SOLUTION CENTRAL

April 2018 - Feb 2019

Solution Central is a flagship CRM software curated in Anthem on PEGA Customer Success platform. I was involved in the following areas:

Performed deep analysis of the information surrounding the Anthem Health Guide offered service for commercial, national and large group employer plans. Studied the use cases to understand the CSR interactions, their current experience and pain points.
Advocated for user-centric design approach and created a framework to help the business/stakeholders and product owner address the gaps and challenges in the current customer journey. The design solution needed to be intentional for guiding CSRs to make right selections, provide information so that each customer service call is contextual and exceptional and reducing the dependency on training and experience. Executed a research plan to sketch, prototype, test and validate to get feedback for the design approach. The development team implemented design recommendations to create the feature and test.
Integrated UX process in the Agile environment to engage with several development teams toupdate the Pega Customer Service Desktop application Solution Central with new features.
Created a design pattern library to help build consistency across the platform. Revised the existing design guidelines. Performed Heuristic Evaluations of the interface of key workflows to discover usability problems. Suggested changes to the UI for implementation.

My Role.

During this project, I have taken the roles of researcher, designer. Developers have been consulted regularly for feedback and ideas since the PEGA PRPC business rules based CRM software platform was primarily used as the foundation.

The Project.

Anthem Health Guide is a dedicated concierge team of Associates that helps members of commercial, national and large group employer plans. They have to guide the members with quick advice on various health conditions, steer them towards the right clinical staff, schedule appointments and warn them on upcoming healthcare related changes to their coverage. They were using a legacy software component which was to be redesigned using PEGA platform and would need:

The user interface was to be simplified, made easy to use and intuitive to provide great customer service.
The component was to provide seamless integration with the other existing modules of Solution Central.
Near future plans included rolling out important features that provided ways to receive call backs from members.
The user interface needed to have a new design approach which would be different from the existing modules from Solution Central. This would need a revision of the design guidelines.

User Centered Design approach.

research.

We started with collecting all the feedback and questions we had gotten through support to get an idea of what our business users were looking for and what they had problems with. Also, I did interviews with some of the CSR’s, to find out what kinds of methods they used and how. I wanted to know how they used their software and multi-tasked between taking calls and updating the data, what they needed for that, what upsides and downsides of their current approach were, and why they made the choices they did.

For a complete image, I also interviewed the product owner to hear about their experiences, since they are a very important part of our user group.

After the interviews I observed how CSR’s structure their work on existing systems and on our old platform, to see what kinds of databases currently get created and what kinds of workarounds they do when not having access to all the tools they need.

ideate.

After interviewing and there after many brainstorming sessions, and making everyone aware of the priorities, came the tough part of making sure everyone on the team believed in my new design approach. The ideation part was very difficult during this project and was the part that probably lasted until the end, way until the end of the design phase. Since there wasn’t a very clear vision yet, so I started sketching mock ups, building wire-frames alongside discussions with the development team. I had to adhere to the PEGA CRM Model for my layouts and studying other solutions helped in conceptualizing.

design.

Finally, we settled on to a conceptual workflow for the business process. The new system structure would be way simpler and would allow CSR’s to easily handle multiple service requests for the different sets of Members of the Healthcare insurance plans. The system would be based on a PEGA CRM platform. The guided workflow would ensure both the CSR and Members didn’t feel like they could miss something, and CSR’s would be able to help Members quickly.

Then upon coming up with multiple approaches via Axure HIFI prototypes, I started presenting to the business users to help them understand our new design. With the near to real prototypes, they could clearly see the value on how the Customer Service would improve from now on. The prototypes were finalized by iterating through several rounds of testing.

There was a requirement to allow the CSR’s to be able to quickly check the contact details of a Member without logging in. This was provided alongside keeping security for the updates requiring logging in according to the CSR’s correct credentials. Giving choice for allowing customers to have their telephone numbers to be placed on Do Not Call list was utmost important and to be implemented in accordance to the company’s legal policy.

All UI screens were designed according to the UI/UX guidelines and Heuristics, and keeping PEGA platform features in mind. This required a learning curve from my side as I was new to PEGA but that’s where my previous software development skills came handy. I could collaborate with the PEGA certified developers and this helped me to come up with useable, clean, easy and efficient Interface design.

There was a need to display all the Member contact details viz., their email, telephone numbers, text numbers, mailing addresses and communication preferences set to their benefits from their health care plan to be shown on one single page. This was challenging to have a clean design without cluttering every detail on one page. The following 2 pages show how information was grouped in 2 tabs so that the Member could handle every contact details and not miss out on anything.