By reducing the time spent on customer support calls, I saved Fenix $78 a day - the equivalent of saving every call agent 16 minutes in their work day.

My role: Responsible for creating a new help desk for Fenix’s call agents, I designed and built a bespoke software that logged over 30,000 daily calls, in 50 languages, for call centres in 9 countries across Africa. This included running multiple pilots to test functionality before deployment, along with defining and delivering training remotely and in-person, designing the product roadmap and launch plan, and creating and measuring KPIs.

Process; In order to build a help desk that met all of the needs of Fenix’s customer support team I sat with call centre agents and learned about their day-to-day. I realised that a lot of time was switching between applications to find information, take actions to resolve customers issues and/or manually handle calls. I was confident that we could design a service desk that allowed the agents to do all of these things in one place. I also designed a help desk that moved away from free text call notes - these were impossible to analyse and time consuming to write - and instead created a hierarchy of topic dropdowns, with related subsets of dropdowns to record issues accurately and quickly.

Outcomes: After the first 3 months of use in Uganda, the time agents spent writing up a call dropped from 26 seconds to 14 seconds, which equated to a saving of 16 minutes a day, per agent. With approximately 200 agents in Uganda’s call centre, this was a daily saving of $78 with less talk time needed on the phone line, totalling to a saving of $2430 a month. Rolling it out across the remaining 8 countries, with approximately 1,000 agents using it in total, Fenix would have expected to save around $10,000 a month. I moved on from Fenix just as the help desk was being rolled out in the final 2 countries - Kenya and Rwanda.

Key Takeaway:

The best way to solve a user’s need is to really get to know your user. I’ve found that sitting with users, visiting them to understand how your product plays a role in their life, will maximise the impact a product can have.