Information Architecture for Customer Support

Balancing between business and customer needs

Before we start talking about the project, I just want to say that I’m a strong believer that customer’s and customer support team’s interfaces should follow the same organizational principles. I call this “the mirror effect” and here is an example of how I used it to plan the IA of a CRM system.

The Problem

My client had an issue with their customer support performance. The calls lasted too long because the support team struggled to help customers navigate the platform and to enter new customer data into the system.

After reviewing both CRM and the customer’s dashboard interfaces the gap became obvious. There were no similarities between the CRM system interface and the customer’s dashboard, logical or visual.

The customer support team had to jump from one form to another, switching tabs and opening different windows just to help a customer change some information on their profile. The customer had it all in front of them, while the support team had to dig through layers of different information which were organized by completely different standards. This caused tension and bad user experience on both sides.

The Challenge

At this point, the client was ready to migrate to a new CRM in order to try to fix the problem. They also had their own in house development team ready to take on the task of customizing the new system to their needs.

To avoid building their own custom system, being a startup with limited resources, they decided to try with the most customizable solution they could find.

Technical limitations also limited our range of movement when it comes to creating something that resembles the customer dashboard the most. So we went for a different approach – match the chronological order of information of the customer UI when designing the CRM information architecture.

The Solution

Matching the logical and chronological order of information between customers and customer support UI, resulted in what a client estimated to be a 70% increase in team satisfaction and efficiency. Customer satisfaction with customer support raised to 56% in the first week of migrating to a new CRM.

How that looked like

The customer dashboard remained mostly unchanged, with some improvements in the content hierarchy, while the customer support team got a system that closely follows the customer’s UI hierarchy and is equipped with easy to access additional “backend” information about the customer.

Having the information organized the same way for these two user types helped the team understand the logic behind what the customer was saying and asking for assistance with, sped up the communication, and significantly simplified the onboarding of the new customer support team members.