Overview
Who's calling and what are you calling about?
Teaching Center is a custom customer relationship management app for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The primary focus of the app is to help online missionaries verify product offers and in-person visit requests by visitors to the church's various media channels and websites. In addition the missionaries would also resolve the needs of visitors, answer questions, and teach church doctrine. The end goal was to prepare the visitors to be referred to the local in-field missionaries.
The online missionary doesn't know the call is from a local missionary or who they are calling about…
…so they created records so they could tell who was calling. The records crowded lists with no relation to each other.
the Problem
How do we recognize calls from in-field missionaries and the person they are calling about?
Online missionaries were getting calls and texts from in-field missionaries that weren’t being recognized in the application as they worked with referred people. Online missionaries created records and labeled them as referred person's missionaries. This created additional records and confusion for the missionaries.
The desired outcome was for Teaching Center to clearly identify phone calls and SMS messages from the in-field missionaries so the online missionaries know who is contacting them and avoid creating extra records. The interactions will also need to be tied to the referred person.
user personas
my Role
As the primary designer on the product, I was charged with conducting user interviews, building wireframes, and prototypes for user testing. I worked with business analysts and the development team to determine the feasibility of the solutions proposed. Our team consisted of five designers, four analysts, and 16 developers.
We tested the prototypes via video conferencing with the online missionaries.
User Interviews
To better understand the need for the missionaries to create these records, we reached out to the online missionaries who were creating the most records. We asked them why they created the records and what we would need to do to make it easier for them to recognize the calls were coming from the in-field missionaries.
Digging deeper helped better solve the problem.
As I was conducting user interviews, it became clear that just identifying the calls as in-field missionaries wouldn't solve the problem. We needed to also associate the call with the referred person the missionaries were calling about.
Usability Testing
The prototypes were tested with the five online missionaries who created the most missionary records. The prototypes tested through the roof. They really liked how the in-field missionary information displayed in the interaction header. They felt it was intuitive as the different phone number contact information showed up in the typeahead input field when they tried to make outbound calls.
"WOW, you thought of everything!"
When they selected the phone interaction of the in-field missionaries, the online missionaries were really excited to see the teaching record of the person that was sent to the in-field missionary. At one point, one of the missionaries asked, "What if I have referred more than one person to the missionaries in that area?" She was very happy to see the selector appear when there is more than one referred person on their list assigned to that area.
constraints
One minor constraint discovered while working with the development team was that we could only successfully associate the contact information of in-field missionaries once the record was sent to the field. Once this was discovered, we interviewed users to see how disruptive this constraint would be. The users interviewed felt it was only a minor concern.
Online missionaries can now look up local missionary numbers from interactions. When the local missionaries call in, the app recognizes the person associated with the local missionaries.
If more those local missionaries are working with more than one person on the online missionaries list, they can choose what record to view.
Results
Better collaboration and less anxiety when taking calls
The online missionaries no longer felt the need to create records as missionary contact information. Because the system now recognized in-field missionaries, the online missionaries felt more confident to answer inbound calls. Now they are better able to collaborate with in-field missionaries allowing for smoother handoffs and a better experience for the people they are teaching.