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UX Research: Ascent Global Logistics Internal Service Desk

As a newly appointed UX Researcher at Ascent Global Logistics, my first major undertaking was to evaluate the performance of the organization's internal Service Desk platform and gauge user satisfaction with its current state. Despite a pre-existing awareness of the widespread discontent amongst users, my challenge was to meticulously identify the specific areas of dissatisfaction, while also devising strategies for enhancing the platform's performance.

Role: User Experience Researcher

Tools Used: Microsoft Forms, Microsoft Teams, Excel

Project Duration: March 2022 - June 2022

Project Overview

Goals

  • Understand how the current internal Service Desk software and request processes are performing.

  • Understand the barriers encountered by users.

  • Pinpoint main factors of dissatisfaction and weak points in user flow.

  • Gain insight on how to improve the platform and to improve efficiency.

Responsibilities

  • Hold regular meetings with stakeholders

  • Write and revise interview scripts and surveys

  • Conduct one on one user interviews

  • Administer company wide survey

  • Compile all research data into a final report

  • Collaborate with design team to suggest an action plan

Discovery

Stakeholders

  • Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

  • Senior Director of Infrastructure and Security

  • Senior Manager of Product Strategy and Design

  • Senior IT Manager of Shared Infrastructure

  • Service Desk Manager of End User Support and Engineering

A pivotal milestone in the research journey entailed convening with the shareholders to gain a comprehensive understanding of the Service Desk's operational framework, as well as solicit their perspectives on its strengths and weaknesses.

Service Desk Strengths

Chat Feature - Stakeholders expressed confidence in the reliability of the chat feature as a viable communication channel for users.

Level 1 Response Times - According to the stakeholders, Level 1 issues were swiftly resolved within 3 hours.

Call-in response - Stakeholders conveyed that service desk agents were prompt in addressing incoming phone calls, with wait times lasting mere seconds.

Service Desk Opportunities

Request Forms - Stakeholders felt that the request forms were lacking in user-friendliness and were perplexing to end-users.

Confirmation Pages - Stakeholders felt that the confirmation page after submitting a ticket was lacking in key details regarding next steps in getting requests resolved

Knowledge Base - Stakeholders observed that the knowledge base was limited in scope and that the articles were not composed in a user-friendly manner.

Personal Exploration

In the initial stages of the project, I conducted a thorough investigation of the Service Desk and identified various channels through which users could submit request tickets, including email, phone, portal, and chat via the portal and Microsoft Teams. To gain deeper insights, I listened to recorded calls between users and Service Desk agents, sent test emails, and submitted test requests via the portal.

 

Upon analyzing my findings, I hypothesized that users could be encountering the following pain points:

  • lack of visibility into the status of their tickets

  • uncertainty regarding the timeframe for issue resolution

  • request forms being complex and vague

  •  limited and vague knowledge base articles within the user portal.

Service Desk Portal Landing page

Planning

Timeline

At the start of this research project the stakeholders determined an 8 week deadline to conduct the research and provide an action plan.

  • Week 1: Discovery

  • Week 2-3: Plan/ Create the Survey and Interview Script

  • Week 4: Send out the Survey and recruit Participants

  • Week 5-6: Hold User Interviews

  • Week 7: Organize survey and interview data

  • Week 8: Meet with design team to ideate action plan and present findings with action plan

Stakeholder Collaboration

The stakeholders were very helpful throughout the research process and were involved in making sure we met our weekly goals.

I led meetings every week to update the stakeholders on how the project was going and to get their approval on the survey and interview questions. I also talked to some of the stakeholders one-on-one to get their input and help me make decisions about the research.

Creating the Survey

To supplement the qualitative data acquired through user interviews, we sought to integrate a survey to procure quantitative insights into user experiences.

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Survey Goals:

  • Assess the satisfaction of communication from the service desk

  • Assess the satisfaction with the time it takes to resolve request/issues

  • Assess the satisfaction with the different contact channels the service desk provides (email, phone, portal, chat)

  • Access the satisfaction with the service desk portal’s UI, usability, and content.

  • Determine the primary uses and understand the journey users take when utilizing the service desk

Writing the Interview Script

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Interview sessions aimed to comprehend the underlying reasons and experiences that informed the survey responses. In developing the interview script, I organized the interview into three distinct segments: overall experience, survey answer clarification, and usability. 

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Interview Script Goals:

  • Understand user’s overall experience, thoughts, and opinions with the service desk

  • Understand some of the main tasks that users regularly do with resources provided by the Service Desk.

  • Understand the causes and situations where users had a negative experience with the Service Desk.

  • Ask clarifying questions about answers users gave in the survey.

  • Assess the usability of submitting a request or incident on the Service Desk Portal.

Conducting the Research

The Survey

Survey Recruitment:​ Due to my recent entry into the company and the criticality of security within Ascent, the stakeholders and I collectively determined that the optimal approach for recruiting our participants without evoking concern was to enlist the CTO to send a notification to the entire organization, notifying them of the survey and further outreach to schedule user interviews. I was tasked with drafting an email that the CTO could distribute, outlining the survey parameters, providing pertinent details regarding the drawing for a gift card, and providing the hyperlink to the survey hosted on Microsoft Forms.

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Survey Platform: Given that the majority of employee data was integrated with Office 365, the decision was made to leverage the capabilities of Microsoft Forms in order to track the identities of survey respondents as well as their responses.  Regrettably, certain glitches were encountered in the Excel file generated by Forms,  requiring a manual reorganization of data in a separate Excel file. Further details on this issue can be found in the upcoming section outlining survey challenges.

The Interview

Interview Recruitment:​ In the survey, the final question inquired whether they would be open to partaking in a one-on-one interview with myself in order to delve deeper into their experience with the service desk. From the pool of 35 volunteers, I was tasked with selecting 15 individuals that encompassed the diverse demographic groups present within the company. In order to ensure a heterogeneous selection of participants, the following demographic variables were taken into consideration:

  1. Departmental affiliation within Ascent

  2. Age

  3. Gender

  4. Level of familiarity and engagement with technology

Upon choosing the 15 participants, an email was sent to the chosen individuals where they were requested to select a date at their earliest convenience, using Calendly, in order to conduct the interview. Out of the 15 individuals contacted, 14 scheduled an interview while one participant respectfully declined.

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Interview Platform: Again since the bulk of employee data was assimilated with Office 365, we remained within the same ecosystem and opted to utilize Microsoft Teams to conduct the interviews via video chat.

Survey Challenges

Data Accuracy:

  • While the survey was being conducted, I kept a close watch on the incoming data, both via Forms and the corresponding Excel sheet that Forms provided. To my dismay, the data presented on the Excel sheet did not align with the data that was visible on Forms.

  • As soon as this discrepancy was detected, I notified the stakeholders of the situation, and proposed manually entering the survey results into a new Excel file.

  • The new Excel file was promptly created, and data was consistently updated on a daily basis, while the survey was being administered.

Interview Challenges

Access:

  • While conducting the interviews, participants were asked to access the service desk portal so I could to observe their interaction with the platform. Regrettably, 4 participants encountered an issue where their login credentials failed to function.

  • Evidently, participants who had never previously accessed the portal were more likely to encounter this issue, while regular users of the portal experienced no difficulty.

  • Following the recurrence of this problem during a subsequent interview, I promptly contacted the Service Desk Manager of End User Support and Engineering to obtain their assistance in rectifying the issue, and to ensure that the remainder of the participants were able to access the portal.

  • For the participants that were unable to access the portal, access was granted to them immediately after the conclusion of the interview.

Conclusion

 Survey Key Findings

  1. 52% of surveyed users primarily call the Service Desk over any other contact channel; whereas 5% used chat, 23% used email, and 20% used the portal.

    • Additional feedback demonstrated that users preferred to call in because it resulted in faster resolution times for their requests since the majority of the time the agent would resolve their issues while they were on the phone​

  2. More than half of surveyed users indicated they were not satisfied with the design, layout, content of the portal and forms within the portal.

    • Additional feedback from users demonstrated that forms on the portal are not user friendly and users found information in the portal to not be helpful ​

  3. The survey also indicated that 60% of users were satisfied with ticket resolution times.

    • Additional feedback from users demonstrated that most users have simple requests that do not need to get escalated; however once a ticket is escalated the resolution times tended to increase.​

  4. The majority of surveyed users indicated that the felt Service Desk agents did their best to resolve their issues and indicated agents displayed empathy towards their problems

    • Additional feedback from users demonstrated that very few users had issues with agents and they felt that even if an agent did not know what to do, the agent still tried to help the users as much as possible​

Interview Key Findings

  1. The majority of users who were interviewed expressed frustration with the lack of education and knowledge about their resources and what the capabilities of the service desk were.

  2. All users who were interviewed were frustrated by the lack of updates or communication regarding the status of their tickets, including no indication of when their ticket would be resolved or who was responsible for handling their case.

  3. Two out of the 14 users who were interviewed had negative experiences with service desk agents, while the remaining participants had a high regard for the service desk agents.

  4. All users who were interviewed expressed frustration with the extended duration of issue resolution, with tickets remaining open for weeks or even months at a time.

  5. All interviewees expressed their frustration and confusion with the navigation of the service desk portal. The overall layout was considered non-intuitive, and the forms lacked a clear flow and comprehensive language, causing additional confusion.

Action Plan

Education - Ensure users are aware of their resources, and expectation and capabilities of the SD​

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Communication - Ensure there is communication about ticket escalation: where is it going, who is it going to, how long will it take, provide regular updates on tickets whether something has changed in status or not, and ensure users are reading communication and training emails from SD.

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Portal Updates - Ensure the portal has an intuitive design that uses cohesive and comprehensive language for users.

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Simple Request/Issues vs. Complex Requests/Issues - Since there may be a correlation with satisfaction and the type of request/incident submitted, then the processes for more complex issues must be reassessed in order to prevent dissatisfaction

  • Examine time frames and boundaries BTL operates when dealing with these tickets to find where we can improve.

Armed with these valuable insights, I convened with the product design team to brainstorm solutions to address the service desk issues plaguing our users. We were confronted with the reality that our Service Desk was managed by a third-party, which limited the extent of our proposed changes. To ensure all proposals were adequately approved by both the third-party and Ascent stakeholders, we narrowed our focus to internally actionable adjustments. Bellow is the proposed changes crafted by the design team and I:

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Rebranding to Support Desk

  • Negative connotation tied to Help Desk and Service Desk (i.e. Helpless Help Desk)

  • What feeling are evoked when you hear “help” or “service”? What about “Support”?

Synchronizing language across channels

  • Terminology that addresses or refers to the users (i.e. customer) is confusing since many users do not realize that they are customers.

  • Use terminology that they recognize and identify with (i.e. user, Ascenter, Roadrunner)

Improving education and communication through email

  • Users already receive emails that communicate and educate them on their resources from the SD, but are being disregarded.

  • We aim to grab the user's attention as best as possible in those emails through more engaging content.

  • All communication emails should share the same theme to maintain a consistency and ensure the user knows what to look for when receiving SD communication.

  • The use of avatars and color can help peak the users interest, making interacting with the SD more fun.

  • Consider including gamification (easter eggs, contests, trivia, etc.) to increase engagement

  • Use an email tool to automate and format as well as track opens and other engagement.

Service portal redesign

  • Users want to be able to see what their options are on the landing page; they don't want to guess where they should go to get support or find the resources they need.

  • Many users mentioned they only use the portal for request, to fix something, or to look up a previous ticket – so these options should be a focus.

  • Simplifying and taking out unnecessary items on the landing page will help users find what they need faster. (I.e., unnecessary images or features that aren't being utilized often)

  • Adding what matters most to the user on the landing page will support the users in fixing their issues and gaining productivity faster. (I.e., popular questions or quick actions)

Location

Austin, Texas

Email 

amormanzanares@gmail.com

Social

  • LinkedIn
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