Optix Ordering
Used by more than 150,000 representatives as the main experience to process all the orders for Verizon’s wireline business.
Partners in crime: Sanchita Baja, Jayson Sellers, Ben Williams, Sofia Qureshi, Minu Arcot, & Dave Sheppard
What problem are we trying to solve?
The legacy system that Verizon reps use to process and complete orders for customers has been struggling under years of neglected maintenance and is in need of a redesign to keep up with the demands of reps and to improve the service they want to provide to customers.
What was my role?
Worked with business partners, and development to define strategy on what should be migrated from the old ordering experience. Redesign the ordering experience to fit into the new call center application (Optix) being rolled out to all reps.
What was the process?
Understanding a rep’s flow
Visited various call centers in the northeast to observe and interview reps to understand their challenges and get an up close look at how they were using the ordering experience.
Documenting use cases
A huge chunk of the project was spent detailing all the use cases and creating an inventory list of all the components. Identifying all that was needed without bringing over all of the clutter from the previous system was one of our biggest goals.
Prototyping iterations
Because this was a huge overhaul of a system we wanted to make sure that the direction we were going in was the right one. We had remote and in-person sessions with reps and had them go through the prototypes and iterated based on their feedback.
Following a design language
Another of the goals of this project was to adhere to the new Verizon design language and to work with the design team in charge of customer-facing ordering experience to make sure that both reps and customers experiences were alike.
Result
It was a long journey to roll out the ordering experience. We had to compromise due to inadequate bandwidth and could not deliver the checkout portion of the experience. It was not an idea path to have the checkout stuck in the past but a decision that had to be made for the time being.
We did successfully capture that reps were more efficient in that it allowed them to process orders quicker, which helped their performance metrics and made customer’s happier as they got off of calls faster.
Key learnings
This was a very high profile project that pushed me in various ways as a designer. Undertaking development teams of 20-40, helped me learn to communicate my design ideas in different ways and that having a design language to fall back on is essential. Working on this also made me pay more attention to the things that were missing which could benefit users and empowered me to bring these to my partners, like how reps could benefit from the ability to create multiple quotes or how taxes needed to be incorporated later on in the order to improve transparency with our customers.