NB - Grievances Tool

NationsBenefits, a leading provider of supplemental benefits and member engagement solutions in the US, was in need of a better way to address their member related issues to ensure 100% customer satisfaction.

Client

NationsBenefits

August 2022 - October 2022

Scope

Led 0 to 1 Design

UX/UI Design

Team

Sai Charan Kankipati, Sole Designer

1 SME, SWE. F & B

2 Business Analysts

1 Product Owner

Context

Took on the role of the sole design resource, leading the design process for an internal grievance tool.

After getting promoted from Junior UX to UX Designer within 6 months of my joining, I was tasked to design internal tools to improve the efficiency of the company's workflow. The company offers a diverse suite of innovative tools and services. Among them, their member engagement solutions needed a specialized tool to address member grievances. Tasked with translating this nascent business idea into reality, I took on the role of the sole design resource, leading the entire design process from ideation to execution. Throughout the project, I meticulously documented every step and maintained open communication with internal stakeholders, ensuring that the tool was seamlessly integrated and successfully launched alongside the company’s existing systems.

My Role

I co-ordinated with the stakeholders like the Product Owner, Subject Matter expert to understand the business requirements by underlining the current workflow, and the project scope.

I Executed the tasks such as idenitifying the issues, defining the project scope, internal discussion to test the prototype and gather feedback, prioritize tasks, and oversee the implementation process.

Project Requirements

The Member Experience Agents (MEAs), who interact with customers daily, lack a streamlined way to distinguish customer grievances from standard inquiries or order requests. As a result, the Grievance and Support teams are forced to manually sift through extensive call logs and notes to identify grievances, leading to inefficiencies and delays in addressing critical issues. Compounding the issue, the current CRM and customer support portal are undergoing a major redesign. As part of this broader project, I was tasked with rethinking and improving how MEAs handle and resolve customer issues effectively.

As-Is Flow

Following in-depth discussions with the Business team, MEAs, and the Grievance team, I analyzed the current "As-Is" workflow to thoroughly understand how grievances are managed. This analysis was essential in identifying the underlying issues and clarifying the roles each user plays in the process.

Users

After extensive discussions with the Business team, MEAs, and the Grievance team, I identified and defined four key user groups aligned with the company’s existing processes to ensure best outcomes.

Member Experience Agents (MEAs)

Day to Day: MEAs interact with their pre-assigned customer base on a regular basis to help them with processing of orders, account information and now with their grievances

Grievance Managers

Day to Day:Grievance Managers overlook the entire grievance intake and resolving process by tracking them and co-ordinating the team responsible to resolve the grievances.

Grievance Analysts

Day to Day:Grievance Analyst goes through the actual grievance and assists the customers with the tools available at their disposal.

Inter-department Experts

Day to Day:If the grievance is related to or out of scope of an analyst they escalate the issues to the pre-assigned inter-department experts who resolve the issues for the customer and escalate it back to Analysts who will close the grievance once its reviewed.

The tool, Grievance Portal

The primary goal of the Grievances Portal is to efficiently identify, assess, and resolve member grievances. Upon reviewing the existing workflow, we uncovered major usability challenges and gaps in the process. Given the tight deadline, we determined that the most effective solution was to design a standalone Grievance Portal that seamlessly integrates with the company’s existing tools.

Project Goal & Scope

Ensure a seamless workflow for managing grievances enhance team efficiency, and develop a tool that is both scalable and user-friendly.

Project Task 1

Redesigning MEA experience to include Member Grievances within the CRM:

To simplify and expedite the experience for MEAs, I positioned the grievance entry point at the customer’s plan level. This strategic placement ensures a more streamlined process for other users throughout the workflow, improving overall efficiency.

The Grievance forms themselves are kept simple with multiple data-points from the plan-level information. This info comes from an inter-connected platform network, so that MEA can just select relevant options and report a grievance as quickly as possible.

Project Task 2

Designing an all new portal for Grievance Manager and Grievance Analysts to access all the grievances that an MEA submits for a customer(s)

After extensive visual exploration, I designed a dashboard-driven experience for Managers and Analysts, featuring a streamlined tab-based interface that allows easy navigation between different grievance statuses while still following the existing design guidelines and the design system in place.

Problems:

The Grievance team needed more information and an easy way to see different grievances, with the dashboard view the information was hidden under various columns which required additional scroll both horizontally and vertically.

Hidden information in tabs

Additional scrolls required to view information or more grievances in the first fold

No context about what is the grievance at a glance

Approach:

Through a series of variation presentations we finally landed on a more bucketed list view where different status fall under multiple easy to track buckets with a pre-defined behaviours that allow Grievance managers to Track multiple grievances at a time, Take actions such as Assign Analysts, Inter-departments within the dashboard, Get a clear understanding what's the status of the overall Grievances at any given time.

Additionally to view the details of each and every grievance user can simply switch to the next menu item, to access any grievance, and take all the above mentioned actions, Listen to call recording and even track the entire activity of the grievance starting from who created it and what's the current status, all in one single place.

Impact

I've made sure to setup metrics to measure the impact of this project

Once the CRM was launched with the new Grievance intake forms for MEA, the efficiency of the forms in conjunction with the new Grievance portal has improved the overall efficiency of the process. Overall, there was a reduction of about time taken by 40% (searching and sorting) as it was completely automated due to the setup.

We noticed a 30% increase in the productivity of the Grievances team as they were able to perform all the tasks such as assigning and resolving grievances quickly and efficiently without relying on any other third party tools anymore.

Nations Benefits