Industry: Product Compliance
Featured Methods: 1-on-1 Usability Testing
A globally-known product compliance firm was looking to improve the customer experience on their customer gateway’s online tools and services. This portal is used by a vast range of customers, large and small, to view the status of current projects and to review reports from previous projects. However, the portal was a non-customized implementation of third-party software. The firm’s web team had concerns about this solution’s usability and its impact on their customers…and even on their firm’s brand and reputation. AnswerLab was asked to determine customer pain points on this portal, and to provide data-driven recommendations to improve the online customer experience.
In order to gather qualitative insights from a customer base that was scattered across the nation, we moved beyond traditional usability moderation to conduct in-depth, one-on-one guided interviews remotely. Remote usability technology allowed our researchers to watch remotely as twelve customers, from Dallas to Trenton, were guided through several key tasks that we developed to uncover specific usability challenges. Users simultaneously talked about their experience in real time with our researchers on the telephone.
We helped our client see how improved usability could reduce customer support costs. We compiled the results of the remote usability sessions and identified the major and minor challenges that users faced when exploring the customer portal, providing detailed documentation and recommendations. For example, users were forced to download a report’s text content separately from its accompanying figures and diagrams. We suggested that reducing the number of steps required to download a full project report would greatly improve overall site experience.
Using this information and our additional recommendations, our client was able to implement changes that 1) increased the portal usage by 45% and 2) reduced the number of phone calls to their customer service department by 90%. As a result, our client was able to maintain their excellent customer service at an overall lower cost.
