Election Day Call Center
Project Overview
Client: Governmental Office
Goal: Improve the ticketing system used in a call center to guide poll workers to solve any situation that could arise in the polling places during an electoral process.
Initial Challenge and Challenge Validation
Before starting the interviews, we had an initial challenge, base on the information provided by the stakeholders:
How might we enable the operator to accurately and quickly identify the problem that the caller is reporting?
After the AHA moment we got from the interviews and after analyzing the current process, we reformulated the challenge, as follow:
How might we support the operator during the call without turning the ticket creation into a double task to complete?
Discovery
Some information and insights gathered about the process:
- The system manages events, locations, elements and operators:
Events: even though election day usually is only one day, this system covers all the events that occur during an election process, which could last several days. Examples of events are: infrastructure testing, site surveys, among others.
Locations: these are polling places, warehouses and control areas.
Elements refer to voting machines, ballots, ballot boxes, poll books, and any other election item or element delivered to the polling locations.
Operators: they could be divided into field operators (poll workers and technical supporters), and remote operators (call center operators).
- Operators must report, through a ticket, every incident that occurs in a polling place.
- The ticketing system should guide the operator during the solving process, as it should allow to easily follow up those tickets related to incidents that are not yet solved.
- Creating a ticket in the current system could take around 10 minutes.
- Training call center operators is difficult because of the complexity of the ticket creation process.
- As the nature of the event they are managing generates stress, the system must be a tool to help both, the poll worker and the call center operator, to get the solutions expected rather that being a burden on them.
Understanding Current Process
We performed a simulation of a call between the call center operator and the poll worker. This way we could understand the current process and visualize a complete workflow for the ticketing creation process. We found that this call simulation was the appropriate way to find out what really happened on the field and allowed to us to identify all the pain points.
AHA! moment in Discovery Phase
The following takeaway came out during the initial phase of gathering information, specifically during the interview process and it was key to start our ideation process.
During an interview, one of the stakeholders said that the operators preferred to record the problem on a piece of paper rather than using the system. What really happens is that the operators receive a call, take note of the incident on a piece of paper and then, when they finish the call, they start filling all the information needed to create the ticket. The operators were not trained to do that, but that was the most natural solution they found to solve the situation they were facing with the complexity of the system.
Ideation process
We based our ideation process on the finding we got from the simulation of a call between the call center operator and the poll worker.
User Journey
After describing all the users, for this exercise, we focused on the call center operator and the poll worker. A complete user journey of the process, for the previously mentioned users, was defined.
Additionally, a notification flow was designed to allow the user to focus only on the next activity to perform: follow up of an existing ticket that is still open or the creation of a new ticket.
System Flow
Sketching and Testing
I put our ideas into paper sketches, and designed the needed elements and the flow that the operator must follow in order to reach the goal of successfully helping the poll worker to solve an incident. I mapped, on paper, every step of the conversation between the poll worker and the call center operator.
During the conversation simulation, I noted something that generated impact when designing the elements that we needed to include in the system: the poll workers, even though they receive training on how to operate the voting machines, need to receive a detailed step by step guidance on how to solve an incident, and the call center operators, who also receive training, need more than just a text to explain how to solve it. For example, if the machine runs out of paper and the solution is to insert a new roll in it, they need a video or images that show where the compartment is located and how the roll of paper should be placed into the machine.
Wireframes
I designed hi-fidelity sketches using Sketch and created a complete flow using InVision. Here is a sample of the wireframes created.
Takeaways
If there is something I have learned while working with the User Experience Design methodology is that you can collect takeaways during any phase of the design process and also they could come from a person you would not have expected.
