By reducing the time spent on customer support calls, I saved Fenix $78 a day — the equivalent of giving every call agent 16 minutes back in their work day.
Responsible for creating a new help desk for Fenix's call agents, I designed and built bespoke software that logged over 30,000 daily calls, in 50 languages, for call centres in 9 countries across Africa. This included running multiple pilots to test functionality before deployment, defining and delivering training remotely and in person, designing the product roadmap and launch plan, and creating and measuring KPIs.
To build a help desk that met all the needs of Fenix's customer support team, I sat with call centre agents and learned about their day-to-day. A lot of their time was spent switching between applications to find information, take actions to resolve issues, and manually handle calls. I was confident we could design a service desk that let agents do all of these things in one place.
I also moved the help desk away from free-text call notes — impossible to analyse and time-consuming to write — and instead created a hierarchy of topic dropdowns, with related subsets, to record issues accurately and quickly.
After the first three months of use in Uganda, the time agents spent writing up a call dropped from 26 seconds to 14 seconds — a saving of 16 minutes a day, per agent. With approximately 200 agents in Uganda's call centre, that was a daily saving of $78 with less talk time needed on the phone line, totalling a saving of $2,430 a month.
Rolled out across the remaining 8 countries, with approximately 1,000 agents using it in total, Fenix would have expected to save around $10,000 a month. I moved on from Fenix just as the help desk was being rolled out in the final two countries — Kenya and Rwanda.
The best way to solve a user's need is to really get to know your user. Sitting with people, visiting them to understand how your product plays a role in their life, will maximise the impact it can have.
By reducing the time spent on customer support calls, I saved Fenix $78 a day — the equivalent of giving every call agent 16 minutes back in their work day.
Responsible for creating a new help desk for Fenix's call agents, I designed and built bespoke software that logged over 30,000 daily calls, in 50 languages, for call centres in 9 countries across Africa. This included running multiple pilots to test functionality before deployment, defining and delivering training remotely and in person, designing the product roadmap and launch plan, and creating and measuring KPIs.
To build a help desk that met all the needs of Fenix's customer support team, I sat with call centre agents and learned about their day-to-day. A lot of their time was spent switching between applications to find information, take actions to resolve issues, and manually handle calls. I was confident we could design a service desk that let agents do all of these things in one place.
I also moved the help desk away from free-text call notes — impossible to analyse and time-consuming to write — and instead created a hierarchy of topic dropdowns, with related subsets, to record issues accurately and quickly.
After the first three months of use in Uganda, the time agents spent writing up a call dropped from 26 seconds to 14 seconds — a saving of 16 minutes a day, per agent. With approximately 200 agents in Uganda's call centre, that was a daily saving of $78 with less talk time needed on the phone line, totalling a saving of $2,430 a month.
Rolled out across the remaining 8 countries, with approximately 1,000 agents using it in total, Fenix would have expected to save around $10,000 a month. I moved on from Fenix just as the help desk was being rolled out in the final two countries — Kenya and Rwanda.
The best way to solve a user's need is to really get to know your user. Sitting with people, visiting them to understand how your product plays a role in their life, will maximise the impact it can have.