This airline handles over 15,000 customer issues each day by phone. However, the primary toolset that customer service specialists use is over 10 years old.
Cancellation. It is the second highest reason customers call. However, specialists continually reported problems with cancelling passengers/flights/segments and the client Product team wanted us to investigate.
The system complexity, driven by a vast set of institutional rules, was certainly a hurdle to mention. To surmount this, I created cheat sheets and lunch-n-learns to up skill the team and preface design work. We also created flow charts before any wireframes to make sure we could articulate how the solution worked.
To truly understand the cancellation process, we needed to go beyond surface-level complaints. Our research combined three key approaches: shadowing specialists during live calls, gathering quantitative feedback through surveys, and documenting detailed task analyses.
During one-hour side-by-side sessions with specialists, we watched as they juggled multiple tools and struggled with flight searches. The frustration was palpable in their responses:
These observations led us to track specific metrics:
Two critical problems emerged from our analysis:
With clear evidence of our specialists' challenges, we needed a framework to guide our solution. We developed a UX Strategy Blueprint* that aligned business goals with user needs, establishing two core guiding principles that would drive every design decision:
*Thank you Jim Kalbach for creating this template!
These principles proved invaluable during concept testing. When specialists saw Miles information integrated directly into their main view—instead of a click away—their enthusiasm validated our blueprint. To refine our approaches, we:
To validate our solution, we conducted usability tests with five specialists across different customer service teams through UserTesting.com. The results exceeded our initial goals!
But the real proof came two months after launch. The streamlined system delivered measurable improvements to both specialists and customers:
One thing I found particular success with was tying the design rationale back to the UX Strategy. The client really appreciated the correlation and it gave the strategy more weight as the project progressed.
