Reflection - Mind Mapping    Challenge  I work for an international payroll outsourcing company. Our company runs payroll on behalf of  our customers. By doing so our customers can spend their Human Resources on strategic HR  initiatives that are not payroll administration related. We operate large call centers in different  parts of the world. Our agents logon to a Ticketing tool to solve customer inquiries related to  payroll and HR. I recently found out that there is no integration between our knowledge base  and the ticketing system and that our agents are spending too much time finding the answer to  an inquiry. I decided to use the mind mapping tool to visualize this problem.    Selection  The reason I selected the mind mapping tool discussed during Week 3 of the coursera course is  that I felt I did not know which design criteria the solution should have to be effective for our  company. I did not know enough about how our agents are solving tickets; i.e. the current  reality of tools and processes. I also believe that a visual picture of the “What is” is easier to  explain then a long word or email report that few find the time to read. I also watched a few  youtubes on how to effectively do mind mapping including a youtube from Tony Buzan (The  inventor of Mind Mapping). A draft of my mind map is below.    Application  I asked colleagues from 3 call center locations to conduct interviews with agents, I also did  some myself. I talked to experienced and inexperienced agents and agents with diverse  backgrounds to make sure I did not get single-sided-data. I also sat next to agents to observe  behavior. I collected all this info in excel sheets and then looked for “insights” and common  themes.  I created a mind map to visualize correlations. The mind map produced initial design  criteria. We also collected quantitative data from our ticketing system to learn more about  which tickets are getting answered slower than others and about the profile of the agent.    Insight  We learned that most agents are aware that an internal knowledge base exists but found the  tool ineffective for solving customer queries because of following key elements:

-  No search capability, therefor finding info is trial and error, navigating through a tree  structure of documents

-  Agents keeping their own “notepad” of standard answers because accessing the  company knowledge base is slow (speed of opening the tool), so they started to create  their own local version

-  Lack of reward in submitting knowledge articles and no clear education on how to get  the knowledge base updated.

By using mind mapping we found a series of tools and info sources that teams are using that  the company was not aware off. This was a great insight. Our initial focus would have been to  move all content from pdf and word documents into a HTML based searchable website but we  learned that our focus should be more on finding ways to make sure the knowledge base  content stays fresh and accurate and on designing a recognition process to reward agents that

share and create knowledge articles as this is a task that goes beyond solving an actual  customer inquiry.        Approach  Applying the mind mapping method to our challenge allowed me to really force my team to go  out in the field and talk and observe people and to document their findings. Too often we  assume we know what the problem and the current state is. In the future I would try to create  the mind map with more people to make sure people don’t think this a my “State of mind”. I  will start looking for tools to do this more in a collaborative way while dealing with the  constraints of a “remote” work environment. My team works in different offices around the  world and there is no travel budget to do these activities face to face.       Appendix - Mind Map Draft Image

