Enhancing Farnell's Support Experience
Calls to the help centre team had increased over time despite the Help Centre being a huge section of the website.
The challenge
Calls to the help centre team had increased over time despite the Help Center being a huge section of the website.
Data on the site was proving difficult for customers to navigate and commonly asked questions weren’t being captured to understand how the site needed to be improved and what Frequently Asked Questions would help.
The cost of scaling up the number of customer agents to keep up pace with the number of calls was not sustainable. A full overhaul of the site and triaging process to the customer agents was therefore 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.
Customer feedback
- The FAQs section is cluttered and difficult to navigate
- The contact details were are the start of every page so many people thought they were being signposted straight to speaking to someone
- The question-answer mechanism was not taking into account enough keywords to be effective
- There was no categorisation of data to try and easily navigate to relevant information
- The existing analytics only gave the Customer Research team limited information on clicks to the individual pages rather than search terms
“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 dynamical 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
“Calls to the customer team decreased by 35% after the product was launched”
Customer, Engineer
Help centre desktop experience
“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
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.
Boosted conversions by 31% for Dyson’s Trade-In service.
Built a multi-brand design system with 30+ components and 360+ variants.
Reduced customer service calls by 35% with a self-service redesign.
