IBM Systems
Support portal design
Our team was challenged by executive leadership to reimagine the future of support at IBM across thousands of products and services delivered over multiple channels.
My role was to design and execute a research strategy--gathering insights from clients and IBM support agents across diverse products. We designed collaboratively with our users and leveraged them to test our solutions.
Users
Who we designed for
- Enterprise Clients in technical roles (SaaS, Hardware, On-Premise Software)
- Support Representatives, Tiers 1-3, across all products
What were the problems:
I led the research protocol and our team in total interviewed over 10 clients across different products. We also spoke with support reps for each tier of support.
- Information is lost in translation
- IBM as a whole does not know who their customer are
- Tiered support structure is hurting their clients more than than helping
- Customers know the products better than IBM does
- Layered support makes it confusing who is owning the problem
- Customer's want to understand their ticket status
- The product changes before the knowledge base can be updated
- Customers don't know about product/feature releases
- Customer value their relationships with support reps
Solution
How we solved the problems
We worked off of a vision statement for the project, "Instill IBM’s clients with the trust that IBM support will deliver a seamless experience throughout their journey." We wanted all clients to view IBM as one company by providing support in a consistent and meaningful manner across all products and channels.
We created these hill statements with our project executives and research insights. They guided the concepts we developed.
Sketches and user flows
Wireframes
Final Solution
We created a client facing portal that recognizes each client, tracks issues, informs about product updates, and uses cognitive technology to find relevant answers.
To power the client portal we redesigned the support engineers experience and portal. It informs engineers of client profiles, tracks issues and updates to tickets, helps engineers collaborate with each other, and analyzes solutions for faster resolutions in the future.
Final takeaways
What did I learn?
This project had amazing executive support. From the beginning they were open to the hearing our fresh take on the problems facing their business unit. I learned the power of well told story. We summarized their problems so nicely they used us to pitch the highest decision makers at IBM.
Our project was the first step in forming a design team and the purchasing of support software that met the requirement we made.