Support Assist

I helped to conduct on-site, in-depth contextual inquiries with techs at both Dell and its customers. Analysis of these insights lead to multiple complex user journeys and mental models. Conducted by myself and my team, these exercises allowed us to create an experience tailored to the way support technicians worked.

We came to a number of conclusions following this exercise:

• Support techs were very empowered to solve the customer problem any way they knew how. The amount of home-brew tools and tribal knowledge among techs was astounding—and encouraged by Dell.
• Dell’s Enterprise Support included several disparate groups under a single umbrella; it was eye-opening to see how each team approached problem solving differently.
• Many support techs lacked strong soft skills, so we included instances throughout the application with reminders, conversational niceties and talking points.

Once the prototypes had undergone user validation with support technicians, I helped to oversee detailed design and consulted with developers as the product was built and launched.

The length of calls to Enterprise Support was markedly reduced. Techs were able to solve customer problems faster and more effectively. Satisfaction scores went up, and the number of re-opened support tickets decreased.