Sky
Developing Sales and CRM systems at Sky
Background
Media and services company Sky announced the launch of a new mobile phone service, which would be an entirely new offering for Sky alongside their core services of TV, home phone and broadband.
I was briefed with designing and building the enterprise sales and CRM tools that Sky’s customer agents would use to process sales and orders from telephone customers, alongside technical architecture, business analysis, infrastructure and dev teams.
Process
Working alongside sales & customer service colleagues, we were able to observe their workstations and screens whilst live customer interactions were taking place.
Across the main contact centres there were (at the time) 11 colleagues with total or near-total blindness who were kind enough to offer their guidance and advice on accessibility as the work developed.
With access to front-line, customer facing colleagues, we were able to take a lean approach, roughly consisting of:
Semi-structured interviews and ethnographic studies
Design synthesis
Mapping and planning
Low-fidelity concepts
High-fidelity working prototypes
Usability testing
Learning and iterating
Prototyping
The development teams had the capability (and preferred) to turn around working prototypes in code, allowing us to gather a far greater depth of insight from our usability tests than if we had worked with static prototypes.
As a result, in some instances we were able to communicate designs at the lowest fidelity, with basic sketches of user flows often being ‘enough’ design for devs to build something we could test.
“Stan”
The team launched a bespoke customer service application which replaced the legacy Chordiant system and was nicknamed ‘Stan’ by the customer service agents, after Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy fame.
Colleagues were able to personalise the application using colours and a catalogue of Sky Movies promotional images, and by chance, the default one had happened to be a picture of Laurel and Hardy.
Stan replaced a suite of multiple existing legacy dialer, CRM, BPM, case management and billing platforms in use across Sky.
The impact of Stan on the teams was immediate.
Software onboarding and training was reduced from 3 and 6 weeks to 45 minutes.
Average call handling time was down from 13 minutes to 7, measured across all 10,000 customer service agents in the UK.
Customer service agents had launched their own hashtag, #ilovestan, on the internal social network, and were writing thank you messages to the product team.
