Transforming Support at IBM

Transforming support at IBM

Project Thor looked at transforming customer support at IBM. A cohesive customer support is essential in order for IBM to be seen by our customers as one seamless company, regardless of how many products they have with us. This project is as much a service design project as it is a UX project because it deals with the entire system of support — the customer-facing solution and IBM support-facing solution.

My Role

My role on this team was the design lead. My amazing team included: Andie Young, Lauren Goldstein, Susan Johnson, Matt Sanders, Daniel Kim, Rocio Guererro, Paula Le, and Abdullah Shaikh (Director)

My team and I were flown to the IBM Corporate HQ in Armonk, NY to present this vision to senior executives.

**Due to proprietary limitations and patent filing, all work being shown  is represented through high level descriptions of interactions and interfaces.** 

 The Problem

IBM is a company of acquisitions.  With each acquisition comes a unique support structure. With continued acquisitions, IBM's support ecosystem becomes heavily diluted. Project Thor attempts to break this paradigm and remake it with a consistent vision across the entire 4,000+ SKU portfolio. Another large problem with support is that it is disparate and hard to navigate. Customers use third-party help to find their answers and when they do reach out to support, it is often fragmented. This leaves IBM customers with a very inconsistent experience.

"A lot of times you have to explain who you are, what the deal was, [and that] we need a fix now."

-Customer

The Vision

All clients view IBM as one company by providing support in a consistent and meaningful manner across all products and channels.

There is also a huge trend showing that the new generation of consumers will not tolerate poor customer service. As a result, companies  are rethinking how they deliver customer service. For IBM to thrive in the coming years, supportability needs to be front and center as a core value of the company. 

As-Is Journey for Customer

We found in our research that the process for getting help is frustrating and long-winded. It is common that once self-help on an issue fails, user-facing support is often a series of fragmented escalations to parties that do not communicate well with one another. An associate developer quickly has to escalate his/her problem to their system administrator and in some cases have to escalate it again to their operations manager. At the end of this experience, nobody is leaving happy. 

As-Is Journey for Customer Service Agent

When looking at the experience for IBM's customer service agents, we found that there is a lack of communication whenever an issue is handed off from one support agent to another. In many cases our customer had to restate their credentials over and over. There was another issue of getting the customer to the correct tier of service agent the first time. All of the escalation takes time and leave the customer and the support agent frustrated. This process is also timely for both the service agent and the customer. 

Opportunity

There is an opportunity to instill IBM's Clients with the trust that IBM support will deliver a seamless experience throughout their journey

Customer Solution

The customer-facing solution dealt heavily with customers being able to know where they are in the support experience, especially in the case of highly technical tickets or in the case of customers with multiple tickets opened simultaneously.  This customer facing experience also leverages IBM's cognitive capabilities to answer customers issues or route them to an appropriate customer service agent.

Leveraging the power of Watson to lower call volume.

One big part of the customer-facing solution leverages the power of Watson to sit in the background of a browser analyze and provide answers to the problem the customer is facing right then and there. Because Watson is constantly learning and growing it’s knowledge, the only time a customer would have to call IBM is if their issue is unique and has never occurred before.

Service Agent Solution

A major pain point that our solution solves is communication between service agents and other agents, as well as communication between service agents and their customers. The cognitive technology working behind the scenes of this service allows agents to only interface with their customers if they are the correct service agent for the job. This dramatically helps save time for both the agent and the customer. Another major pain-point that our solution addresses is keeping information consistent between service agents, so when there is a hand off of information, the new service agent is picking up right where the last agent left off, leaving a seamless experience for the customer. 

Leading a Team