InDebted

To ensure profitability, InDebted must identify and optimise internal processes to reduce operational costs effectively.

Gather the data: To understand the deficiencies in InDebted's operations, I needed to grasp how the product functions accurately. To ensure I gained an accurate picture of the business, I organised meetings with key areas, including CS Agents, Client Managers, and the executive team of InDebted.

What we discovered: Although some aspects of the business developed industry firsts in automation for payments, there were huge areas in customer and client services that still had manual process with some requiring engineering effort:

• For each enterprise customer they onboarded, it required on average 12 customer service agent to service a clients account costing about $120k.

•Customer data scattered across 3 places, requiring customer service agents excess amount of time to resolve customer and client quires.

• Unclear balances necessitate manual account calculation by customer service.

•Current CRM can't manually alter accounts, hampering US customer service a day as they relied on Australian operations team.

•Engineering and data teams were needed for frequent bulk debtor account exports for clients auditing each week.

• Current client and customer servicing software cost over 1.5 million US per year.

•There were multiple debtor profiles and status, which made it hard to manage an customer account.

Assessment of existing services: I created a user flow to capture how customer and client services operated. This step was critical for evaluating the design and scoping the project, as it pinpointed where breaks occurred and opportunities for improvement arose. My recommendation was we need 3 systems:

• Update the existing user experience within the current CRM to streamline customer escalations and reduce query servicing time.

•Create a client admin portal, to give client service managers functionality removing engineering effort to solve critical issues.

•Clint portal for medium enterprise customers to be able to self prevision their accounts, reducing the need to hire agents to service the account.  

After evaluating the problem and CRM alternatives, the stakeholders choose to invest in 3 custom CRMs, that they would be able to scale and service as the business scaled with a long term benefit of reducing licensing cost.

My initial approach involved making low-effort updates to the existing customer service CRM. These updates promised significant benefits by reducing the time required to service customer queries and could be accomplished within a single sprint. This kept the engineering team busy as I was scoping the designs required.

Next, I mapped the information architecture detailing how all three systems would function and represent a debtor's account and status. This served as the foundational blueprint for the project and a crucial asset for facilitating asynchronous communication among the three teams involved.

From the finalised IA diagrams and working with product managers I was able to scope the required functionality that would be key to lowering the operation costs, creating low fidelity wireframes and concepts to gain feedback with users, before designing a shared design system that all 3 teams could use, and finalising the final designs for production.

By improving the efficiency and effectiveness of customer and client service operations, the CRMs developed streamlined the workflow of InDebted agents by consolidating customer information and implementing a more intuitive page hierarchy, the systems minimises the number of cognitive decisions required by agents when handling customer queries, leading to a more streamlined and seamless experience.

We archived a 32% reduction in average resolution time for customer queries has met our goal of providing customer service within 5 minutes. Additionally, the dependency on engineering effort by client managers decreased by 58% in the first quarter post-release. We anticipate a reduction in the number of customer agents required to service the companies, resulting in overall savings year-on-year. Furthermore, the scalability of the client portal for enterprise customers is expected to contribute to continued savings.