Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge & Selection

I work for a bank in our Credit Card Customer Service department, leading a team of 17 phone  associates that were selected as a Pilot Team for new servicing products. As technology evolves, we try  to beat it to the curve by designing innovative and intuitive platforms in-house. Our latest project  involves migrating our existing servicing platform to a new, proprietary platform, that will allow our  front lines to efficiently navigate through a call with ease.

The challenge comes in as these high-performing agents are not seeing features available on our older  platform as well as not liking the flow and feel of the new one (...we’re creatures of habit after all). Mind  Mapping was the first tool that called out to me; Since I’m not on the phone, using the system every day  like my team is, I wanted to know what they had in mind & what feedback/ideas they had to improve  the platform they’d ultimately be using in the future.

Application

I wanted to host some sort of Yard Sale, as referenced in the “Designing for Growth” book, to compile as  much information from the users themselves. To do this, in the virtual world that is 2021, I turned to  Google. I first sent out a Google Form (short survey) to gather feedback around the main pain-points,  workflow errors, suggestions, and even wins that our team saw. I then compiled the data and broke it  down into 4 different categories based on responses. After feeling confident with the categories, I  opened a Google Jamboard. The Jamboard allowed me to set up 4 different pages/tabs with a specific  category on each.

What’s a yard sale without any customers?! I invited my team, along with other teams on the Pilot, to  explore the different tabs and add a “sticky note” with their feedback/suggestions to the corresponding  categories.  Since the Jamboard is a live/shared document, all the associates were able to  simultaneously add their input. At the end of the Yard Sale, I regathered the data and color coded and  clustered like-sticky notes to identify common needs/trends.  (small screenshot to tie this together)

Reflection – Mind Mapping

Insight & Approach

WOW, I never would’ve thought to learn what we did after this activity! Our associates, for one, felt  empowered and included in the development of their servicing platform. Our developer teams were  astonished at what the associates were able to provide – the “Front Lines” know what they need to  service the customers and were fantastically vocal in identifying those items through the different  activities. We found that the things our agents felt they were missing were mostly “tribal knowledge” of  the systems and workflows, things a designer would never think of since they aren’t in the trenches like  the associates are. From this, we were able to implement subtle changes to enhance the associates’  experiences.

The Mind Mapping activity quickly proved to be a success and is something we will be using time and  time again as it was able to generate insight like we haven’t had in the past.

