The company built products to support all user roles within the Contact Center ecosystem, including administrators, supervisors, agents, and end consumers. While Voice and Chat were the core, established communication channels, we expanded our capabilities by introducing Email as an additional support channel. Email is a widely adopted and highly requested medium in customer service, offering key advantages such as 24/7 accessibility for end users and cost-effective operation and maintenance. This new channel elevated both the customer and agent experience by merging the familiarity of traditional email with the efficiency and power of purpose-built contact center tools.
I took over as the lead designer after initial involvement of the UI Director. I collaborated and had weekly reviews with Product Managers.
In designing the Email experience, our goal was to keep the interface intuitive and familiar by leveraging standard patterns found in common email clients, while seamlessly integrating essential contact center features to support agent workflows. These included the ability to easily assign and transfer emails to queues and agents, as well as track email statuses to monitor progress and maintain accountability. We also incorporated spell check and rich text formatting tools to support professional communication, and enabled features such as attachments, templates, and auto-responses to improve efficiency.
Agents previously had to manually scroll through long lists of emails to locate specific sessions, leading to inefficient use of time during peak operational hours. To solve this, we introduced an enhanced search functionality for email sessions and threads. In addition to standard search options like keywords, names, and email addresses, we added support for session IDs and multi-parameter searches, allowing agents to query multiple names or emails simultaneously.
While the original scope was limited to adding a search bar within the existing Email List toolbar, I proposed a more scalable solution by introducing a secondary toolbar dedicated to task-specific email actions. This separation improved usability and long-term maintainability, keeping the primary toolbar focused on general actions and global search.
