My Role

As Lead Product Designer, my responsibilities over the course of this project were:

Customer Insights & Ideation
I partnered with the project manager and product owner to uncover insights and translate concepts into features that address customer behaviours and motivations.

Experience Strategy & Vision
I created frameworks and prototypes to share the vision of the eDesk Talk. This helped to convert ideas, gain alignment and drive decision making.

Planning & Scope Definition
I balanced customer goals and business goals. I prioritised and negotiated features for the first launch and planned future iterations.

Oversight & Coordination
I designed across and collaborated with 3 developers and echoed the voice of the customer to the technical team throughout the dev process.

Design Exploration, Refinement & Validation
Diverged wide and explored a range of possible solutions to the problem. Refined the chosen design direction after incremental prototype sessions with clients.

Leadership
I designed up and presented works to gain buy‐in from the Head of Product and other senior stakeholders.

Why?

We already have a great ticket system and even a Live Chat feature in eDesk—is adding voice support really worth the company effort?

Building Voice in eDesk is part of our strategic goal of expanding into an omnichannel experience (the ability to talk to, and continue the conversation with, a customer across email, chat and, now, voice). Part of what makes eDesk magic is our ability to centralise support and connect the dots, Voice is another example of that. We also know that, given all competitors provide a voice solution (of their own or through providers) we score negatively on feature comparisons in that regard during the sales cycle (regardless of the degree to which voice is important, it’s indicative to some prospects of a product that grows with them.

Research

Interviews

We interviewed participants from our Research Community who had all submitted Voice related insights, suggestions or requests.

From a varied pool of customers, we wanted to make sure we were speaking to those already exploring omnichannel solutions, those in significant need for an omnichannel solution or those who had transitioned to eDesk from other helpdesks that support Voice i.e Zendesk & Freshdesk.

Competitor Analysis

Our direct competitors either had an existing voice solution or were in the process of building one. Speaking to customers using these solutions gave us invaluble insight into the pros and cons of each omnichannel support product on the market. Competitor analysis gave us a grounding for industry standards, industry flaws and prominent indication of how we could address what customers need from a voice solution that were not being met by other customer support platforms and were not seamlessly integrated with the customer support process as a whole.

User Flow

For Phase 1, we focused on the following user flow.

Receiving Calls in eDesk

Most interviewees were taking calls from a physical phone on their desk, and then manually creating tickets. The first flow for consideration was an end to end flow for receiving calls inside eDesk and converting these calls into tickets.
Integrating aircalls pre-built dialler, clients could use this integration by simply setting up an aircall account and installing the aircall app in our app store.

UI Scoping

Where should the aircall integration live in eDesk?

eDesk is built in react, meaning that clients can navigate from page to page within the product without the product’s architecture refreshing. For this reason, we decided that the header was the most technically logical place to house the Aircall Dialler, so that calls could stay ongoing throughout any page transitions, navigations etc.



The dialler is accessible from any part of the product, calls can be answered without distrupting any workflows, notes can be added etc.

We established that the most cost effective and time effective approach to offer a well needed voice solution to our clients within 3 months was to integrate with an existing voice solution by forming a partnership with Aircall for our first phase. Partnering with Aircall would allow us to validate a voice solution inside eDesk, without dedicating valuble engineering time to building a native dialler as our first approach to solving the problem.

Learnings of Phase 1

We released our Aircall integration to a cohort of users, including those who we interviewed during the research phase. The MixPanel data showed us that the uptake of the feature was okay—most clients were recieving and answering calls. But the aircall onboarding process was causing many clients some teething issues, meaning that our support team was doing a lot of handholding through onboarding.

In addition to this, a subscription to aircall as a third party was very expensive per user—most of our clients were not willing to pay an additional cost per user to use this integration.

It was time to go native, with eDesk Talk.

The cost of Aircall was proving to be too high, and at this point we bit the bullet and realised that if we were going to have a voice integration, it needed to be a native part of eDesk and included in the price of clients plan per month.
We knew that if we built a voice feature ourselves, we could fully weave it into the eDesk ticket experience.

Designing Natively

We had the technical back bone of receiving calls in eDesk in our helpdesk ticketing system, so now it was time to design our own dialler. Our engineers began to build a dialler using Twillio. This gave us complete freedom to design a customer centric dialpad for eDesk.

Like any other project, I began with wireframing & design exploration. Throughout this iterative process, I continuously obtained feedback from engineers and product stakeholders

After customer validation and stakeholder buy-in, I could then construct the dialler in high fidelity—creating functioning prototypes for customer, engineer and stakeholder validation throughout the process.

Launch & Learnings

We released eDesk Talk to our clients and the uptake was astronomical compared to the previous aircall integration approach. We released the feature for no additional cost on all plans,ß meaning that we covered the costs for all clients which undoubtedly added to the uptake and overall user engagement.

We released this feature recently, and we are currently gathering feedback from clients and carrying out further usability tests. Customers have given various levels of feedback. Most notably, they have admired the integrated customer experience. By going native, we were truly able to leverage the vast amount of customer data in our database and provide a well rounded, information driven customer experience to agents managingß phone support. Now, agents immediately know a customers buying history, loyalty level and overall sentiment while in a call—something aircall or any other voice solution failed to provide us with.