Customer Center

overview

The goal of the Customer Center project was to enhance customer communication for the Cidadania Já service. By introducing a user-friendly platform with onboarding processes and comprehensive information, customers can now effortlessly manage and track information, and also get online support.

company

Cidadania Já

Role

UX Designer

Contributions

I worked in the end-to-end process, from desk research to the high fidelity prototype.

Background

Cidadania Já is a company that has as mission help people to claim their portuguese and italian citizenship. The company has started your activity in 2017 and since then, helped more than 5.000 clients to acquire their citizenship and open 5 new stores to reach more new clients all over Brazil.
I joined the Product team at its inception, when the team was newly formed. At that time, the team comprised two UX designers, a UX design intern, a UI designer, and the CEO as the design lead.
As UX designer in this project, I worked from the design strategy, research, user interview, medium fidelity prototyping and usability testing.

Understanding the project

The  problem 

Even though the company's stakeholders regularly engage with clients concerning their Portuguese citizenship processes, they yearned for a solution where they wouldn't need a phone call to grasp their application status, resolve queries regarding paperwork, and still experience satisfactory service upon purchase.

Consequently, despite the establishment of the Customer Center, the issue persisted due to its inadequate usability, leading clients unable to execute the website's intended tasks. Consequently, clients reverted to contacting customer service for updates and documentation inquiries.

The  Solution 

Cidadania Já introduces a new Customer Center as a solution, which contains all the information that clients need. It was thought out, designed, and tested with them, aiming to bring comfort, ease, and security when they want to learn more about their requests. Additionally, it provides online support in case there are any doubts about the procedures and offers an intuitive onboarding process.

Design process

Design Strategy

Company Goal

Creating a user-friendly platform with clear visualization for individuals using Cidadania Já services who want to understand the status of their request daily. Consequently, the interaction between client and support will be minimized, allowing the business to have more satisfied customers and a larger user base.

Target

Clients that already ask for support to claim their portuguese citizenship. Age range between 35 and 70 years old.

Expected outcomes

  • Ease of attaching documents;
  • Decrease the number of calls regarding status in the customer service department;
  • Possibility of contacting the company via chat in the Customer Center;
  • Decrease the number of incorrect documents sent to the company.

Discovery process

Internal research and observation

We started this process with an internal research, aiming to understand the entire journey that the company's customers must go through after hiring the service.

During this step, it was possible to understand the end-to-end user flow, the client/user expectations, the possible gaps and also the stakeholder's pain points. After this, the team was able to ask some questions work on the design strategy.

Benchmark

We started to do some benchmark to check how the user flow works in different products and how the onboarding process worked. The objective was to understand how explanatory the onboarding was, what was missing following the steps and the objectives and resources offered during the process.

Facts, assumptions and questions

The Facts, Assumptions and Questions is a Design Thinking methodology used at the beginning of projects. Therefore, before moving on to another stage, I felt the need to gather our facts, assumptions, and questiuons about our problem.

I decided to map these assumptions from the moment the client make the deal until the end of the customer's procedure, thus, the choice of this methodology also helps in the construction of the interview script and user observation during platform usage, as well as during their journey.

Definition process

user interviews

Following the discovery process, we outlined key objectives to guide our team during user interviews.

Leveraging the customer success team, we selected clients who generally appreciated the service but had experienced delays or had specific complaints.

Organizing interview panels helped us visualize and structure the gathered information, enabling the creation of empathy maps to inform the subsequent definition process.
  1. Understand fails of the actual onboarding process.
  2. List users' pain points during the onboarding process.
  3. Understand users' expectations after hiring the service.
  4. Generate insights and hypothesis.
In total, I managed to interview 09 users ranging in age from 30 to 70 years old, all clients of the company at different stages of the procedure.

The interview stage was crucial to deeply understand the pains and situations that users were experiencing, as well as to confirm and discard assumptions, and also to clarify questions about the user's journey.

Based on the interviews, we were able to begin creating empathy maps of the users so that we can implement a collaborative visualization and record what we know about a specific type of interviewed user. We did this by combining various individual empathy maps of users exhibiting similar behaviors and can be grouped into a segment to have a macro view of the characteristics and create our personas.

Personas

After conducting the interview, empathy mapping, and analyzing all the gaps and pain points that the user presented to us, we were able to create the personas.

We decided to develop the process this way because we believed that through this step, we could gain a deep understanding of the user's particularities, how the product interacts with their life, and the most effective way to communicate with them.

user journey

The user journey is every interaction that can be translated as a story between the client and the product. Our user goes through a path from the purchase of the service to its use, interaction, and completion.

By this point, I felt the need to group all the information we gather. Thus, through it, we can identify all the touchpoints that the user has with the company and the product, as well as understand their pains and feelings during this journey.

Finally, we were also able to observe opportunities for improvements that could be implemented in the redesign of the Customer Center.

Insight cards

After thoroughly mapping out the user journey and understanding how customers interact with the company and the customer centre, I decided to create cards highlighting the main challenges.

This approach aims to deepen our understanding of the difficulties faced. We made this choice because we're currently striving to delve into each user's unique struggles and insights for the brainstorming phase. It involves understanding their language, recognizing the product's value in their lives, and finding the best way to communicate.

Ideation process

Brainstorming

In this step we tried to bring possible solutions with the UX team and some company's stakeholders. We used a board in Miro, so everybody could see the ideas and generate insights.

After we bring all the possible ideas, was time to vote in the ideas that we believe should perform best to solve our problems. So, every participant could vote in 5 different idea, aiming to prioritize those we believe were best.
The most voted ideas:

Prototyping and testing

Medium fidelity prototype

The team came with the idea to create a medium fidelity prototype aiming to validate the ideas. We came up with this solution because we had a good stablished brand identity and we wanted to avoid misunderstandings and confusion by our users during the test. We believed that using a low fidelity prototype could prejudice the experience for our seniors testers.

First tests

For our first test session we separate some tasks to our users accomplishes. For this round, we did a moderate usability testing with 10 selected users, observating them through Google Meet, while complete the tasks in the prototype.

The objective during the test was to understand if the user could pass through the onboarding and the virtual tour and then complete the tasks.

the result

Following the tests, we engaged with users to gather feedback on the interface's usability and clarity of information.

Despite the online nature of our interactions and occasional connectivity issues, the engagement was positive. Users expressed enthusiasm for testing the solution and felt valued for participating in the usability testing. Subsequently, we implemented adjustments based on their feedback and proceeded to create the high-fidelity prototype.
  • Some seniors users didn't understand the terms "cashback" and "onboarding" .
  • The seniors testers felt the need to go back in the tutorial  instead of consulting the FAQ.
  • The younger users skip the tutorial  even that they didn't know how to use the product.

High fidelity prototype

Let's connect!

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