Enhancing Farnell's Support Experience
Outcome
Calls to the customer team decreased by 35%
Calls to the help centre team had increased over time despite the Help Centre being a huge section of the website.
The challenge
Data on the site was proving difficult for customers to navigate, and commonly asked questions weren't being captured — so there was no clear picture of how the Help Center needed to improve or what FAQs would actually help.
The cost of scaling up customer agents to keep pace with the volume of calls wasn't sustainable. A full overhaul of the site and the triaging process was required.
My role
This was a deeply collaborative and cross functional project that pulled in key stakeholders from the Customer Research team as well as customers directly. I acted as both the UI/UX designer and technical lead for this project.
The prototypes I generated as part of this project where so comprehensive that they required very little support from the Development team and so I was able to see the whole site section through to a production ready experience which was deployed in the UK and North America.
What customers told us
The FAQs section was cluttered and difficult to navigate. Contact details sat at the top of every page, so many people assumed they were being pointed straight to a phone call rather than an answer. The question-answer mechanism wasn't matching enough keywords to be useful, there was no categorisation to help people find relevant information quickly, and the existing analytics only showed clicks per page — not what people were actually searching for.
“The details were so prominent on the page and it seemed to be turning up no results so it just made more sense to call.”
Feedback from customer
What changed
- Creating clear categories for question types
- Presenting possible answers to customers instantly on the same page
- Using keywords to dynamically attribute questions to the database of answers
- Creating a hierarchy of content within the FAQs section to make it easier to navigate
- De-emphasising the company contact information, putting it at the end of any section as a final sign post if no answer was available
- Introduction of Adobe Analytics to assess search queries, question open and close times to more closely monitor and adjust content
Wireframes were created to help with the information architecture
Help centre desktop experience
Key performance improvements
Before and after
“Richard was instrumental in delivering customer focused enhancements across our Web BOM tool and Help Centre during their first redesign in 2022 /while part of the eCommerce Agile transformation programme in 2022 Richard provided expertise throughout all the projects' phases: from customer research to thoroughly understand the customer needs and validate the business assumptions; to wireframes that enabled us to get live feedback and further enhance the proposed solution. Richard designed the wireframe and created interactive prototypes, and then supported on the usability testing in collaboration with the UX team. His technical skills as well proved very valuable when having to understand the current CMS architecture and define the ways of working for a new FAQs application, replacing an existing Help Centre. A well-rounded UX/UI designer, who was able to very quickly understand a new industry, interact with customer and internal stakeholders, and deliver solutions that directly benefited the business goals.”
Amalia Tileaga, Product Manager — Premier Farnell
Impact
Calls to the customer team dropped by 35%, and engagement with the FAQs doubled compared with the old help centre — clear evidence that a clearer structure and a faster path to an answer changed how people actually used the site. What started as a fix for an overwhelmed support team ended up reshaping the help experience across both the UK and North America.
More of my projects
My recent achievements
Launched 10+ products with measurable business results.
Created a service blueprint to reimagine employee hiring in financial services.
Contributed to a 46% revenue increase via personalized A/B testing.
Launched Dyson's Trade-In service at a 14.7% conversion rate
Built a multi-brand design system with 30+ components and 360+ variants.
Reduced customer service calls by 35% with a self-service redesign.
