Presenting a quick view of a customer's activity
The team: Product Designer (me), PM, Engineering squad
RESEARCH
DESIGN
Launched: January 2020
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The designed solution

success metrics

The Release and Impact:
The Omnichannel customer timeline was released in sprints (Agile methodology).
This design got lots of positive customer feedback on Freshdesk's community page.

Here's the timeline displayed as the top feature on Freshdesk's website.
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the product and it's users

What is Freshdesk?

Freshdesk is a customer support tool used by customer support teams to resolve enquiries.

A few enquiries are "I would like a refund" or "This application isn't working, would you be able to help me?"

These support tickets are then picked up by support agents to handle, collaborate, and solve within Freshdesk.

Freshdesk (a customer relational management tool) is used by support teams, sales teams, and marketing teams depending on the organization.

What Freshdesk looks like - and how a support agent uses it

Project details

To help support agents getter a better view of customers' past tickets, Freshdesk, an Omnichannel helpdesk, introduced a Customer Timeline - a designed log of a customer’s activity.
As part of the Timeline project, Omnichannel Custom Sources was also designed to extend the timeline functionalities.

The team: Product Designer (me), PM, Engineering squad

Release: January 2020

Please note that the research below has been modified to comply with the company's NDA policy.

The support persona

Who we're designing the Omnichannel timeline for
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Works at Booktickets, an e-commerce organization that sells plane tickets. Bookticket uses Freshdesk as their support tool to handle incoming queries.

THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Customer calls

Our plan was to release the Omnichannel customer timeline in the contact detail page in Freshdesk.
The contact detail page lists out customer details like their email address, phone number and other contact information.
To validate whether it was the right place to put the feature, we got on calls with customers to understand how they currently use the contact detail page.

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The research question

Is the contact detail page the right place for this feature?

The questions
How often do you visit the contact detail page?
Frequently, during my shift.
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When do you visit the contact detail page?
When a customer faces an issue, I check the contact detail page to get more information from other tickets associated with the customer.
‍Do your customers contact you through multiple channels?
Yes, most customers contact us through multiple channels. Via phone, Facebook  or even email.
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What workflow do your support agents follow?
We follow the round robin approach of picking tickets assigned to us


We also planned to introduce a minimized Timeline view in the ticket detail page.
This allows support agents to quickly view a few of the previous raised support tickets within the ticket detail page itself. The ticket detail page is the core of Freshdesk's functionalities - where agents can reply, edit or assign tickets to other teams.

THE RELEASE PLAN

The release plan

→ Introduce the timeline in the Contact detail page
→Introduce a minimized timeline in the Ticket detail page

the Structure

Where the timeline would fit in a support flow

How we envisioned the Timeline would fit in a support agent's workflow (while responding to a support ticket/ customer enquiry):

How we envisioned the minimized Timeline widget on the ticket detail page to be used:

mocks - the timeline in freshdesk

Introducing the timeline

Breaking it down - the hover actions

Third party events in the timeline

Introducing the timeline widget

For support agents working on the Ticket detail page, a timeline widget was introduced.

EXPANDING THE TIMELINE

Omnichannel Custom sources in the timeline

What are custom sources?
All customer enquiries come from a source (Email, Facebook, Chat, etc.)
These sources show up automatically on tickets. By introducing Custom sources, Freshdesk admins can create tickets and tag them to a source that is customized for them.

An example of a Custom source: Walk-in store
These custom sources can then be logged onto the timeline.
The created flow

To create or edit a Omnichannel custom source, Support admins:-
Mocks

Creating a custom source

Choosing an icon for the new custom source

Customer feedback

Customer feedback

the end