Agent Desktop
Agent Desktop
How might we integrate Web Application technologies ServiceMaster has begun developing to create a Call Center Application for American Home Shield and Terminix to provide a modern User Experience?
Overview - Moonshot Application
Early in my ServiceMaster carrier, the IT division began an ongoing project to move customer data to cloud-based technologies. We were allowing ServiceMaster brands to develop modern-based applications and leverage new technologies. The first iteration of this Moonshot application was called Kepler. This was mainly used to determine how to merge customer data into a centralized area for American Home Shield and Terminix. Within about a year, we changed the name to Agent Desktop, an exploration to build a new modern web-based application with micro-applications and help improve the user experience and customer experience overall for all the brands under ServiceMaster.
Insight
From the start of this project in late 2015 through 2016, I worked with management and stakeholders and a third-party design agency Simple Focus to better understand and gain empathy with call center agents. We worked in tandem, interviewing and observing call centers and other supporting business units.
Eventually, in early 2017, this project became the springboard leading me into a more established Design Discovery and Design Thinking process. Activities of user observations and interviews, along with moderated testing of paper prototypes, became more accepted for the operation of UX.
Over the next year, we conducted various observations, user interviews, iterative mockups, and prototypes to understand better how our brands' data could be visualized and what the issues and wicked problems would need to be addressed in all aspects of the business units.
Throughout this period, I aided front-end developers by helping them learn to use modern frameworks to produce prototypes. This period was when Google had just started to develop Material Design, and I had been learning to code with it using Polymer. Over the first two years, Angular began to take hold as the web code. We would develop this application with our company to follow the guidelines set forth by Google on Material Design. This move helped me utilize the UX research and UI development from Google Teams to focus more on our users. It will enable me to use these designs to quickly iterate ideas and concepts into quick prototypes using Axure RP and, eventually, Adobe XD.
Solution
In late 2017 or early 2018, our Moonshot application took root in many of our developing technologies. The Agent Desktop application eventually produced the following code-named web applications Serv-A, ServDesk, and ServCenter and helped create UX at ServiceMaster.