When Agents Win, Customers Win
LEAD DESIGNER
JAN 2025
Myles Anderson, CEO:
“Fleur played a central role in redesigning a number of our internal workflows and screens used by our internal team of 200+ citation agents that helped us reduce our delivery SLA from 18 days to just 5 — a great achievement that benefited both our team and our customers.”
PROJECT SUMMARY:
Led end to end design process from user research to prototyping and testing
Redesigned user experience of workflow tools for remote citation agents
100% reduction in spreadsheet usage (from 20+ to 0)
100% tool adoption by the Philippines team
User satisfaction: 4.5/5
Reduced SLA per campaign management cycle from 18 days to 5 over 6 months
Team Impact
100% adoption
Efficiency Gain
88% reduction
SLA
18 to 5 days
BUSINESS CONTEXT:
BrightLocal is a platform that helps marketers beat their competitors in Local SEO. As well as operating as a SaaS provider, BrightLocal offers a citation service which is executed by a remote team of agents in the Philippines. In late 2024, the Service Level Agreement to complete a campaign of citations had crept up to a high of 20 days and we as a team were tasked with helping to reduce this.
USER PROBLEM:
Agents’ were ignoring the internal tools in favour of spreadsheets, prone to human error and slow work processes. As campaign orders rose, so did agents’ ability to keep up and succeed.
KEY CONSTRAINTS:
01 After several rebuilds of our design system and another under construction, there was no source of truth to rely on between Figma and Storybook.
02 There was a lack of conviction and understanding from certain stakeholders that a design could have a significant impact.
TIMELINE:
Below is an overview of the project timeline and which UX/UI activities were conducted at each stage of the process.
KEY RESEARCH INSIGHTS:
01 SPEED:
What the user interviews quickly revealed was that the tools were very slow to load ~5 seconds on average, which was unacceptable for agents trying to work efficiently.
02 USABILITY ISSUES:
Abbreviations and colour coding were often misunderstood and there was a lack of flexibility in surfacing priority or duplicate campaigns quickly and easily.
SOLUTION OVERVIEW:
As well as improving the speed of the internal tools, I proposed a consolidated tool with more powerful filtering functionality as well as the ability to assign campaigns to address both the problems of speed and usability.
Priority Tagging & Due Date
Tagging capability for Customer Support and Overdue campaigns and arrange order by due date.
Ability to Filter By Criteria
Ability to filter by a wide range of criteria as uncovered by the UX research.
Ability to Assign Campaigns to Users
Add ability to assign one or multiple campaigns to a user.
Cleaner, UI Design Aesthetic
Improve the overall UI Design and play into the 'Aesthetic-Usability Effect' UX Law that users have a cognitive bias for products that are more attractive in design as easier to use and more functional.
HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPES:
LEARN & ITERATE:
As well as testing the prototype with the team pre-production, we continued to test after the first release and made iterations that would further increase adoption and ease of use.
IMPACT METRICS:
By improving the loading speed, reducing the need of spreadsheets from 20+ to 0 and improving usability of the two tools, over a six months period we were able to see a dramatic downward shift in the SLA from 18 to just 5. A big win for the agents!
100% reduction in spreadsheet usage (from 20+ to 0)
100% tool adoption by the Philippines team
User satisfaction: 4.5/5
Reduced SLA per campaign management cycle from 18 days to just 5
“The new tools are much faster and really easy to use.”
Joe Jacinto, Remote Agent
“At last they have stopped using all of those spreadsheets and long workarounds that didn't make sense.”
Rada Daktina, Operations Manager
KEY LEARNINGS:
01 OFF-THE-SHELF DESIGN SYSTEM
As this project was purely for internal tools, using an off-the-shelf design system could have proved to be a faster interim solution with a more flexible, user-friendly colour palette.
02 STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT
If I were to "redo" the project, I would focus on involving stakeholders earlier on in the process by sharing and discussing wireframes as well as early prototypes in order to improve the overall buy-in of the project as early as possible.