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Handling customer support beyond accommodations
The existing customer service platforms were designed solely for accommodations and needed to be adapted to meet the evolving needs of customers.
To create an inspiring sneak peek into where we could be in 5 years, I translated this vision into a prototype that gave us a glimpse of the journey ahead and sparked crucial discussions.
Picture this: you’re a customer service agent for the world’s largest accommodation website. Now, this website also offers all sorts of travel products.
Suddenly, customers are booking more than just accommodations. They’re booking flights and museum passes. They’re calling you because they’ve just found out the museum they chose is closed for renovations. They want to know if they can rearrange their hotel room and flight dates without a massive penalty.
You’re juggling three different tickets in three different tabs, sometimes interacting with different systems to help that one customer. There’s poor visibility of how their purchases are related and what the cascading effect of changing one of them is. The handling time is so long that support lines and chat are clogged. Customers are confused. You are confused. Your options for helping them get a better experience with the platform are limited because it feels fragmented—to you and now, to them.
The current single-ticketing system wasn’t cutting it.
So we engaged in extensive research and creative sessions with designers, product managers, engineers, customers, and support agents themselves. Together, we crafted a product vision that evolved our in-house customer service software from a single-ticketing system into a holistic platform.
To keep everyone on the same page, we encapsulated it in a roadmap titled after our product vision:
Empowering Our Agents with Tools That Feel Like Magic.
This roadmap was our compass, guiding us towards a future of growth and expansion of the platform as Booking.com introduced new products and services. I chose to experiment by showing it in a format that felt easy to read and maintain.
To create an inspiring sneak peek into where we could be in 5 years, I translated this vision into a prototype that gave us a glimpse of the journey ahead.
The prototype was also a test run for our customer-facing Design System. Ironing it in an internal environment gave us a chance to see which gaps existed and how we could contribute before moving on.
Our prototype wasn’t just a pretty picture; it was a catalyst for conversation, creating discussions that rippled through the entire company—how we could leverage machine learning to improve the agent experience, or how we could merge the self-service content into the agent tooling for easy access and relevant machine suggestions.
These components were part of other systems and were incorporated in the prototype in an at-a-glance manner, working with the assumption this would reduce unnecessary context-switching for the agents.
Several components of this prototype were integrated into the existing design through smaller-scale experiments, including some conducted as A/B tests. These experiments were aimed at assessing metrics such as Full-Time Equivalents (FTE), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores, touchpoint frequency, and resolution time.
I’m grateful for the amazing folks in the CS Agent Design team who helped shape this vision ♡ Sierra Hatcher, Bradley Walker, Jeanna Hamilton, Rogerio Rossi, Isabela Sampaio, Ruikun Xu, Daniel Nunes, Matthew Pennel
