how and why, in a more visual representation. Based on the query, the system can then display these snippets to quickly reference with the results page based on our understanding of the intent
FROM
TO
Filtering enhancements
Filters are contextual and work in favor of the experts search, making it faster to find exactly what they need
FROM
TO
Expert data and patterns
By updating our foundational pre-search models to include Expert data and patterns, we can contextualize the help panel experience to proactively give the expert exactly what they need and therefore increase their customer service confidence
FROM
TO
Relevant help
Showing only content that is relevant helps get the expert to the answer faster eliminating loss time in trying to search through pages of articles
FROM
TO
Building a repository for FAQs when they arise…
Documenting questions and solutions into a structured CMS framework that feeds back into our models, will eliminate information loss and will continuously improve the search/presearch experience for our Experts
FROM
TO
… and redirecting Experts to the Help Panel through intercept channels
Driving Experts to the Help Panel eliminates the need for multiple tools, building up trust within the system. Resulting in freeing up leads time and improving overall efficiency
Live chat with dedicated Lead
B. Digital Assistant intercept
We brought our 1-3 year strategy to our leadership team with a time horizon for execution and gained buy-in. From there we began executing on the first milestone to unlocking a new innovative and proactive help system.
Low-hanging fruit
Execute on contextualization
