Embedded UX Teams Fuel
Better Customer Experience

Our client, a leading telecom company, prides itself on exceptional service – and to ensure superior in-store customer care, the company invests heavily in tools and technology empower its retail representatives and support staff. These employee-focused apps are as vital as the brand’s consumer-facing domains to delivering fast, seamless and positive experiences for its customers.

As such, our client sought to drive the continuous improvement of these tools with a better understanding of the user experience – the environments, circumstances, tasks and challenges that these employees face in their everyday efforts to serve and support customers. What improvements would enable support teams to service customers faster? How is the retail dynamic changing as reps move from using PCs to tablets and phones for processing new customers? How can they deliver more value and satisfaction to its employees through THEIR digital experiences – and lower operating costs at the same time?

To meet these ambitions, the company engaged Filter to bring additional UX research and design services in-house as part of a centralized creative studio that in turn supports product teams responsible for internal apps. Filter had been engaged by this client in the past, and they valued Filter’s ability to provide an embedded team who could quickly get up to speed – proven experts who could get right to work with minimal onboarding or ramp-up time.

Filter also brought an informed partner’s perspective on how to mitigate risk stemming from the unpredictable workload demands from various internal clients; the need to integrate not only with their own teams but also with other outside consulting groups; their desire to drive overall process improvements and efficiencies for the creative studio organization; and space constraints at their HQ location just outside Seattle.

In a collaborative process with the telecom leader’s stakeholders, Filter designed a UX services solution to meet these needs – with a team of researchers and designers at its core, a scrum master to run the team’s work in an agile process over ongoing 2-week sprints, and one of Filter’s veteran program managers to lead the way.

The team primarily serves as a shared resource for multiple groups within the client’s organization, providing fast and fluid UX research to the client’s own designers, developers and product managers to fuel product improvements across constant cycles of iteration.

Through this model, Filter’s UX team drives the continual optimization and value growth of the telecom leader’s internal apps as the company puts that foundational work into practice with each new release.

The team also provides added UX research and design capacity for other stakeholder groups within the company, on a seasonal and ad hoc basis or when the need otherwise exceeds the bandwidth of its own UX resources.

Indeed, Filter’s role within the organization continues to grow as we collaborate with different teams and work on new UX initiatives. From complex mobile applications to customer care workflows, the telecom giant has expressed its confidence that Filter’s world-class expertise and agile approach can help them manage whatever may come next.