Wireless Ticket portal allows customer to create and track trouble tickets

Background

Verizon Wireless Business did not have a self-serve solution for its customer to report issues. Overcoming the technical constraints on integration with existing Verizon internal representative system, I designed a self-serve portal that allow customers to report problems and track trouble tickets easily and efficiently.

My Role

As the lead UX Designer on this project, I worked closely with the product owner and the business analyst to understand customer needs and project requirements. I also worked with developers to understand technical limitations. Knowing the goals and constraints, I created the design for Trouble Ticket portal that allow customers to create ticket and to view ticket history.

Tools: Whiteboarding, Sketching, Photoshop
Deliverable: Wireframes, Comps

The Problem

Verizon Wireless Business did not have a self-serve solution for its My Business, Unified Portal, and VEC Portal customer to report issues. When encountering an issue, end user would contact his company's helpdesk with the problem. If the issue cannot be resolved, customer's company helpdesk will have to call the Verizon Helpdesk to file a trouble ticket. Depending on the complexity of a particular issue, a trouble ticket may be resolved by the Tier 2 Verizon Helpdesk, or passed on to Tier 3 Technician for support. This experience was time consuming and nontransparent to the customer. Furthermore, this model required high labor input and it was not cost-effective.

To increase accessibility and create efficiency, this project aimed to initiate automation process. By providing a customer facing portal, it allows the customer to report and track trouble tickets online. Furthermore, it creates the opportunity for Verizon to resolve low-touch/no-touch issues automatically.

Currently customer has to call Verizon Helpdesk in order to report and file trouble ticket

Future experience will promote automation and accessibility

The Approach

In this project we adapted agile methodology to focus on delivering fully-tested, independent, small features to diversify the risk. The project was divided into multiple releases with two-week sprint. In this current January release, we targeted Minimum Viable Products (MVP). The business analyst and project owner had prioritized a list of items on the product backlog, which I then used as the foundation to design the desired outcome for each sprint.

The Discovery

Before the project kick-started, I worked closely with the business analyst and project owner to understand the high level requirements, user journey and the expectations.

Findings

Integrate with existing Customer Support system: There is an existing internal representative portal. Thus one main goal of this project is to integrate with existing system and provide end-to-end visibility of the tickets to both the internal users and customers.
Initiate automation process: As mentioned earlier, the ultimate goal of this project is to expand the portal to include self-diagnostics and automated troubleshooting functions. Even though this is not part of the MVP, it is crucial in the current phase we build a fundation for it.
Problem type structure: The problem type can be nested. We hierarchized a problem into Problem Category, Subcategory, and problem type. Depending on the complexity of the problem, a problem may or may not have a subcategory. Thus the design should accomodate for both scenarios.

Information Architecture

After the initial research and discovery, I used sitemap to visualize how the customers would navigate the portal and what content the customers would need to support them. The Trouble Ticket portal is consist of three main pages:

Wireless Tickets page: The landing page would list all the tickets associated with the customer's company.
Ticket Details page: The customer could view the details of the ticket, including the Verizon Representative's activity log.
Create Ticket page: The customer would fill out a list of questionnaires in the Create Ticket page to report a problem. Depending on the type of problem it is, the questionnaires should change dynamically to help the Verizon Representative gather meaningful information. Thus the Create Ticket page should be a step-by-step process.

The sitemap provides the initial definition for what the delivering along with the first steps of defining the interface.

Ideation

Once we've settled on the sitemap, I started the iteration through sketching. My attention was highly focused on the Create Ticket page because it is the key initiate action that the customer will take.

Identify Problem Type

Initially I was provided with two sets of trouble ticket questionnaires for reference. I noticed that the problem type can be nested; some may have two layers while some other have three. I hierarchized a problem into Problem Category, Subcategory, and Problem type. Depending on the complexity of the problem, a problem may or may not have a Subcategory. I explored multiple solutions to accomodate this, and finally decided to move forward with navigation menu style approach.

Detailed design

The gallery below shows some of the high-fidelity wireframes in MVP.